It seems possible that Bernie Sanders could actually be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency if Hillary Clinton were to be indicted for the obvious felonies she has committed.

He calls himself a “democratic socialist”. From all that we can discover about him, we’d say that “Communist” would fit him perfectly.

But okay, “democratic socialist” will do for now.

“Democratic”?  Leftist dictatorships like to call themselves “democratic”. It means nothing there. Sanders points to Scandinavian examples of “democratic socialism”. Denmark, Sweden, Norway are welfare states which hold democratic elections. They’re often held up – rightly or wrongly – as proof that socialism can be a workable system, even though it has failed everywhere else.

So how well can socialism work?

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

Over the last 200 years, free enterprise has led to an unprecedented explosion of wealth, individual liberty and creativity. Nothing in human history … has enriched the human race to anything like the same degree. If human history has conclusively established any fact, it is that free enterprise is fantastically successful, while socialism is a pitiful failure. Think of North Korea, the USSR, Maoist China, Albania, East Germany, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, India until it wised up. The list goes on and on.

And yet…the siren song of socialism still lures suckers. Currently, Venezuela is learning the age-old lesson the hard way. But we can’t laugh at Venezuelans, when Bernie Sanders is a serious contender for our presidency and is far and away the campus favorite. How is it that socialism (or the urge toward socialism, anyway) can survive? It is the cockroach of ideologies, seemingly impervious to all efforts to kill it.

It may be helpful to think of socialism as a species of fraud. There are many types of fraud, but nothing new under the Sun. … The same con games that flourished hundreds of years ago still work. Charles Ponzi’s financial empire collapsed in 1920, and he was arrested and sent to prison. Yet hardly a month goes by without another Ponzi scheme being revealed. There is only one way in which a Ponzi scheme can end: in disaster. This is a mathematical fact. Yet people fall for them, over and over. …

Socialism is fraud writ large. …

Only under socialism could Fidel Castro become the richest warlord, relative to his subjects’ wealth, in recorded history. (And that was the least of his sins.) Only under socialism could Maria Gabriela Chavez, daughter of socialist tribune of the people Hugo Chavez, beloved by the American left, waltz off with a $4 billion fortune. But then, she was a piker: Chavez’s Minister of the Treasury stashed $11 billion in Swiss bank accounts.

Charles Ponzi’s mistake was that he should have gone into politics. He could have gone far as a socialist politician, and could have avoided prison. … A fraudster like Bernie Madoff will only take your money. A socialist will take your money, but that is just the beginning. When you give power to the power-mad, your freedom and human dignity, and perhaps your life, are soon forfeit.

Bernie Sanders’s economic theory is very simple, superficial and childish. He thinks there is a fixed amount of wealth (he calls it “the wealth” as if it exists in nature independent of human activity) and it is unfairly distributed. Too much over here, too little over there. Government must come along and spread it nice and evenly.

We doubt that Hillary Clinton has a better understanding. She insists that businesses do not create jobs. Obama is also unaffected by economic realities.

Perhaps what America needs is a successful businessman to take charge. In which case voters might cast a considering eye on Donald Trump.

As, in fact, they are.

In my book L: A Novel History, revolution sweeps Louis Zander, a charismatic philosopher of art and politics known as L, into power as a Marxist dictator of England.

It is available in hardback, paperback and kindle editions here.

These are quotations from L: A Novel History illustrating themes of the book which, though set in a fictitious England in the 1980s, are applicable to the United States under President Obama.

1. Analogies to The Occupy Wall Street Movement:

There was no use in protest marches and demonstrations now. For now there was real deprivation, real tyranny, real hunger. And that was precisely what L had promised them. They were no longer rich in many poor things, as once protestors had so angrily complained to governments and authorities. Now they were poor in all things. It was those who had freedom and decried it, pretending they were oppressed; those who had material plenty and despised it, pretending they were poor; those who thus secreted a worm in their own hearts, and so at the heart of civilization – envy: the amazing unforeseen and unforeseeable envy, by the free and comfortable, of the unfree and wretched of the earth: it was these self-deceiving, would-be lovers of mankind … the affluent children who squatted in the communes and protested against freedom calling it “repressive tolerance”, and those they elected … who were caught in the trap of their own lies, and brought an end to liberty in the name of liberation; an end to plenty in the name of humanitarianism; and an end to the impersonality of the law before which all were equal, and the impersonality of the market in which all were equal, and created legal discrimination and class elitism, in the name of equality.

2. Dependency on the state:

The people had become unaccustomed to self-reliance. They did not after all want a government that would leave them to do the best they could for themselves, and only remove obstacles and restrictions. They wanted a government with paternal responsibilities: to house the citizens, educate them, inoculate them against diseases, cure them when they were ill, keep them warm, tell them to fasten their safety-harnesses in their cars, warn them against smoking tobacco, “counsel” them when they quarreled with their spouses or beat their children or drank too much … and even spend as much of their money as possible on what government considered good for them rather than let them spend it themselves! If the educated and well-off did not need all this for themselves, they believed that “the vast majority of the people of this country” did need it. … The tragedy of Britain was that a self-reliant, self-disciplined, industrious people who had valued freedom, justice, goodwill, commonsense, and had grown strong and prospered because they had the character to embrace those values, had been turned into dependants, dissatisfied and envious, demanding that the state provide what they were no longer willing to provide for themselves.

L wrote: “I look towards a time when none shall have peace, when all feel insecure, and can look only to the Party, manifestly whimsical, for any reward and any punishment, without any reason to expect justice. For there and there only authority will reside, and it will be total and incomprehensible. No aspect of their lives will be too big or too small for the Party to deal with. It will reach into the heart and mind of every man, and his person, his life, will belong not to him but to the Party. The Party will hold the monopoly of life and death. Whatever anyone has will be dispensed to him by the Party, whether it is a material thing, like food and drink, or dignity, self-respect, his mate, the company of his own children. And there will be no escape. For the power of the Party must be planetary. That is why there can be no refuge for individualism; why anyone who expresses thoughts the Party has not allowed him, or who even thinks them to himself, must be stopped.”

3. Redistribution:

L wrote: “You and I know perfectly well that a redistribution of wealth does not make everybody wealthy. In fact, it makes everybody poor.”

4. Social justice:

Increasingly it was the case that the victims of crime were less the object of concern than were the criminals who were excused on the grounds that they were the “real victims” of something called “social injustice”. Tax-payers’ money was spent lavishly on providing them with “therapy”, shelter, comfort, and rehabilitation.

5. Central planning:

The oligarchs occupied themselves with the laborious business of trying “to plan society”. Laws, rules and regulations proliferated, all emanating from the Council of Ministers. Local government was “suspended” when the Council took its “emergency powers”. Administrators were appointed in their stead: Party officials with unlimited powers over persons and property in their districts.

