“Creating Problems to Secure Elections” Sydney Williams
A problem endemic to successful countries is the need to create issues that get people excited when things are going relatively well. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, except for a few years following 9/11, the United States has not faced a major crisis that galvanized and unified the nation. In 2008, we faced a credit crisis. It could have undone the global financial system but, truth be told, the crisis was over by the end of calendar year 2008 when the TED spread – a calculation used to measure risk in financial markets – narrowed sharply from its October-November highs, and high-yield bonds began to rally. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 last year was seized by politicians and called a crisis. A (deliberate?) confusion of correlation with causation regarding reported deaths was used as an excuse to expand governmental power and curtail individual rights. Despite conventional opinion, however, we do not know if shutting down the economy did more harm than good.
The United States has achieved high living standards and diminished poverty because of capitalism and individual freedom. Is everything perfect? No. Should we rest on our laurels? Of course not. There is always more to be done. But the world, and especially the West, is richer and more at peace than at any time in history, which is a problem for politicians whose campaigns are all about needed change.
It is true that external problems lurk. China threatens peace in the western Pacific. Russia is flexing its muscles along borders of its old empire in Ukraine. Iran, an impoverished state with little to risk and much to gain, is disrupting the Middle East with a revival of its nuclear program. North Korea, another state so impoverished it has little to lose, is led by a man who in a normal country would be committed.
However, in this time of relative prosperity and peace, Progressives convert addressable issues into partisan crises. While there are several, two, in my opinion, are forefront: race and climate. Others include policing, guns and immigration, with the latter having become a serious problem on our southern border. Methods used to create and promote crises are insidious: claim the moral high ground, censor speech, disallow gender-specific pronouns and cancel history. A consequence is the intimidation (and worse) of those in academia, corporate offices, entertainment, and professional sports who do not hew to an approved narrative.
There is no question that there are racists in the United States. A country of 330 million people harbors every conceivable type of good and bad individual. Has racial equality been achieved? No. Bias against race is embedded in all societies, including in parts of ours, and change always happens more slowly than proponents would like. But positive change has occurred. In 1970, according to U.S. Census data, 60% of all Americans had a high school education, while only 30% of blacks did. By 2020 those trends had almost converged, with 90% of all Americans having a high school diploma and 88% of blacks. Interracial marriages have increased. In the 1967 decision Loving versus Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that anti-miscegenation marriage laws were unconstitutional. It is hard to believe today, but 54 years ago such marriages were illegal in seventeen states. Since that decision there has been a five-fold increase in interracial marriages, so that today, according to a Pew Research study, one in six marriages is interracial. Race is still an issue, but the situation is miles from where it was half a century ago. We are not systemically racist, and Critical Race Theory is derisive to blacks and disruptive to society. The assumption that blacks are victims and cannot compete against whites is an insult to the black community. Consider the success of black Americans in every field, from finance, medicine, politics and law to literature, the media, sports and entertainment. The term “victim” is tossed out too freely, as when LeBron James (worth an estimated $500 million, according to Forbes), Tweeted “Your next,” beneath a picture of Columbus, Ohio police officer Nicholas Reardon, to his 50 million followers. When followers complained his message was inflammatory, he asserted he was a victim. What kind of a country do Progressives want? Do they believe Reverend Jeremiah Wright was on target to preach after 9/11: “No, no, no, not God bless America! God damn America!” No true American has ever claimed we have achieved perfection. But we should all be able to say we are a better Country today than we were 200, 100, even 50 years ago. We must take care that we continue to move forward, not backward. The teaching of Critical Race Theory is guaranteed to foment discrimination and segregation, pushing us backward into the Jim Crow era.
The public debate over climate is another issue Progressives have cynically seized for political purposes. Their arguments ignore knowledge and promote advocacy, which was clear a few years ago when “global warming” became “climate change.” An apocalypse has been falsely predicted by many. In 2006 former Vice President Al Gore, who sold his cable channel company Current TV to Al Jazeera for $500 million in 2013, said that unless drastic measures were taken to reduce greenhouse gasses within ten years the world would reach a point of no return. Led by China and India, greenhouse gasses have continued to increase, yet no apocalypse has arrived. Nevertheless, like the problem of race, there is truth in the fact we face climate change. And there is no question that man has affected what has always been the case – that climate is in a constant state of flux. The Earth has warmed and cooled over the millennia and will continue to do so. In his new book, False Alarm, Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economist who has been studying and writing about climate for twenty years, quoted the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that had studied flooding around the world and “found that it’s not clear whether it’s getting more or less frequent, [or whether] there is a human fingerprint involved.” Lomborg points out the value of wealth and adaption in addressing climate concerns. (Wealthy people prefer to live in a clean environment yet continue to build homes in flood-prone areas). A review of the book in Forbes noted: “In the 1920s, climate-related disasters killed almost 500,000 people each year. Today the number is lower than 20,000.”
President Obama’s Under Secretary for Science in the Department of Energy Dr. Steven Koonin recently published Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters. In an op-ed about his book, published in the New York Post, Dr. Koonin made certain points that would shock those who believe we are headed for catastrophe: “…Heat waves in the U.S. are now no more common than they were in 1900…The warmest temperatures in the U.S. have not risen in the past fifty years…Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century…Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.” Man’s impact on climate has been real, but, despite claims by Progressives, it is unclear what exactly that impact has been. To add perspective, in his op-ed Dr. Koonin quoted a former colleague at Caltech, Professor Richard Feynman (1918-1988), a theoretical physicist known for his work on quantum mechanics who gave the 1974 commencement address: “Give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution, not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.” Humility among politicians is a rare, but treasured, commodity. What is ignored is that, like the problem with race, we are moving in the right direction. With natural gas substituting for coal, U.S. per capita carbon dioxide emissions declined 24% between 2000 and 2017, while U.S. GDP rose 94 percent.
A hundred and fifty years ago, in the December 1870 magazine, New and Old, James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888), an American theologian, penned words whose wisdom still applies: “A politician thinks about the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.” “Woke” Progressives claim the moral high ground, but it is passion, not reason, that motivates them. Passion may help win elections, but thoughtfulness and reason help politicians become statesmen. In his poem “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Bertrand Russell, in his 1945 book A History of Western Philosophy, expressed similar sentiments: “the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always sure of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubt.” Beware politicians whose promises lead to the tyranny C.S. Lewis warned of in the rubric that heads this essay.
Win at any costs has become the mantra of Progressives. In a recent interview with Mathias Döpfner of Germany’s Axel Springer, Henry Kissinger commented on the belief that American society has been immoral from its beginnings: “It’s a revolutionary view in the sense it aims for victory, not compromise.” The cost is societal division. A lack of civility has become common. People are not held accountable. Rules of behavior are not taught at home. Schools don’t demand respect from students. Great books are no longer required reading, and civics and history are no longer emphasized. Equity, as a goal, has replaced equality. Victimization has been substituted for personal responsibility. The crises Americans face are ones of behavior and epistemology, not structural racism or a climate apocalypse.
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