George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 22 October 2014. Starting today, my commentaries have been moved from Friday evenings to Wednesdays’ 6pm news hour.]
In less than two weeks Americans go to the polls and vote in an important mid-term election to determine the extent and progress of the country’s ongoing fundamental transformation during President Obama’s last two years in office. The focus is the US Senate – which side will gain or maintain the majority. This comes at a time when the nation’s political Right and Left are further apart in what they believe than they were during the Civil War 150 years ago.
Back then the North and the South were much closer together in their beliefs about God, governance, economics, and even human nature. The South wanted to retain slavery for economic reasons since their economy was based on slave-powered agriculture. Yes, there was a fringe that also thought Negroes were less than human, but they were a small and uneducated minority. The majority knew slavery was not a long term solution and used the constitutional guarantee of states’ rights to attempt secession in order to pace their own economic transition. But that was enough to launch the then bloodiest conflict now recognized by many as the first modern war.
In recent decades Americans have again pulled into two very distinct and polarized groups. The difference today is that the dimensions, along which we see ourselves separated, are comprehensive in the sense that there are precious few beliefs which we still hold in common.
In governance the Left strives toward pure democracy as the way to organize society, and the Right adheres to republicanism, believing with our Founders that popular democracy paves the road to national suicide. The Left believes that a person reaches the loftiest heights of achievement as a member of an altruistic collective. The Right rejects public policies based on widespread altruism and promotes enlightened individualism in work, responsibility, risk taking, and commensurate rewards as the way to organize a beneficent society. The Left sees such a society as based on nothing less than rapacious greed.
We also have a hard time coming together because we see ourselves as inhabitants of literally different worlds, each having a history that is almost unrecognizable by the other. Today this is no more apparent anywhere than in the widely disparate American histories the Right and the Left hold dear. As a result, each side prescribes their own distinct medicines to cure the country’s two differently perceived diseases. And each side considers the other’s medicine to be toxic to their desired quality of life and society as a whole.
There are many well-meaning people out there who counsel that there exists yet a compatible and achievable ideological middle to which both sides may profitably congregate. Years ago President Lyndon Johnson invited his political opposites to “come let us reason together” as the means to overcome differences. Unfortunately, today even that is no longer a possibility. Why? Because the Right and Left subscribe to almost totally different logics. This may come as a surprise to the non-technical layman who is taught that there is only one system of logic, and it’s the one that he understands. Unfortunately, reality and mathematics teach us that there are an uncountable number of different yet totally self-consistent systems of logic. You can reason the solution to a problem using yours, and I can equally reason a different solution using mine.
Coming together might even then be possible if we would but adopt a common definition of what a good solution looks like. Then we could compare our various approaches in a more commonly objective manner, and perhaps find one that we agree on, even though it may be for different reasons. But that also is no longer possible. Unfortunately, time does not allow me to explore the many more factors that polarize us. For those interested, I will discuss those on Rebane’s Ruminations.
As a nation we live in a historically difficult time. Each side firmly believes that 2+2=4, and that the other side insanely holds that 2+2=5. So any compromise that yields a middle ground of 2+2=4.5 is patently unacceptable to both. They each see that society built on the other’s rules simply will not work. Therefore each seeks to triumph over the other, believing that their ultimate victory will then benefit all.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on georgerebane.com where an expanded transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links. As always, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] The attributes mentioned here that divide us into two distinct groups have been covered in these pages over the years. But since the discord between us continues to grow, it is useful to review the specifics of how differently we believe.
1. The Left promotes policies that enable and empower the growth of big governments at all levels, especially a cradle-to-grave providing central government. In the process the Left promotes governing structures based on all-knowing, all-powerful, expert elites who know what would benefit us and what we need in all phases and all stages of our lives. Society should live under the aegis of central planning that provides equally for all – “From each …, to each … .” The Right does not believe that humans know enough to beneficially manage large complex societies from centers removed from where people live, and with a single voice declare that such attempts not only don’t work, but have led to untold human misery, suffering, and death.
2. The Left teaches that all cultures are of equal worth and that no man has the right to pejoratively judge another’s culture. The Right point to the variety of dysfunctional cultures that denigrate and suppress factions of their own populations, cultures that have stifled their adherents for generations (centuries), and have no problem asserting that this culture is better than that one, and that we don’t want any of that culture to be a daily factor in our lives.