6. Inflation:

“It is in our interest to boost inflation … the unions which have power in the state-monopolized vital services – electricity and gas, mining, transport, shipping, the health service – must use it to keep public expenditure high. Easy enough, since members are unlikely to object to using their collective power to get wages as high as the union can squeeze out of the government for them … The more public money paid out to failing industries the better for us … High unemployment is in our long-term interest, but it is not to our short-term advantage. … Workers are less likely to strike, bring private firms to bankruptcy and generally disrupt the economy if they have real reason to fear the loss of jobs through employment reduction or closure of a business. … There is also the extreme danger that they will start selling their services privately for payment they do not declare – in other words the free ‘black’ economy might gain in strength, and far too many rediscover the personal advantages of self-employment.”

L knew that continuous inflation of the value of money was inimical not only to prosperity, but to security and hopes for the future. He knew that the most responsible, the most self-reliant, the most thrifty, would be the most cheated, because to save money was to lose money. He knew that as money bought less, demands for higher wages would be made more frequently and more exorbitantly; and that those demands could only be met by the printing of ever more paper money, worth ever less and less. And as the Conservative government tried to bring down inflation, tried to make the country live within its means, produce more to earn more real money, L’s legions howled against their efforts. .L-ite economists urged that the government print more money. Their recommendations were given wide and persistent publicity by the BBC, independent television and radio, and most – though not quite all – of the national daily newspapers.

7.  The politics of envy:

Private ownership of land could be ended forever; private education could be made illegal; private medicine entirely abolished; all the known needs of the underprivileged supplied in perfect measure, the poor made collectively rich, and – best of all – the rich made poor.

8. Freedom as a burden:

The Left feared: “The Conservatives will impose freedom on everybody, even those least able to bear it.”

9. Judging according to empathy rather than evidence:

What judges were expected to do was “manifest heart”. The important thing in what had once been called a criminal case was to “arrive at an understanding of the quality of the man” they were judging.

10. Back to the simple life:

[The citizen’s] experience of the revolution was of the decay of everything. He was poor. He was cold. Quite soon he was worse fed that he had ever imagined would be possible in England. Soon the scope of his activities became severely curtailed, and life became monotonous in its misery, unless it was suddenly made appalling and agonizing for this or that individual.

L wrote that they must feel not just cold and hunger, but terror, loneliness, despair. Only then will they understand that the Party is their savior, and that it alone can redeem them from their most terrible spiritual torment – isolation. They will give up their little selfish desires, the pathetic shallow satisfactions they have been deceived into imagining are their real needs. They will begin to understand their role in history. They will thank the power that whips them with tears in their eyes, the mastering Party, giver of bread and purposes.

11. Making the country ungovernable – on the lines of the Cloward-Piven strategy:

The assault on the “commanding heights of power” was to be done by the disruption of civil order, the stirring up of violence in the streets, to the point of serious insurrection and even civil war if possible. Hence the importance of the emotional issue of race. The idea was that liberal democratic government was to be seen not to work. Then an extreme left-dominated Party would take extraordinary powers to restore order.

12. “We all belong to the government” – as per the 2012 Democratic National Convention:

“Everyone will have the pleasure of knowing that he is being used. That what he does is what he must do. That therefore he is necessary, and has purpose. He will belong to the state and the state to him. He will be attached to the state as a babe to its mother’s breast.”

“The state must put them in houses, bring them to school, tempt them with pensions, lure them with kindness. When all have been received inside the shelter of the state, then they will be redeemable. What a harvest will then be promised of men and women for the new age, the third millennium and beyond. But the process of redemption will not be as easy as the gathering-in. They have yet to learn that beyond their material needs there are others, which they have first to discover and then to understand and then to satisfy before they are fit for the absolute community of the human spirit wherein no individual shall have an existence outside of the community, and each will joyfully give up his life at any moment for the preservation of the Greater Life of Universal Man.”

L: A Novel History may turn out to be prophetic if the new leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, comes to power. 

Jillian Becker   November 29, 2015

We hope that Brussels, “under lockdown” in fear of Muslim terrorist attacks, is experiencing maximum inconvenience. That’s the least it deserves.

We quote from an article at Gatestone by Stefan Frank:

The Molenbeek district of Brussels is considered Europe’s “terrorist factory”.

At least three of the perpetrators of the November terrorist attacks in Paris came from there: Ibrahim Abdeslam, Abdelhamid Abaaoud and the remaining fugitive Salah Abdeslam. The list does not stop there. The Viennese daily newspaper Die Presse writes:

Molenbeek made headlines for the first time in 2001: Abdessatar Dahmane, the murderer of the Afghan war hero and horror of the Taliban, Ahmed Schah Massoud, was a regular at the Islamic center at 18 Rue du Manchester, known for its radical views; as well as Hassan El Haski, who was presumed behind the attacks in Casablanca (41 dead in 2003) and Madrid (200 victims in 2004). The weapons that were used in the attacks on the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 came from Molenbeek. The French jihadist Mehdi Nemouche, who caused a bloodbath in the Brussels Jewish Museum the previous year, lived here. In August 2015, Ayoub El Khazzani started out from here on his attempt to attack a train from Amsterdam to Paris.

The two jihadists killed by Belgian police in January, in Verviers, came from Molenbeek. The terrorist Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked the HyperCacher kosher supermarket in Paris, also spent time in Molenbeek.

The majority of the terrorists who have appeared in Europe in recent times originated from a single neighborhood, six square-kilometers in size — an astounding concentration.

Belgium is, in relation to the size of its population, the greatest European exporter of fighters for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Most of them come from Molenbeek. “Instead of bombing Raqqah,” says the French journalist Eric Zemmour, “France should be bombing Molenbeek.”

More than half the population of Molenbeek is Muslim; a quarter come from Morocco – such as the Paris attackers. “You know, there are more veiled women here in Molenbeek than in Casablanca,” says a resident interviewed by investigative reporter Gilles Gaetner of the French news portal Atlantico. … “When one walks the streets of this Brussels district, with its nearly 96,000 residents, one is overcome by a bizarre impression. Not only would you think you were no longer in the Kingdom of Belgium, but an oppressive atmosphere reigns here.”

Foreign reporters are only now discovering Molenbeek. …

[Brussels is] a city in fear. Much of the responsibility for this apparently rests with Philippe Moureaux, member of the Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste), who was mayor of Molenbeek from 1992 until 2012. Confronted with the complaints of his citizens, he regularly denied the unsustainable conditions in his town: “It makes me angry when people pick out tiny details and lie about them,” he said in the quoted report. Molenbeek is “not the Bronx; the problems with criminality only concern a small number of streets,” said Moureaux.

Then Moureaux showed his true colors: “Molenbeek is a symbol that certain people want to destroy. But only over my dead body.” Certain people? Does the mayor actually believe in a conspiracy against his district of misery? One does not have to search for long to realize that Moureaux, on whose initiative Belgium passed an “anti-racism law” in 1981, is an anti-Semite  … He downplays and supports the violence of young Muslims – also against Jews.

There was heavy rioting in 2009 during Ramadan in Molenbeek. Muslim youths set up barricades made of burning tires, set cars ablaze, threw rocks at firefighters who came to put out fires and, equipped with rocks and crowbars, looted stores. … The police received the following order: “Do not provoke them, do not search them, do not intervene, even if dozens of them come together, do not issue warnings for harassment, not even if they throw rocks at you.”

