RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been talking a lot about “fairness” and “equality” during their primary campaigns. Like most progressives, they pass themselves off as the champions of the ordinary people who are suffering beneath the boot of rapacious capitalists and the plutocratic “one percent.” Give us power, they say, and we will create “social justice” for all the victims of “white privilege” and capitalist greed, not to mention redistributing even more money from the selfish “rich” in order to finance such utopian goals.

Promiscuously displaying their hearts bleeding for the oppressed has long been the progressive camouflage that hides their real motive: the lust for power. Whether they want power to advance their failed ideology (Sanders), or to gratify their ambition for status and wealth (Hillary), in the end it doesn’t matter. History has repeatedly proven that the libido dominandi, the ancient lust for dominating others that lies behind the progressives’ political ambitions, in the end always leads to tyranny and misery.

When progressivism began in the late 19th century, progressives at least were honest about their aim to expand their power over the ignorant, selfish masses. A striking––and prophetic–– example can be found in Woodrow Wilson’s 1890 essay “Leaders of Men.” Wilson rejected the limited executive of the Constitution for a more activist president who has the “insight” to know “the motives which move other men in the mass”:

Besides, it is not a sympathy ­[with people] that serves, but a sympathy whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument . . . The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much-everything for the external uses to which they may be put. His will seeks the lines of least resistance; but the whole question with him is a question of the application of force. There are men to be moved: how shall he move them?

In the progressive view, fellow citizens are an abstract, collective “mass,” “instruments” that must be “moved,” manipulated, and used to reach the ideological goals of the technocratic elite, who knows far better than the people how they should live, what they should believe, and what aims they should strive for. Any resistance must be met by “the application of force.” Wilson means here primarily psychological or social force, but as we have seen after a century of expanding federal power, progressive policies enshrined in federal law are in the end backed by the coercive power of the police to punish non-compliance and enforce compliance.

From this perspective, Barack Obama is not an anomaly or some new political phenomenon birthed in the sixties. He is the predictable result of progressive assumptions over a century old. Thus he shares Wilson’s view of a “leader of men” as someone who knows what’s best for the people, and is willing to use unconstitutional “force” to achieve his aims. Think of the IRS hounding conservative political organizations, or the EPA violating private property rights, or the DOJ usurping the sovereignty of the states, or Obama’s various executive diktats that compromise individual rights, legislated laws, and the power of the states. All of these actions have applied “force” to “move” men in a particular ideological direction.

During the House Oversight Committee hearing examining the White House narratives on the Iranian nuclear deal, Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) compared the administration’s deceptive approach to selling the unpopular deal with the deceptive approach it took to selling Obamacare. He began by asking the panel — comprised of Michael Rubin (AEI), Michael Doran (Hudson Inst.) and John Hannah (Foundation for Defense of Democracies) — if they had ever heard of Jonathan Gruber.

Jordan reminded them that Gruber was the “Obamacare architect” who had gained “some notoriety in the press” a few years ago and was subsequently called to testify before Congress to explain himself.

“He was deceptive,” Jordan noted. “He talked about the stupidity of the American voter” and how a “lack of transparency is a political advantage.”

“That’s a nice way of saying, ‘if you deceive people, you might get your way. It might help your case,'” Jordan explained. “So here is Jonathan Gruber — architect of Obamacare — talking about deception. Things like: if you like your plan you can keep it, if you like your doctor you can keep him, premiums will go down, website’s gonna work, website’s safe….everything turned out to be false.”

He continued, “and now we hear about another person in the Obama administration — Mr. Rhodes — and he is given the title, according to the The New York Times, of the ‘single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy.'”

“Wow, things are starting to sound familiar,” Jordan exclaimed. “He creates a false narrative as well. He talks about this echo chamber and deceiving the press. His derision for the press is kind of like Mr. Gruber’s derision for the American voter.” After all, Rhodes had said, “they literally know nothing.”

The decline of America, perhaps surprisingly, can be traced directly to the Nixon administration. Surprising, because the Left hated Tricky Dick with a passion that can only be compared with the passion that animates the never-Trump crowd: sheer, animal loathing. Surprising, because Nixon was the most domestically liberal, if not actually leftist, president we’ve had until Obama. Surprising, because to this day old Nixon-haters still foam at the mouth at the very thought of the man who took down the “pink lady,” Helen Gahagan Douglas, and saved Israel in 1973; a year later, of course, they finally sacked him over Watergate.

But it was during the first Nixon administration that the hideous monstrosity of the Environmental Protection Agency came into being by executive order, along with its ugly twin, the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Seemingly innocuous and well-intentioned at the time, both agencies have metastasized, their original missions completed and now forever on the prowl for something else to meddle with. They’re both unconstitutional, of course, but what’s even worse is that they’ve turned into rogue agencies, issuing edicts, orders and regulations largely devoid of congressional scrutiny — pure instruments of executive power, with none to gainsay them.

To get an idea of just hoe obnoxious and intrusive these do-gooder agencies have become, get a load of this from Lou Ann Rieley, who owns a farm in Delaware:

This week a young rancher in Wyoming, Andy Johnson, won a battle for private property rights against one of the bureaucratic entities that strikes fear in the hearts of farmers and ranchers nationwide, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Johnson fought back against a mandate from the EPA to dismantle a pond that he had built on his own land with the required state permits. Fines totaling $16 million were imposed before they were finally overturned in the wake of his court victory.

As I read about his ordeal I thought back through the years that I have managed our small family farm and the many times we have been harassed by government busy-bodies who thought it was in their purview to question us, investigate us, intrude on us, and regulate us.

Let’s stop right there. (You can read all about the Johnson case, which ought to outrage every real American, here.) Sixteen million dollars in fines? For what?

A Wyoming man threatened with $16 million in fines over the building of a stock pond reached a settlement with the Environment Protection Agency, allowing him to keep the pond without a federal permit or hefty fine. Andy Johnson, of Fort Bridger, Wyoming obtained a state permit before building the stock pond in 2012 on his sprawling nine-acre farm for a small herd of livestock.

Not long after construction, the EPA threatened Johnson with civil and criminal penalties – including the threat of a $37,500-a-day fine — claiming he needed the agency’s permission before building the 40-by-300 foot pond, which is filled by a natural stream.

“The Agency’s permission.” The proper response to which from a freeborn American citizen is: shove it. CONTINUE AT SITE