3. A number of studies have shown that significantly more people of the Left than Right have problems with numeracy. This deficit goes a long way into explaining why the Left does not want to debate public policies on the basis of the aggregate numbers involved, and instead prefers to advance their causes through emotional anecdotes to constituencies who are specially suited to resonate with such arguments.
4. A number of studies have also shown that the Left has significant problems understanding the elements of economics. For example, embracing their ‘truth’ that government tax rates don’t affect economic behavior (with regard to growth, investment, savings, and job creation). The Right believes that tax policy has a marked and measurable effect on economic behavior. Both sides reject each other’s metrics of such behavior.
5. To impose equality, the Left emplaces policies that dun the capable and promote the less capable, hence imposing a handicapping system at the starting line.
6. The Right believes in equal opportunity that is best attempted at the starting line, knowing that our individual abilities and efforts will cause us to advance at different rates. The Left, while also attesting equal opportunity, instead measures the success of such policies at the ‘finish line’ that ideally must be crossed concurrently by all.
7. The Left believes that the best future for humans is a global government that controls all resources, regulates all production, and prescribes all human activities. The compendium of such societal objectives may be seen under the prescriptions of the United Nation’s Agenda 21 umbrella of objectives. The Right holds a diametrically opposite view that sees aggregate benefits to mankind in the formation of smaller sovereign nation-states consisting of smaller cities and communities of people with more similar belief systems that will compete both culturally and commercially with each other under a loose global federation that serves primarily as a locus of communication and arbitration among the jurisdictions.
8. Realizing that conversion of beliefs is a futile enterprise, the Right is more willing to entertain means of separation that range all the way from the establishment of new states from parts of the old all the way to the Great Divide which can itself range from a confederation of semi-independent regions to new sovereign nation-states. The Left will have none of it because they realize that such free jurisdictions will attract the wealth creators from the remaining socialist jurisdictions. (You have read about the State of Jefferson movement in California. Here is another one starting in Florida.)
We have covered more differences in previous RR commentaries and their comment streams, but these should suffice to make the case that there is no easy middle to be had between today’s progressive collectivists and the conservative classical liberals (also libertarians and conservetarians). Our belief systems are also maintained by a plethora of media outlets that tailor the content across the liberal-to-conservative spectrum. Pew Research has studied and published how major worldwide outlets attract their audiences from such a spectrum (here and here). And again, such findings go a long way to explaining how people maintain and strengthen their strongly held ideologies. Especially when one considers how the preponderence of liberal outlets concurs with how much more trusting are liberals than conservatives of their information sources.
[23oct14 update] The purpose of this addition is to take advantage of the several comments to this piece made by Steven Frisch, CEO of the Sierra Business Council and admittedly one of the leading progressive intellects and apologists of Nevada County’s Left. Available for your inspection, his wit and wisdom has adorned RR’s comment streams for years, fervently attempting to debase the people and thoughts advanced here by me and RR’s more conservative readers, while arguing his own view of the world.
For the recently arrived or drive-by RR readers it is important to review the purpose of this web log. As stated in the blog’s tagline, I believe this century to very likely be the last and therefore most momentous for mankind. The prime support for this thesis comes from the confluence of technology, global economics, and contending ideologies seeking to explain what is happening and what should happen next. All of these factors have been elaborated here, and will continue to be examined and debated as long as my energy and interests last. The hoped for audience for these exercises are the ideologically pre-formed (the so-called ‘independents’ and ‘undeclareds’) and those leaning Right who might gain more productive insight to support their interpretations and beliefs. There is little hope evinced here for epiphanies and/or conversions of collectivists. Instead, RR continues to serve as an open and inviting forum for our leftwing compatriots to also put their ideas on display and contend for the minds of the uncertain and/or uncommitted. As such, RR is somewhat unique in its admittedly lax policy of monitoring, mediating, and moderating readers’ ideas and their modes of expression (for which it is continually and roundly ostracized by the Left).