Jewish shop-owners were also harassed other than at Ramadan. In 2008, the Flemish magazine Dag Allemaal reported on “youths” yelling, “The Jews are our worst enemies,” in the streets of Molenbeek. There used be many stores run by Jews on the Rue du Prado and the Chaussée de Grand in Molenbeek, but in 2008, with the exception of one furniture store, they suddenly disappeared. And nobody seemed bothered by this, especially not Mayor Moureaux.

None of the Jews wanted to speak with the Dag Allemaal reporter, out of fear of reprisals. The one exception was a man whom the paper referred to as “René.” René ran a barbershop for over 30 years in the Chaussée de Gand. Then came a series of acts of violence. It began with graffiti on his shop’s windows: “Sale youpin” (“dirty Jew”) and other anti-Semitic slogans. Later on, six Muslim youths stormed into his shop, destroyed the furnishings and punched René in the face. He called the police. An hour later, the youths returned in order to “punish” him; they broke all the mirrors. For more than 35 years, René had built up a large and loyal customer base, but after this attack, most people were afraid to visit his shop. He had no other choice but to close it.

How did Moureaux react? By accusing Belgian Jews of wanting to deny Muslims the “right to diversity”. …

This “right to diversity” was not granted to citizens by Moureaux during Ramadan. In a press release with the title, “Ramadan regulations for everyone”, Moureaux appealed to citizens in August 2011 to stop driving into the center of Molenbeek in the afternoon during the month of Ramadan, because Muslims are doing their shopping there.

In January 2015, after the massacre of the staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the murder of four Jews in Paris’s HyperCacher supermarket, the now-retired mayor gave an interview to Maghreb TV, a channel broadcast via the internet, the target audience for which is North Africans in Belgium. After he made an appeal not to hold all Muslims responsible for the actions of a few terrorists, it got wild:

Many have an interest in dividing us. … Unfortunately, these people can be found everywhere. There is a contagion of the problems of the Middle East, in the Near East, the Israeli-Palestinian problem, which leads to some having an interest in provoking local disagreements, like a reflex to what happens over there. … It will be said that it is coming from both sides. But it is obvious that they are trying to create hatred for Arabs here in the West, in order to justify the policies of the state of Israel, policies that appear unacceptable to me.

It is supposed to be Israel’s fault when the Arabs of Belgium – and especially those of Molenbeek – have a bad reputation? This type of anti-Semitic resentment is unfortunately not only typical for Moureaux, but for his entire party. In March 2013, the Socialists of Molenbeek issued an invitation to an event titled: “What if we freely and calmly spoke about Zionism?” On the invitation flyer was an anti-Semitic caricature, drawn in the style of Der Stürmer, by the Arabic neo-Nazi Zéon. After loud protests, the Socialists cancelled the event – on the grounds that the aspired-to “calm” discussion was unfortunately no longer possible. …

Welcome to Molenbeek. The jurist Etienne Dujardin recently wrote in the news portal Levif.be that the conditions in Islamist terror districts such as Molenbeek, Verviers or Saint Denis also had something to do with the deliberate efforts of some politicians, who find welcome campaign workers in radical Islamic circles:

Parties have been practicing a form of cronyism based on elections; they all used the same radical mosques as mouthpieces for their election campaigns. Some saw them as a massive pool of easily available votes.

And that is how it seems Mayor Moureaux observed that he could personally profit from the transformation of Molenbeek into a bastion of jihad. As he himself lives in a wealthy district, he was able to reject with great arrogance citizens who complained about excessive crime. He won elections by catering to radical Islam. … Behind the anti-Israel agitation of Moureaux lay a corrupt mayor, who only cared for his office and his income; who, as he himself said, was “addicted to power”. That his town was transforming into a hell of criminality, anti-Semitism and Sharia, he either did not care about or actually welcomed. …  This is how Molenbeek became, during the term in office of just one man, what it is today.

“Less than a year to go to the election of a new president.”

“Only 14 months more of this disastrous presidency.”

And then …?

Obama’s malign effect on the nation will be ended and undone?

Not if Obama can do anything to prevent it – and he can, and he will, and he’s doing it.

Matthew Vadum writes at Front Page:

After making America poorer, weaker, less free, more race-obsessed and balkanized throughout his tumultuous presidency, Barack Obama is gearing up to use his two tax-exempt nonprofits to continue attacking what remains of the republic’s civil society after he leaves office in 14 months.

Obama’s presidency “has been pockmarked by rioting, looting and protests”, as he “encouraged the nonstop civil unrest exhausting the nation”, writes the Hoover Institution’s Paul Sperry. Obama and his “army of social justice bullies” are going to make things worse before he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017.

Our indefatigable Community Organizer-in-Chief is planning to use Organizing for Action (OfA) and the Barack Obama Foundation to continue punishing America for its imaginary sins and to promote manufactured controversies long after he leaves the White House.

Chicago-based OfA has trained “more than 10,000 leftist organizers, who, in turn, are training more than 2 million youths in [Saul] Alinsky street tactics,” according to Sperry. This “army of social justice bullies” will carry on Obama’s campaign to fundamentally transform America. 

OfA is a less violent version of Mussolini’s black shirts and Hitler’s brown shirts, or of the government-supported goon squads that Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Cuba’s Castro brothers use to harass and intimidate their domestic opponents. OfA units brought muscle to the 2011-12 fight in Wisconsin over that state’s out-of-control government labor unions. OfA has bludgeoned Democrats that Obama deemed insufficiently left-wing, especially red-state congressional Democrats who had been wavering on the issue of Obamacare. …

Will the OfA be less violent than its forerunners? It would be a mistake to assume or expect that to be the case.

OfA, however, is only part of the picture.

Obama’s presidential foundation … may end up eclipsing OfA as a locus of destructive, nihilistic, antisocial activism in the post-Obama era. Obama intends to use his foundation, based at the planned Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side, to continue wreaking havoc in America and around the globe.

A “scaled down” version of OfA will reportedly reside at the Barack Obama Foundation whose website states ominously, “As President Obama has said, the change we seek will take longer than one presidency.  Obama’s historic candidacy was never simply about winning an office; it was about building a movement to tackle challenges that would define a generation. This work will live on in the Obama Foundation, which will inspire citizens across the globe to better their communities, their countries, and their world.”

But at least until the foundation is fully operational, Organizing for Action will remain Obama’s primary nonprofit vehicle for subjecting the American people to the community organizer-style terrorism that got him where he is today.

Sperry notes that OfA holds “organizing summits” on college campuses and uses social media to “mobilize flash mobs against ‘biased cops’, ‘climate-change deniers’,  ‘Wall Street predators’ and ‘gun extremists’.”  It organizes rallies against conservative opponents of same-sex marriage, expanded LGBT rights, abortion, and amnesty for illegal aliens.

