A bit of an overstatement. However, I'd rather have Japanese companies selling Americans products made in America, than have them selling Americans the same products made in Japan.
CK MacLeod: you are interpreting what I said in almost the opposite way that I intended it.
First of all, just because I think a government has sacrificed its legitimacy does not mean that I support overthrowing it violently, or even peacefully like the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. It does mean that I feel no compunction to obey unjust or unconstitutional laws. I guess I just don't put the government on as high a pedestal as you do; to my mind, there's a reason our form of government is known as a "republic" rather than a "presidency."
Second, you are naive if you don't think Presidents already coerce Supreme Court Justices in order to get their way.
It’s still not clear to me how you cope with the fact that, according to your own narration, the progressives have run more and more of everything according to that scheme, and yet over the same period our little country has risen to pre-eminence. The broad overview and takeaway is that the period of “wanting more government to coerce more people to do more things” has also been the period of the greatest and best national enterprise known to history...
It's simple. The U.S. was already a technological and economic powerhouse at the time of WWI. With a populace familiar with both weapons and machines, it was fairly simple to create, almost overnight, a military that could deal a death blow to the Kaiser's army. After that war the US returned to isolationism, and then in WWII almost overnight created another military to defeat both Germany and Japan.
It was not Wilson or Roosevelt's policies that allowed the US military dominance; it was the already existing economic dominance and the resourcefulness of the American people.
By the time the negative effects of "Progressivism" were becoming obvious, in the late 1960's, it was also having a negative impact on the US effort in the Vietnam War. To some extent the "Progressives" were turned back during the Reagan years, with the top tax rates cut to 28% (now 34%), and this probably gave the US economy enough of a boost to allow it to slip past the finish line in the Cold War.
Keep in mind, too, that it didn't hurt that the other countries vying for preeminence--mainly the Soviets, but you can include the UK and France here too--were much farther on the road toward socialism, so it's not at all surprising that the US was at the top of the class. However, we would have been even more powerful if we hadn't followed the "Progressives."
...the constitutional idyll that preceded the first embers of progressivism was accompanied by and conditioned upon the extirpation of several pre-existing nations, and the enslavement of a race.
Accompanied by? Yes. Conditioned upon? Not hardly. The Indian nations were decimated by disease far more than by murder. As for slavery, it is a particularly vile lie to say that the Founders loved the system of slavery. The issue of slavery almost killed the Constitution, because it was considered so reprehensible by virtually all Northerners, and even some Southerners. The 3/5 compromise was actually negotiated as a check on the power of white Southerners, who had wanted to augment their political power by counting slaves fully in the census.
Also, the slave states were frankly a poor fit in the nation. They had close ties to Britain and France, and practically none to the northern states. They had few technological innovations; consider that even the cotton gin was invented by a man from Massachusetts!
(Ironically, this is directly related to the present Republican dominance in the South, though not in the racial way leftists claim. Rather, the failure of the South to enter into the Industrial Revolution until the 1960's saved them from the worst abuses of "progressivism" and labor unions, so that when the economy finally took off, it didn't have so many taxes, regulations, and labor contracts. The current Republican base in the South is not rednecks, but businessmen--many of them displaced Northerners).
Another thing, CK: among the supposedly false claims by Glenn Beck, you casually include two that are not only true, but not even particularly controversial.
Van Jones was a Communist; he has said so himself. Worse, he became a Communist in the early Nineties, when it had already been discredited--quite recently.
Also, Woodrow Wilson was a racist. He spoke admiringly of The Birth of a Nation, a movie celebrating the founding of the KKK; and he ordered the segregation of the previously integrated District of Columbia.
If believing that the government of the United States is legitimate is an “obsession,” then I’m happy to be as obsessed as the vast majority of my fellow insane citizens.
The issue wasn't that you believed the government to be legitimate. It's that you seem to believe--based on what you've said in this post and previous ones--that it is a moral necessity for the rest of us to believe it so. That if I don't accept Obama, or Bush, or Clinton, et al, as legitimate, I am undermining the "authority" of the Presidency. Honestly, if Obama's Presidency is that unstable when he has 2.5 million men under arms, he's got much bigger problems than yours truly.