So, with this preamble we return to Mr Frisch’s latest foray. To begin we must understand that the man is a professional progressive apparatchik whose NGO and lifestyle are maintained by agenda driven state and private grantees of the liberal persuasion, joined by the occasional city or county jurisdiction that has no idea of what real value SBC can deliver. As such, Mr Frisch is one of the uncountable many soldiers of socialism spread across the land who seek to bring America to a better place, and rescue it from what they and theirs see as the country’s exceptionally sordid past and equally deficient present. The propaganda and programs promoted by SBC are readily available at its website.
People like Mr Frisch do not want to entertain thoughts that a large segment of American citizens are very unhappy with the direction the country has taken in the last decades and that is now amplified by the current administration. They attribute talk and discussions of creating new states and events pushing us toward a Great Divide as the product of fevered brains belonging to a fringe and radical minority. They must do this, for their ideological products are based on the notion that Americans in the aggragate are all of one undirected and sanguine mind waiting for enlightened succor, a malady for which they have the perfect remedy.
When I presented arguments illuminating the ongoing absence of any feasible middle ground that could attract conservatives and liberals, Mr Frisch’s coarse response was not to contend the arguments, but instead to insult and fasten on a point of historical interpretation. He did this to divert attention from the thrust of my commentary and at the same time to attempt a denigration of my knowledge of history, thereby hoping to lower the strength of the real arguments since they came from the same source he discredits. But as usual, he and so many of his ilk do not read well, and instead leap into an intellectual abyss in order to commandeer the conversation. In this case, Mr Frisch assumed the well-established stance taught by Saul Alinsky in his Rules for Radicals – you construct a strawman that is a suitable target for your assault, attribute its origin to your selected counter-party (‘this is what he really meant to say’), and then proceed to destroy the strawman. However, here in the process Mr Frisch’s selection of my introductory remarks on the state of the southern mind viz slavery and the implied causes of the Civil War demonstrated either his ignorance of American history or the assertion that the Left’s control of our schools now teaches what he seems to spout.
Without going into the details of what led to the secession of states in 1860, most students of pre-Great Society schools are aware of the complex matrix of economic and states’ rights issues that gave rise to the war for Southern independence. Slavery and the complex beliefs about Negroes were ancillary to the economy of the South which began to transform the region after Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin. Cheap labor provided by slaves were paramount to that economy, and that longstanding evil was amplified by the conversion of new lands to cotton and its profitable shipment to the waiting mills in England. America’s import of the finished cloth and clothes irked the industrialists of the populous North enough for them to usher through Congress tariffs on British imports of finished cotton products, this in order to change the economics of the South’s exports and force them to sell their cotton to the North at its dictated discount. With the failure of the principle of the states’ ability to nullify distasteful federal laws, secession was the South’s only alternative. And Lincoln’s determination to keep the Union whole by force gave rise to what we today call the Civil War (technically a misnomer since the South never wanted to conquer and govern the United States).
But Mr Frisch’s desperate accusation (deduction?) that somehow I condone slavery and hold the 19th century southerners innocent of their support of that despicable institution serves as the latest Exhibit A of the progressives’ denial of the great schism that separates us; a schism that they seek to ‘fix’ by the government gun which, by in large and starting with Washington, they now control. However, that denial is only a public posture. When they consult with each other, they give evidence that they are well aware of the schism and what measures they must take in order to advance their agenda – the public evidence of that abounds in the policies that come out of the Democrats’ caucuses and their subsequent promotions by the lamestream. The keystone to keeping that train on track is a continued high level of public ignorance starting with their ‘in the tank’ constituencies. The remainder of the task involves convincing the ‘independents’ that all is well, no need to look behind the curtain because there are hidden only a few but voluble right wingnut crazies who can be safely ignored while we seek means to silence them.
Let me end this by pointing out that the above arguments are not constrained to Mr Frisch who is only a local placeholder for the remainder of the leftwing's legion working to fundamentally transform America. There are many more like him, busy in their own necks of the wood. Nothing I have said is meant to denigrate Mr Frisch as a person. He is a man of deeply held beliefs and a very organized ideology which he often communicates admirably. I and mine believe him and his to be in great error when their plans for our future are laid bare for examination. And I believe he does his best to promote his cause with the well-worn tools that collectivists have used over a century now. We may not like his means and methods, but that is all they have, and we should accept that while we continue our own fight for maintaining what the Founders bequeathed us, whether we can go on with them as our neighbors or not.
rebanesruminations.com 
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