During the nationwide battle over Obamacare, OfA sent out a mass email attacking the good faith of opponents. Those who questioned the wisdom of Obamacare weren’t Americans who sincerely disagreed with the president, but “Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists who are subverting the American Democratic Process, whipped to a frenzy by their Fox Propaganda Network ceaselessly re-seizing power for their treacherous leaders”. …

OfA was created because the White House could not lawfully use the 13 million e-mail addresses that the campaign compiled in 2008. The Democratic National Committee set up the allegedly grassroots movement as an in-house project to continue to proselytize on Obama’s behalf between elections. It was previously called Organizing for America but that name was jettisoned, probably because it sounded too pro-American.

Organizing for Action is a 501c4 nonprofit “social welfare” organization formed in January 2013. …  At the end of 2013 it reported $26 million in total revenue, 197 employees, and 27,282 volunteers.

OfA … runs something it calls the Community Organizing Institute which conducts “documentary film screenings, panel discussions and receptions with distinguished guests”.

Obama has also used taxpayer money to train “hundreds of thousands of junior agitators through AmeriCorps, a Clinton youth program he’s dramatically expanded”, Sperry writes, “and through My Brother’s Keeper, the ‘racial justice’ initiative he launched in the wake of the 2012 death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin”.

Obama openly supports the violent Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements, which are “coordinating activities with nonprofit ACORN clones, who are being secretly bankrolled through Justice Department subprime settlement funds extracted from banks”. …

Obama is leaving behind a generation of militant jerks — collectively known as his “family” — to continue to proliferate protests and militate against everything and nothing. These irritating, self-absorbed, belligerent brats will “hands-up, don’t shoot” themselves into every cobwebbed corner of society, and the liberal media will give them the national bullhorn to amplify their hatred every time.

Bernie Sanders’s and Hilary Clinton’s model socialist society is feeling the pinch:

From Online Post – a Danish site, in English.

A new analysis by Arbejderbevægelsens Erhvervsråd (AE), an economic policy institute and think-tank working to promote social justice, indicates that an increasing number of Danes can be considered poor.

Our emphasis – to draw attention to it’s being a leftist organization.

The analysis, which looked at poverty numbers from 2002-2010, conveys that nearly a quarter of a million Danes live below the poverty line, as per the definition used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

According to Berlingske newspaper, that definition translates to a monthly income of 8,788 kroner [$1,338] a month for a single person or 5,047 kroner [$768] per person for a family with four children.

And it is especially the areas around the capital of Copenhagen that things look dire. Brøndby, Albertslund, Ishøj, Copenhagen and Høje-Taastrup Councils experienced the greatest increase in poverty.

From 2002 to 2010, the number of poor in Brøndby Council rose by 3.7 percent, while it rose by 3.4 and 3.3 in Albertslund and Ishøj, respectively.

In Brøndby, the challenge comes from many residents being poorly educated. According to the council’s mayor, Ib Terp (Socialdemokraterne), the council is meeting that problems by urging youths to get an education. …

But it’s not only blue-collar areas that have experienced a rise in the number of people living under the poverty line. Traditional wealthy areas such as Frederiksberg Council and Holbæk Council have also been struggling. In fact, there is no single council in Denmark that has experienced a decrease of the number of people living in poverty. Struer Council in central Jutland performed the best, with the number of poor increasing by only 0.4 percent over the eight year period.

Overall, Copenhagen has the most cases of poverty in the nation by far. There were 41,419 in 2010, up from 25,170 in 2002. Aarhus Council has 14,166, Odense Council has 9,428 and Aalborg council has 7,696. …

OECD’s definition of poverty has been criticised for being too rigid, but AE has used the definition for a number of years because it is an internationally-approved definition used throughout the EU. …

Karen Hækkerup, the integration and social minister, is awaiting the new Danish definition of poverty, which is expected in the spring of 2013, but indicated that the government has already initiated a number of schemes that are designed to tackle the issue.

The issue of poverty? Or of re-defining the word?

Plain fact: Socialism makes people poor. The fatter the government, the thinner the people.

Capitalism makes ever more people rich. A billion people have been made richer by markets over the last 20 years. The evidence is writ so large over the whole world that it is simply amazing how it can be missed.

As for Denmark – now it must somehow extend its welfare to tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants. Good luck, Denmark, with that!

(Hat-tip to our Facebook commenter, Jeff Leeper)

Do European governments know what they are doing, letting millions of aliens into their countries? Do European leaders have a clear understanding of what the policy entails, and a purpose they judge to be good for their countries, even if they do not explain to the people what the policy is and why it will be good for them?

No.

There could not be better proof that the “thinking” behind this immense historical change is totally irrational, than this incoherent speech by the Prime Minister of Sweden when pressed to explain just why he is letting his country be swamped by Muslim immigrants:

Yes, well first of all we, we are in the middle of what I mean seriously when I’m saying, when I express a, a big thank you to all the people doing such a great job, because it is a humanitarian effort, it’s just as the Minister for Justice and Migration just said. What we are actually doing is that we are saving lives when people who come from bombs, from, from killing, from oppression, their lives are shattered. We, we help them and that is a, that is a great humanitarian effort, and of course now that we can see the number of people who need it, that are seeking protection, then it is one of the greatest humanitarian efforts. And that we are facing a crisis situation, that is in part why I, we are outlining today that we are also preparing for a situation where we may need to house people in tents, because we stand up with the humanitarian refugee policy, right of asylum, but we can now also see that we cannot close our eyes to the fact that there are more coming than ever in such a short time, and we need to provide a roof over their heads. Then it is – other things may be required.  

This is from Gatestone, by Ingrid Carlquvist:

Sweden is fast approaching a complete collapse. More and more municipalities are raising the alarm that if the migrants keep coming at this pace, the government can no longer guarantee normal service to its citizens.

In addition, ominous statements from government officials have left Swedes in fear of what tomorrow may bring. If the migrant wave keeps coming, in 10-15 years, Swedes will be a minority in their own country.

And even if no more come than are there now, Sweden is set to be lost to the Swedes.

At a press conference October 9, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said that Sweden is in a state of crisis. However, when asked to clarify what he meant by this, Löfven was unable to produce a single coherent sentence.

Three ministers appeared by the Prime Minister’s side at the hastily summoned press conference, which came on the heels of an extraordinary government meeting. The purpose of the press conference seems to have been to convey two messages:

1. To explain to the world and the Swedish people that Sweden is facing “one of the largest humanitarian efforts in Swedish history”.
2. That there is no more housing available, and migrants should be prepared to live in tents.

During the question period after the ministers’ speeches, journalist Tomas Ramberg of Ekot Public Radio asked: “You say that Sweden is preparing for a crisis situation, what do you mean by those dramatic words?”

Stefan Löfven’s reply was incomprehensible …

He  gave the speech we’ve quoted above.

However, the fact that the government is now talking about housing migrants in tents, may be a signal that Sweden, despite everything, may not want to be on the front lines of the “humanitarian” battle anymore, after all. The prospect of spending an ice-cold Swedish winter in a tent may make migrants choose countries other than Sweden. If not, a complete collapse of the Swedish system is imminent.