BTW, this also relates to your severe overreaction regarding Beck's Founder posters. It's called humor.
Exit question (with apologies to Allahpundit): why do you react so harshly to my nonchalant, nonviolent refusal to give the President more credit than he deserves, yet you barely raise an eyebrow at Strangelet's genocidal fantasies?
Last I checked, we were the ones who helped destroy the Gulagers.
Actually, the USSR was brought down by a massive defense buildup by the Reagan administration. It was no coincidence that Reagan was the most anti-"progressive" President of the past eighty years.
In fact, most of the Left was openly siding with the USSR and its clients against Reagan. Edward Kennedy sent a messenger to Moscow to try to persuade General Secretary Andropov to work hand-in-hand to defeat Reagan's reelection bid. The Left started a "nuclear freeze" movement that, if successful, would have stopped the US buildup in its tracks and given military dominance to Moscow. Tip O'Neill repeatedly killed attempts by Reagan to aid anti-Communist revolutionaries in Nicaragua. The Left opposed a missile defense shield.
In short, the "we" that destroyed the Gulagers was the right wing of the Republican Party. The rest of the "wes" were effectively on the USSR's side.
You seem to put an awful lot of emphasis on maintaining the legitimacy of the US government. What you miss is that legitimacy involves more than just being freely elected.
For instance, suppose that I am elected dogcatcher with 60% of the vote in a free and fair election. I proceed to find the five most vicious Rottweillers in the pound and take them door to door demanding everyone give a "protection fee." What makes me illegitimate is not the election, which I won fair and square, but the fact that I used my office for purposes which are legally forbidden.
Sound farfetched? How about a policeman, promoted through legal means by a freely and fairly elected municipal government, who does shakedowns for money? Unlike the dogcatcher scenario, this one happens quite frequently.
When Obama, Reid, and Pelosi ram through legislation that contains an unconstitutional mandate to buy medical insurance, they are themselves an illegitimate government, as surely as if Obama had become President in a military coup.
This brings us to your obsession with believing the government to be legitimate. I believe that this obsession results from something we argued about in a different thread: your belief in the government having a monopoly on violence.
As I pointed out then, the government has neither a moral nor a legal monopoly on violence. You legally have the right to self-defense, or to defend others. While there have been some who have claimed otherwise, they are on the far-out authoritarian fringe; in fact, the overall trend in recent years has been toward more freedom of self-defense, more Castle Doctrine and similar laws, and more freedom to carry arms in public (open, concealed, or both, depending on the state).
I would even go so far as to say that you have the right to kill officers of the law in self-defense in some unusual circumstances. For instance, if an officer in plain clothes breaks down your door and starts shooting your kids one by one, you have the right to shoot him, since he is far exceeding his legal rights as a law officer. (This is not debating the wisdom of such a defense, only the moral and legal rights).
Obviously, this scales up; if a crowd protesting a government action meets a Tiananmen Square type massacre by the military or policemen, they have a right to defend themselves. Once again, this is not judging the practicality of such a defense, only the morality and legality of it.
So, as you see, I do not believe in the government as the Keeper of the Sacred Flame of Justifiable Force. You might think that this means that I live in a shack in the Rockies with my 500 guns, my million rounds of ammo, and my Timothy McVeigh poster saying "I AM the Revolution!!!" but, in fact, I'm not. As I've stated, I don't think it's practical or wise to start an armed conflict with your government.
I am much more open to more practical ways of resisting tyranny. I refer you to the 55 mph speed limit: like the overwhelming majority of drivers, I didn't join the Interstate 80 Militia and storm the DMV or the Highway Patrol; I simply drove 65 mph until the federal government eventually got a clue and changed the law.
Nevertheless, unlike you, I am willing to call a spade a spade, and to call an illegitimate government an illegitimate government, since I don't feel the need to justify that government's monopoly on force. I would argue that this is one reason there are more leftist revolutionaries than rightist revolutionaries: the leftist feels the need to believe in the moral authority of his government in a way that most rightists do not. This is also why rightists like yourself who believe in a governmental monopoly on violence tend over time to become authoritarian.
Japan Inc owns/controls the South.
