Progressivism, Chaos, Tyranny, and the Community Organizer's Blackmail and Extortion

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has called opponents "modern day anarchists,'' all because we do not swoon at the prospect of a phony government "shutdown" such as the one we now see. As long as the Senator from Nevada is going to go all early 20th century on us, we should return the favor and call him a modern day Bolshevik. There, I think that makes for perfectly civil discussion, and serves as lead in to today's topic: the chaos of progressivism.

One more thing before we get going. In the process of following Aussie politics, I have noted that one of the very many admirable things about that great nation is that,

conservatives in Australia have preserved the word 'Liberal' for themselves and not allowed it to be stolen and warped by the left. 

It is time we did likewise in our own beleaguered and increasingly less great nation. American "liberals" are just old fashioned "progressives," AKA socialists, who seek an ever growing state with more and more control over every aspect of our lives. There is nothing "liberal" in American "liberalism."

Everywhere we look in America we see the chaos and tyranny generated by progressive thought and policies. Without repeating all I already have written about the results of progressivism in our country, I note one item I wrote six months ago (substitute "progressive" for everywhere you see the now banned "liberal"),

Liberal welfare policies create havoc throughout our society. What slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, and racial discrimination could not do, liberal polices have done, to wit, destroy the black family and turn millions of blacks into permanent wards of the state and of the liberal political machines that control most of our cities. Liberal immigration policies, beginning with the disastrous 1965 Kennedy-Johnson immigration law, insure a constant stream of poor third world immigrants, altering irrevocably the nature of our society and ensuring that the struggling black (and white) American poor cannot compete with the ultra-poor pouring in from Mexico, El Salvador, Bangladesh, and so on. Liberal minimum wage laws ensure the disappearance of the starter jobs, once a platform for the poor to spring out of poverty. All of these people, the old poor and the newly arriving poor, need, of course, social programs and more and more government help. The liberal political machine dispenses jobs and money, and the productive sectors face rising taxes, a labyrinth of regulations, and the constant presence of "helpful" government regulators and enforcers. Let the poverty and misery spread!

Liberal gun control policies also target the poor. The poor in our cities must live with the drug dealers, gang bangers, and the other hoods in the hood. The comfortable liberals live in secure high-rises, and tony suburbs well protected by overpaid and over equipped police and fire departments and expensive security firms. The poor must put up with the inability to defend themselves; they must allow themselves to be murdered in the name of ridding America of gun violence.

In the last few days, we see even more examples of the chaos brought to our shores by progressivism, all highlighted by the phony government shutdown and the despicable boot-licking mainstream media--one knows, for example, that the government is shutdown is phony because the government's mouthpiece MSNBC is still on the air. The government "shutdown" has targeted much-frequented national parks and monuments not because it costs much if anything to keep them open--in fact, it costs more to close them--but to inflict discomfort, generate confusion, and, yes, chaos. As I wrote before,

a conservative's default position must be to oppose all new government programs, regardless of how high-sounding they are, and constantly seek to eliminate or reduce existing programs. Any government program in the "socio-economic-humanitarian" realm will get taken over by liberals [substitute progressives].

We see our National Parks, a Republican idea, used to further the progressive's notions of expanding government. The US Park Service, once a model of what a government agency could be, has become just another tool used by progressives to create chaos in furtherance of progressive goals. Park Rangers, once admired for their knowledge of American history, geography, flora, and fauna are now just tools of petty repression. They are used to roust elderly veterans out of the monuments built to honor those elderly veterans, and to prevent taxpayers from viewing the great parks and historical locations in our country, many of them partially, mostly, or even entirely built with private funds.

In sum, what do we see? We see the community organizer tactic of using lies, chaos, and the uncertainty that flows as tools of blackmail and extortion. The progressives have moved into almost every aspect of our lives, and when they encounter resistance to further encroachment, they threaten us by shutting down the other services on which they have made us dependent. It's blackmail, pure and simple. We have the extraordinary spectacle of an American President predicting economic disaster and warning Wall Street of tough times to come if he does not get his way. We have a President pushing the stock market to crash, and dissuading businesses from investing and creating jobs, all over a dispute about his seriously flawed health care policy. He, again, is the Chicago community organizer threatening the local landlord or McDonald's franchise with instability, violence, and disruption if he does not get what he wants. Imagine what he can do to you, if he controls your health care.

Chaos in the service of tyranny. The only way to defeat this is to stop the encroachment of government on our lives and begin a serious campaign of rollback.