In 2014, the Danish historian and social commentator Lars Hedegaard prophetically remarked in the book “Farliga ord“(Dangerous Words), that the economic breakdown of a nation always happens quickly and unexpectedly:

If there is any lesson to be drawn from history, it is that what you do not think will happen, does. Time and again. The final consequence of the West and, above all, Sweden’s immigration policy is that the economy will collapse – because who is going to pay for it all? And economic breakdowns, once they happen, always happen very fast.

Right now, the Swedish government is borrowing money abroad to pay for immigration. But that amount is not enough. …

The government is also raising (already high) taxes.

High-ranking politicians and officials are also saying the situation is extremely grim.

On October 1, Minister for Home Affairs Anders Ygeman said that the current wave of immigrants will lead to “huge economic strains“; and a few days later Immigration Service Director General Anders Danielsson explained that “within the framework of the system we all know, we are now approaching the end of the road”.

Statements such as these have never been heard before in Sweden, especially in connection with the “sacred” issue of migration. Until now, Swedes have perpetually been told that we live in a rich country that has no problem handling all asylum seekers who want to come here.

In the shadow the 1.5 million migrants expected to arrive this year in Germany, the EU’s largest country (population 81 million), migrants are also pouring into a rather smaller Sweden. Geographically Sweden is large, but consists mainly of forests and wilderness, and fewer than 10 million people live in the country. Until 2010, Sweden took in about 25,000 migrants a year. However, in 2010, then Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt made a deal with pro-immigration Green Party, (Miljöpartiet) — by his own admission to punish voters for allowing the anti-mass-immigration Sweden Democrats party (Sverigedemokraterna) into parliament.

Ah, so Swedish voters elected a party that was against mass immigration – and their will was frustrated by a coalition. A Green Party tilted the balance away from common sense and national self-preservation. No surprise there.

Reinfeldt’s deal opened the immigration floodgates. In 2014, 81,000 people sought asylum in Sweden; and 33,500 were granted asylum. However, as many of the immigrants subsequently brought over their relatives, that figure substantially increased. Last year, 110,000 people were granted residency status in Sweden. One should add to this figure an unknown number of illegal aliens.

There is now talk of 180,000 asylum seekers coming to Sweden in 2015. That number is more than twice as many as the year before. If half of them are granted asylum, and they each bring over three relatives, we are talking about 270,000 new immigrants to Sweden – within one year. Over 8000 people arrived just last week, 1,716 of whom were so-called “unaccompanied refugee children”.

Swedes who only follow the mainstream media get the impression that all the migrants arriving are war refugees from Syria, but the number of Syrians is actually less than half of the total: 2,864 people last week claimed to be from Syria. 1,861 claimed to be from Iraq, and 1,820 from Afghanistan. Clearly, many people from countries that are not at war are taking their chances and applying for asylum in Sweden; but this is something about which the mainstream media does not see fit to inform its followers.

… The Swedish economist Tino Sanandaji (of Iranian-Kurdish descent, and therefore tougher than most Swedes, who, if they criticize the immigration policy, are immediately accused of racism) writes on his blog that Swedes could soon be in the minority in their own country:

1,000-1,500 asylum seekers a day for 15 years equals 5.5 to 8.2 million asylum seekers. At the end of 2014, the Statistical Central Bureau, SCB, calculated that 21.5% of the Swedish population were of foreign descent: 2.1 million, out of 9.7 million. The number of people of Swedish descent – born in Sweden with two parents born in Sweden – has been stable at about 7.7 million and is expected to remain stable or increase slightly due to birth surplus. If those of foreign descent increase their number by about 5.6 million, they will become the majority.

One of the municipalities that has been flooded with migrants is Trelleborg (population 43,000), located on Sweden’s southernmost coast. Over 100 “unaccompanied refugee children” arrive from Germany via ferry on a typical day. During the last two weeks, more than 1000 such youths have been registered; more than half of them have now vanished and are listed as missing. No one knows why, or where they have gone. Add to this 13,000 adult asylum seekers.

Impromptu temporary lodgings have been created in sports centers, ice rinks, and at the Sturup airport hotel, to name a few.

Trelleborg has written a desperate letter of appeal for help to the government, just as, a few weeks ago, the Örkelljunga municipality did in vain. The mayor and the Municipal Director of Trelleborg, who signed the letter on October 1, wrote:

In the past, many asylum seekers have taken the route through Denmark to Malmö, but this changed about two weeks ago. From September 10 until the morning of October 1, 14,100 asylum seekers arrived in Trelleborg by ferry. There is no indication that the pace is slowing; if anything it is continuously increasing. On Tuesday, September 22, Trelleborg received word from the Immigration Service that the municipality where children and young people arrive is by law the authority that is required to provide housing, care and living expenses, until such time as the Immigration Service decides upon a designated municipality. … Trelleborg has quickly ended up in a situation where the regular services to the community are at great risk of being affected. … By writing this letter, we would like to bring to your attention the enormous strain we now find ourselves under.

Apparently, the Minister for Justice and Migration, Morgan Johansson, has since been in contact with Trelleborg’s mayor via telephone to discuss possible solutions. On October 9, the Immigration Service decided that Trelleborg should be exempt as a designated municipality for unaccompanied children. However, it is unclear how this will alleviate Trelleborg’s plight as far as the new arrivals go. The only concrete help so far has come from some of the neighboring municipalities, who have opened up facilities to house some of the Trelleborg migrants.

Malmö, about 18 miles from Trelleborg, is also in dire straits. For the last few weeks, the central train station in Sweden’s third largest city has been overrun with migrants, and the volunteers that showed up for the first few days with food, water and clothes now seem to have lost interest. The daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet summed up the desperate situation in Malmö, where even the city’s empty jail was considered (and rejected) as possible housing for refugee children. It now looks more like a possibility for adult refugees.

The Social Democratic mayor of Filipstad, Per Gruvberger, also recently raised the alarm that his municipality of 6,000 people will not be able to provide schooling and childcare for the 1,100 asylum seekers now assigned to his municipality.

The reply of the Minister for Justice and Migration, Morgan Johansson, to this cry for help was: “If need be, Filipstad will just have to expand its operations.”

This insensitive statement from Johansson caused the Mayor of neighboring Årjäng, Daniel Schützer, to go ballistic. He wrote about his fellow party member on Facebook:

“Pardon my French, but Morgan Johansson is totally f—ing stupid. ‘Expand,’ he says. It is not f—ing bricks and planks that we are lacking, it is teachers!!!!”

The Immigration Service, which is tasked with reviewing the asylum seekers’ reasons for immigrating, is understandably swamped with work. Even before the latest “refugee crisis” – and despite 1,200 new employees being hired last year – its staff is struggling. The employees’ union is now raising the alarm, concerning more and more incidents of violence, vandalism and suicide attempts – this year (up to August), 1,021 such incidents were reported. …

While all this plays out, large portions of the Swedish people watch in horror from the sidelines and wonder when the unavoidable collapse will occur. At the same time, a surprisingly large portion of the citizenry still overconfidently believe that “Daddy State” will make everything all right. This a very Swedish view, like the wishes of children, that Peter Santesson, head of polling institute Demoskop, wrote about on the website Dagens Opinion. Santesson states that the Swedes have an unusually high level of trust in the social order, and that they are convinced that “somewhere higher up, there is always someone smarter and more informed, taking responsibility and making sure everything works.” If the government officials turn out to be incapable of handling the refugee chaos they themselves have created, it could be disastrous.