A bit of an overstatement. However, I'd rather have Japanese companies selling Americans products made in America, than have them selling Americans the same products made in Japan.
CK MacLeod: you are interpreting what I said in almost the opposite way that I intended it.
First of all, just because I think a government has sacrificed its legitimacy does not mean that I support overthrowing it violently, or even peacefully like the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. It does mean that I feel no compunction to obey unjust or unconstitutional laws. I guess I just don't put the government on as high a pedestal as you do; to my mind, there's a reason our form of government is known as a "republic" rather than a "presidency."
Second, you are naive if you don't think Presidents already coerce Supreme Court Justices in order to get their way.
It’s still not clear to me how you cope with the fact that, according to your own narration, the progressives have run more and more of everything according to that scheme, and yet over the same period our little country has risen to pre-eminence. The broad overview and takeaway is that the period of “wanting more government to coerce more people to do more things” has also been the period of the greatest and best national enterprise known to history...
It's simple. The U.S. was already a technological and economic powerhouse at the time of WWI. With a populace familiar with both weapons and machines, it was fairly simple to create, almost overnight, a military that could deal a death blow to the Kaiser's army. After that war the US returned to isolationism, and then in WWII almost overnight created another military to defeat both Germany and Japan.
It was not Wilson or Roosevelt's policies that allowed the US military dominance; it was the already existing economic dominance and the resourcefulness of the American people.
By the time the negative effects of "Progressivism" were becoming obvious, in the late 1960's, it was also having a negative impact on the US effort in the Vietnam War. To some extent the "Progressives" were turned back during the Reagan years, with the top tax rates cut to 28% (now 34%), and this probably gave the US economy enough of a boost to allow it to slip past the finish line in the Cold War.
Keep in mind, too, that it didn't hurt that the other countries vying for preeminence--mainly the Soviets, but you can include the UK and France here too--were much farther on the road toward socialism, so it's not at all surprising that the US was at the top of the class. However, we would have been even more powerful if we hadn't followed the "Progressives."
...the constitutional idyll that preceded the first embers of progressivism was accompanied by and conditioned upon the extirpation of several pre-existing nations, and the enslavement of a race.
Accompanied by? Yes. Conditioned upon? Not hardly. The Indian nations were decimated by disease far more than by murder. As for slavery, it is a particularly vile lie to say that the Founders loved the system of slavery. The issue of slavery almost killed the Constitution, because it was considered so reprehensible by virtually all Northerners, and even some Southerners. The 3/5 compromise was actually negotiated as a check on the power of white Southerners, who had wanted to augment their political power by counting slaves fully in the census.
Also, the slave states were frankly a poor fit in the nation. They had close ties to Britain and France, and practically none to the northern states. They had few technological innovations; consider that even the cotton gin was invented by a man from Massachusetts!
(Ironically, this is directly related to the present Republican dominance in the South, though not in the racial way leftists claim. Rather, the failure of the South to enter into the Industrial Revolution until the 1960's saved them from the worst abuses of "progressivism" and labor unions, so that when the economy finally took off, it didn't have so many taxes, regulations, and labor contracts. The current Republican base in the South is not rednecks, but businessmen--many of them displaced Northerners).
Another thing, CK: among the supposedly false claims by Glenn Beck, you casually include two that are not only true, but not even particularly controversial.
Van Jones was a Communist; he has said so himself. Worse, he became a Communist in the early Nineties, when it had already been discredited--quite recently.
Also, Woodrow Wilson was a racist. He spoke admiringly of The Birth of a Nation, a movie celebrating the founding of the KKK; and he ordered the segregation of the previously integrated District of Columbia.
CK MacLeod:
If believing that the government of the United States is legitimate is an “obsession,” then I’m happy to be as obsessed as the vast majority of my fellow insane citizens.
The issue wasn't that you believed the government to be legitimate. It's that you seem to believe--based on what you've said in this post and previous ones--that it is a moral necessity for the rest of us to believe it so. That if I don't accept Obama, or Bush, or Clinton, et al, as legitimate, I am undermining the "authority" of the Presidency. Honestly, if Obama's Presidency is that unstable when he has 2.5 million men under arms, he's got much bigger problems than yours truly.