Santesson continues,

Responsible decision makers need to ponder the trust the people have now bestowed on them, and they need to handle this trust with care in this difficult crisis. If the people’s confidence is betrayed by them turning out not to be able to handle the situation – if “Sweden” turns out to be insufficient as a miracle cure and the crisis becomes too much to handle – the outcome could be political and social consequences reaching far beyond the issue of immigration.

What consequences might those be? Insurrection? Armed rebellion?

If so, they could find themselves clashing not only with Swedish governent forces – who are probably a pushover – but with trained terrorists:

The blogger Johan Westerholm, a Social Democrat who is critical of the government … writes that the situation in Malmö is “out of control,” and states that we do not have any idea who those arriving in Sweden are:

A very large group of administrators [at the Immigration Service] do not even know the designated terror organizations, and then there are the sympathizers – people who, on principal, would never file a report to the Immigration Service security department, for ideological reasons. A large group consists of those who are scared into silence. In an organization characterized by fear and stress, to do nothing is a surefire way to keep your job. If a report of suspicion is filed anyway, typically nothing happens. If the life and health of the terrorist is threatened, as is often the situation, the person gets to stay. Initially he is given a temporary residence permit, but in practice, this turns out to be permanent.

The 152 asylum seekers reported to the Security Service so far this year as possible threats to national security, are thus most likely just the tip of the iceberg.

The Swedes who have already lost faith in the authorities and the politicians are now preparing for the unthinkable – that their once so secure society is about to collapse.

On the website 72timmar.se, the Civil Contingencies Agency informs the public on “our five most basic needs: Water, food, heat, sleep and security.” The readers are told to keep water and canned goods at home, and make sure they can stay warm.

So not insurrection. But laying in emergency supplies. Hunking down for a miserable, fear-ridden winter – that will last not for the usual six months of biting cold, but forever? Emergency supplies will run out soon – and then? Starvation? Freezing to death? Or will the Muslim guests finish off their hosts quickly with rape, pillage and mass murder?

Let socialists the world over (including, we hope forlornly, the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the US, Bernie Sanders, who holds Sweden up as a model for America), imagine all those thin shivering native Swedes expiring in their ideal socialist state! 

But even the need for “prepping” in the face of the coming emergency does not seem to penetrate the heads of most of them:

“Prepping” is becoming more common in Sweden. Last summer, the daily Svenska Dagbladetran a story on the first Swedish online store for preppers, and that interest was huge. According to the polling institute Sifo, until recently, seven out of ten Swedes have been completely unprepared for a crisis that knocks out the power supply and thereby the infrastructure. The owner of the online store, Fredrik Qvarnström, told the paper that, in his estimation, the Swedes are the worlds most poorly prepared for a crisis:

… People seem to be aware that there are problems, but I do not think they know how vulnerable we really are. We rely on the state to take care of us, as it has in the past.

It will not be long until the Swedes realize that the state will not look after them. The country that just 20 years ago was considered one of the safest and most affluent in the world, is now in danger of becoming a failed state.

And not just failed. Finished. Extinct.

Monica Showalter, writing at Investor’s Business Daily on the rival but similar socialist programs of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, gives this picture of a country where the policies both of them favor have been put into practice:

Amid all the free stuff, bankruptcy and shortages have come, the miserable process of “running out of other people’s money” as Lady Thatcher put it.

Standing in line for basic goods as Cubans do occupies the lives of millions of Venezuelans.

Some are clubbed to death as goods are fought over.

Young people prefer drug-dealing to college, given the absent opportunities for advancement.

Prisoners eat cat meat.

Corruption is rampant and central planning mismanagement ensures that food rots on the docks.

Hospitals are crumbling from shortages, with vital cancer and hemophilia medication unavailable. Maternity wards are overrun by filthy opossums — killing dozens of newborns as they spread disease.

With the focus on putting dissidents in prison, crime has overrun the country — with even a Miss Venezuela slain.

Family tombs are broken into and robbed of bones.

The scale of the horror, from birth to death in what Chavez called a socialist “sea of happiness” is unspeakable, and thousands of educated Venezuelans are fleeing.

Enough said?

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.             – Ayn Rand

The political philosophy of the New Left is weak, shallow, and in its expression by some of its gurus, patently absurd. But it has won the West. It has won the academies of the pan-European word, and through them generations grow up steeped in the creed.

What is the creed, and why has it won?

It has won because it echoes a Christian teaching, to which some 8,000 generations (reckoning 4 generations per century) of Europeans have been subjected.

It is the notion that to be a good person you must pity other people and make sacrifices for them. Only if you do that, are you worthy and virtuous.

It has been drummed into every Christian from his earliest years, so even if he rebels against his religion, his class, his culture, his race, his nation, he clings to that idea as to the moral kingpin of his universe. Take it away, and the center will not hold.

The New Left was a rebellion by affluent, middle-class adolescents (some of them well advanced in middle age) against their class, culture, race, and nation, starting  about twenty years after the end of the Second World War (1939-1945).

The old Left, a secular version of Christianity, won the support of middle-class intellectuals by directing pity on to the working-class. The intellectuals would, at whatever cost to themselves, lead the oppressed and exploited workers in revolution. In Russia to start with, they did just that before the end of the First World War.

By the late 1960s, the old Left, in the person of dictators and their henchmen, was actively oppressing millions, including the populations of the Eastern European countries and a part of Germany.

So the old Left lost its appeal partly because the Leftist regimes could not easily be held up as models of paradise on earth. In addition, the working-class in the West had generally become prosperous enough to be content with its lot.

The New Left found new victims to feel sorry for. It found them first abroad, in the Third World, which was not prosperous. It declared the people of Third World countries to be exploited and oppressed by European colonialism and imperialism, even if their countries were no longer colonies or parts of empires. Its concern extended to Third World descendants who lived in the First World.

Then it declared that in the First World, women were victims of male-dominated societies. Many women volunteered for the role.

Next, homosexuals were declared, and many declared themselves, victims of heterosexual-dominated First World societies.

The main thing was, New Left intellectuals found new groups to pity, and so new sources for pride in a feeling of self-worth.

After 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War – of which the West was the immediate winner – the old Left was held by Western intellectuals (whom Thomas Sowell calls “the self-annointed”) to have been the wrong Left. The New Left, they maintain, is the politically correct Left.

The strange thing about the (new or old) Left’s remedy for human suffering is this: While only the individual can feel pain and suffer distress; while no masses, no group, no class, no race as such can suffer or feel anything at all; yet  the Plan of the Left to remedy suffering is always one that sacrifices individuals for the sake of the group. It is always a Plan that is implemented regardless of individual suffering. So important is the Plan itself, that any number of individuals may be persecuted, silenced, tortured, enslaved, killed for it. 

There is no collective remedy for human suffering. The only prescription that works is individual freedom; leaving people alone to serve their own purposes in the manner they choose for themselves. (Nothing need prevent an individual from aiding other individuals if that’s what he wants to do.)

*

John Schindler, who calls himself “a traditional leftist”, writes about why he believes the New Left has won in an article titled Who Really Won the Cold War?, in The Federalist. I quote it in full.

While he makes some points I do not agree with (chiefly the idea he takes for granted that Leftism ideally serves the cause of “human freedom”), he makes many more that bear out what I have said about the old Left and the New Left, and how and why the New Left has won the Cold War. I found this surprising. But it explains why an essay by a “traditional leftist” appears in The Federalist.

He starts with a figure from the old Left who has just recently risen to prominence:

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party has sent shockwaves far beyond Britain. There has been disbelief that the United Kingdom’s storied left-wing party opted to be led by a man so obviously contemptuous of his own society. In the wake of their recent electoral debacle under the uninspiring Ed Miliband, Labour has chosen as its leader an activist who resembles a walking leftist cliché. Corbyn’s radicalism is not in doubt. Aside from his embrace of socialist-throwback platitudes that linger on his party’s left flank on the full range of domestic issues, in adamant rejection of Blairism, Corbyn’s foreign-policy views merit attention. Openly hostile to NATO and Britain’s longstanding “special relationship” with the United States, Corbyn adds overt sympathy for numerous authoritarian regimes.

He blames the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the Kremlin, for the Ukraine crisis and has endorsed Russia Today, Putin’s TV propaganda network. Corbyn opposes essentially all overseas military operations by Britain and wants to parley with Bashar al-Assad, four years into Syria’s fratricide, while viewing Tehran as a partner for Middle East peace.

That said, leftist infatuation with foreign dictators is hardly new. For decades a crush on “progressive” despots safely far away from their own free country has been a staple of the Western far-Left diet. Corbyn is simply a paid-up member of his ideological tribe.

Yet Corbyn surpasses his predecessors in his fervent embrace of the social-justice message at home as well as abroad. He exudes hostility towards the Britain that made the historic Labour Party. This, after all, is a man who celebrates Hamas, Hezbollah, and related Islamist extremists as freedom-fighters, while explaining the death of Osama bin Laden was “a tragedy”.

Unsurprisingly, Corbyn enthusiastically espouses multiculturalism and says Britain should “celebrate” record numbers of immigrants entering the country — a position not popular with many voters, who see the European Union being overwhelmed by waves of migrants from Asia and Africa. Between his crush on the West’s enemies and his desire to change his country’s population, Corbyn wants to abolish Britain, not reform it.

Yet we should not regard Corbyn as a particular outlier. In truth, his cocktail of trendy “progressive” opinions, which rejects virtually everything about their own society, is commonly found among postmodern Western leftists. The only difference is that Corbyn makes no effort to mask his views. Many of his fellow travelers obscure their take, which would be considered extreme by most voters, behind moderate-sounding language.

Unlike Barack Obama, who once assured us that he did not see a Red America or a Blue America, rather a United States of America — then proceeded to govern through two terms as a highly partisan liberal Democrat — Corbyn states openly that there is only one “real” Britain, and it is deep red (which in Britain, as most of Europe, means left-wing).

Corbynism is no sudden or shocking development, but the natural culmination of 50 years of left-wing views that have shifted from a desire to reform Western democracies to an unconcealed wish to kill them, or at least change them so fundamentally that they bear little resemblance to themselves.

The Old Left, for all its sometimes horrific flaws, sought socioeconomic change to benefit average citizens, not all-out social revolution. They, in their own way, were very much a product of Western culture. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which split the Left worldwide into communist and social democratic groupings, the latter worked within the socioeconomic system, embracing democracy while seeking minimal deep changes to society itself.

Even the communists were hardly social revolutionaries in practice. In the initial euphoria of the revolution there was experimentation. The Soviet Union became the first society ever to allow abortion and easy divorce. In Hungary, during the short-lived red revolution at the end of World War I, Bolsheviks embraced social radicalism and introduced sex education to undermine the traditional family.

However, once firmly in power, the Soviets dropped any pretense of social revolution to mirror the politico-economic one. While religion was persecuted and mild feminism got lip service, Stalin banned abortion and the party frowned upon sexual immorality. After all, the revolution needed soldiers and workers, and who but communist women could make those?

Although the abortion ban was dropped after Stalin, Soviet social practices remained highly “heteronormative,” with homosexuality being criminal while men and women were strongly encouraged to marry and be fruitful. In its most extreme form, Nicolae Ceaușescu nearly banned abortion and contraceptives altogether in his effort to build his highly fecund socialist Romania.

Many were the Western progressives who visited the East Bloc during the Cold War, having been fed propaganda about the wondrous “new society”, only to discover that communism was actually behind the West in matters of family, sex, and gender.

While the Soviets and their clients remained mired in traditional social models, the West moved on — or forward, depending on your viewpoint. The great social revolution of the 1960s, which passed the East Bloc by because communism had insulated the countries, brought forth a New Left in the West that was interested in matters of sex, gender, and race rather than who owns the means of production.

Their “long march through the institutions” after a half-century must be judged wholly successful. While the Right has won the battle for economics across the West — calls for public ownership now seem quaint rather than threatening to capitalists — the New Left has triumphed on the social front in every arena.

In the United States, which was more resistant to the New Left agenda than many Western countries, the Obama years have witnessed the victory of social justice on all major matters of race, gender, and sexuality. Thanks to activists, politicians, and courts, Americans today are living in a very different social and sexual world than their parents and grandparents.

More than a few communists saw all this coming. Beginning in the 1970s, East Bloc secret police began to notice the impact of the New Left on their Old Left countries. Cries for radical individualism from dissidents under Western influence troubled the communists, who didn’t know what to do about this trend, which they dismissed as a bourgeois affectation.

By the 1980s, the more perceptive East Bloc security services were denouncing this Western poison, which took the form of radical feminism, sexual freedom, environmental activism, and gay rights. To traditional communists, who barely understood this new ideology, it was a scary Western import, according to the secret police. Some in Eastern Europe termed this decadence “anarcho-liberalism”, and they considered it a disease of an affluent late capitalist society burdened with excessive consumerism and leisure time.

In the end, of course, the communists lost. Lots of average people in the East Bloc wanted the freedom to own cool shoes, while some pined for the social-sexual liberties that the West offered. In many ways, the revolutions of 1989 to 1991 that changed the map and politics of Europe and beyond can be viewed with a quarter-century of hindsight as the defeat of the Old Left in the East by the New Left in the West.

We are living still with the consequences of this seismic political shift. With the sudden disappearance of the communist threat, the Right lost interest in socioeconomic fairness, a Cold War necessity to keep reds at bay on the home-front, while oddly so did the Left.

The obsessive interest of the New Left in social justice has come at the expense of economic concerns, with the result that on a wide range of topics their positions, barring lip service, differ hardly at all from the Right. Few on the Left question our basic economic arrangements; tearing down our social foundations has been their core program.