BTW, this also relates to your severe overreaction regarding Beck's Founder posters. It's called humor.
Exit question (with apologies to Allahpundit): why do you react so harshly to my nonchalant, nonviolent refusal to give the President more credit than he deserves, yet you barely raise an eyebrow at Strangelet's genocidal fantasies?
Last I checked, we were the ones who helped destroy the Gulagers.
Actually, the USSR was brought down by a massive defense buildup by the Reagan administration. It was no coincidence that Reagan was the most anti-"progressive" President of the past eighty years.
In fact, most of the Left was openly siding with the USSR and its clients against Reagan. Edward Kennedy sent a messenger to Moscow to try to persuade General Secretary Andropov to work hand-in-hand to defeat Reagan's reelection bid. The Left started a "nuclear freeze" movement that, if successful, would have stopped the US buildup in its tracks and given military dominance to Moscow. Tip O'Neill repeatedly killed attempts by Reagan to aid anti-Communist revolutionaries in Nicaragua. The Left opposed a missile defense shield.
In short, the "we" that destroyed the Gulagers was the right wing of the Republican Party. The rest of the "wes" were effectively on the USSR's side.
CK MacLeod:
You seem to put an awful lot of emphasis on maintaining the legitimacy of the US government. What you miss is that legitimacy involves more than just being freely elected.
For instance, suppose that I am elected dogcatcher with 60% of the vote in a free and fair election. I proceed to find the five most vicious Rottweillers in the pound and take them door to door demanding everyone give a "protection fee." What makes me illegitimate is not the election, which I won fair and square, but the fact that I used my office for purposes which are legally forbidden.
Sound farfetched? How about a policeman, promoted through legal means by a freely and fairly elected municipal government, who does shakedowns for money? Unlike the dogcatcher scenario, this one happens quite frequently.
When Obama, Reid, and Pelosi ram through legislation that contains an unconstitutional mandate to buy medical insurance, they are themselves an illegitimate government, as surely as if Obama had become President in a military coup.
This brings us to your obsession with believing the government to be legitimate. I believe that this obsession results from something we argued about in a different thread: your belief in the government having a monopoly on violence.
As I pointed out then, the government has neither a moral nor a legal monopoly on violence. You legally have the right to self-defense, or to defend others. While there have been some who have claimed otherwise, they are on the far-out authoritarian fringe; in fact, the overall trend in recent years has been toward more freedom of self-defense, more Castle Doctrine and similar laws, and more freedom to carry arms in public (open, concealed, or both, depending on the state).
I would even go so far as to say that you have the right to kill officers of the law in self-defense in some unusual circumstances. For instance, if an officer in plain clothes breaks down your door and starts shooting your kids one by one, you have the right to shoot him, since he is far exceeding his legal rights as a law officer. (This is not debating the wisdom of such a defense, only the moral and legal rights).
Obviously, this scales up; if a crowd protesting a government action meets a Tiananmen Square type massacre by the military or policemen, they have a right to defend themselves. Once again, this is not judging the practicality of such a defense, only the morality and legality of it.
So, as you see, I do not believe in the government as the Keeper of the Sacred Flame of Justifiable Force. You might think that this means that I live in a shack in the Rockies with my 500 guns, my million rounds of ammo, and my Timothy McVeigh poster saying "I AM the Revolution!!!" but, in fact, I'm not. As I've stated, I don't think it's practical or wise to start an armed conflict with your government.
I am much more open to more practical ways of resisting tyranny. I refer you to the 55 mph speed limit: like the overwhelming majority of drivers, I didn't join the Interstate 80 Militia and storm the DMV or the Highway Patrol; I simply drove 65 mph until the federal government eventually got a clue and changed the law.
Nevertheless, unlike you, I am willing to call a spade a spade, and to call an illegitimate government an illegitimate government, since I don't feel the need to justify that government's monopoly on force. I would argue that this is one reason there are more leftist revolutionaries than rightist revolutionaries: the leftist feels the need to believe in the moral authority of his government in a way that most rightists do not. This is also why rightists like yourself who believe in a governmental monopoly on violence tend over time to become authoritarian.