Barack Obama is the most left-wing president ever on social justice, yet he is a darling of Wall Street. Hillary Clinton, despite her belated interest in social issues, is deeply enmeshed in high finance and will never challenge it. Thus Bernie Sanders, who is an amalgam of Old and New Left, is treated like an atavism by mainstream liberals when he opens the economics can of worms.

It’s all enough to make the few traditional leftists among us want to pull their hair out. The broad alliance of cultural Left and corporate Right, which questions none of our economics, has triumphed in our politics — or at least had until Donald Trump came along to question “settled” issues such as mass, often illegal, immigration. The cultural Left favors this because it gradually dissolves the traditional culture, which they despise, while the corporate Right favors it for the cheap labor. Postmodern capitalism is at least as revolutionary a force as anything cooked up by any Marxist, as well as something any Social Justice Warrior can live with.

For more than a generation we have sorely lacked mainstream contributions from social democrats who seek to make our society better, not destroy it. There ought to be no illusions about what the cultural Left seeks: a full revolution of our society and its history, which they see as benighted by irredeemable racism, sexism, and Old Think. Their opponents are objectively evil and on the“wrong side of history,” as Obama himself has assured us, and they must disappear. “Error has no rights,” the mid-nineteenth-century Vatican formulation, has oddly been adapted by our postmodern Left.

As communists once predicted the state itself would wither away, resulting in complete human freedom and progress, the New Left expects that all traditional societal arrangements will wither away, thereby allowing full human freedom and progress. One offered discipline and order and sometimes gulags; the other offers sexual liberty, anti-racism, and iPhones.

Both these beliefs are illusions, and dangerous ones, rooted in a Marxist sense of “knowing” where history is going. The working class was once revered by leftists as uniquely virtuous, while for the New Left that vanguard role is played by minorities sexual and racial, who are allegedly untainted by the dominant group. The essential willingness to ignore inconvenient truths remains the same.

Let us give the Old Left, particularly its social democratic guise, credit that they did not seek the extirpation of our whole society and culture, but instead its transformation. What the New Left today fights for is far more revolutionary and utopian. A Europe that seeks a future where actual Europeans are a dying remnant, replaced by more vigorous immigrants, is but one manifestation of this worldview.

Leftists once heartily sang the “Internationale,” which promised “This is the final struggle” (C’est la lutte finale). Communists were quite wrong about that. History has moved on and left them behind everywhere but Cuba, North Korea, and Western universities. Yet their social-justice descendants believe the same thing, with a different favored fantasy class.

They will be proved wrong, too. The Corbyn vision has no future to offer most Britons. It would be incomprehensible to generations of Labour patriots who fought for Britain, her values, and her allies. The only question is how much damage to what is left of the West will be inflicted before the New Left is vanquished, too.

I wish I could share his optimism that the New Left will be vanquished (in the foreseeable future).

And what I miss in the essay is any reference to the human misery that “traditional leftism” of the redder kind has caused wherever it has had power to cause it. Of course, his focus is on the British Left, which was never – until now? – as red as all that.

I dislike his implication that collectivism (aka Leftism) of his favored – or any –  kind is a valid recipe for improving what Leftists have called “the human condition”.

But I applaud his recognition that the New Left “seeks the extirpation of our whole society and culture”, and that he deplores that terrible aim.

If only he could also see that it is logically, even necessarily, derived from the old socialist collectivist thinking to which he remains faithful!

Jillian Becker   September 18, 2015

The Democratic Party has a list of candidates for the presidency that looks more like a waiting list for a retirement home. One of them ought to be taking her retirement in prison.

The most ludicrous, and it would seem the most popular to judge by the crowds who flock to hear him, is an old commie from way back.

John Hinderaker critically examines his fusty notions at PowerLine:

Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke at Liberty University today. You can read his speech here. It is useful, in that it exposes the extent of Sanders’s ignorance and radicalism. Any deconstruction of a speech this bad must be selective.

I am far, far from being a perfect human being, but I am motivated by a vision, which exists in all of the great religions, in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam and Buddhism, and other religions. And that vision is so beautifully and clearly stated in Matthew 7:12, and it states, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them to do to you, for this sums up the war and the prophets.

Bullshit. Islam does not teach that Muslims should do unto infidels as they would have infidels do unto them. …

It would be hard for anyone in this room today to make the case that the United States of America, our great country, a country which all of us love, it would be hard to make the case that we are a just society, or anything resembling a just society today. In the United States of America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant.

Bullshit. Inequality does not equal injustice. In fact, a society without unequal incomes and wealth would scarcely be worth living in. One wonders: what society, contemporary or ancient, does Sanders consider more just than ours? Soviet Russia? Maoist China? Communist Cuba? He doesn’t say, of course.

In my view, there is no justice, when here, in Virginia and Vermont and all over this country, millions of people are working long hours for abysmally low wages of $7.25 an hour, of $8 an hour, of $9 an hour, working hard, but unable to bring in enough money to adequately feed their kids.

Bullshit. There is a market for labor, whether Sanders likes it or not. Someone who wants to earn more than $7.25 an hour should gain skills and experience that are worth more than $7.25 an hour. Actually, hardly anyone works for that low wage, and 64% of those who do are working part-time. Half are aged 16 to 24, doing precisely what I said–gaining skills and experience so that they can advance and make more. Sanders wants to make it illegal for teenagers and part-timers to work for the wages they can command, even though they want to do so. He thereby dooms them to unemployment. Thanks, Bernie!

In the last two years, 15 people saw $170 billion increase in their wealth, 45 million Americans live in poverty. That in my view is not justice. That is a rigged economy, designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else.

Bullshit. What does Sanders want to do about the fact that the people who founded Facebook have made a lot of money? Prohibit innovation? Limit the number of people who can access popular web sites? Make it illegal to sell advertising if the owners of the web site are already rich? The only “remedy” he can come up with is higher taxes, but America already has the most progressive income tax regime of any developed country–more progressive than Sweden, Denmark, you name it. And yet Democrats like Sanders keep telling us how awful things are for most Americans. Maybe we should try lower taxes on the “rich,” since the world’s highest taxes evidently haven’t worked. By the way, when Democrats talk about rich people, they always use Mark Zuckerberg–a Democrat, no doubt–as an exemplar, but when I read the fine print, I always find that they mean me.

People should not be dying in the United States of America when they are sick.What that is, is an indication that we are the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right, and I think we should change that.

Bullshit. Sorry to break it to you, Bernie, but some sick people do die, even in socialist countries. Actually, for better or worse, the U.S. does guarantee health care to all people. Hospitals can’t turn anyone away, and poor people are on Medicaid. People who live in countries with socialized medicine come here for treatment if they are really sick, and if they can afford it. Let me know when residents of Rochester, Minnesota are booking flights to London so they can participate in Great Britain’s wonderful National Health Service.

In my view there is no justice in our country when youth unemployment exists at tragically high levels. I requested a study last month from a group of economists. And what they told me is that 51 percent of African American high school graduates between the ages of 17 and 20 are unemployed or underemployed — 51 percent.

Bullshit. This one is really galling. Why are black youths unemployed? Because the Obama economy is lousy. Because inner-city schools run by teachers’ unions suck. Because minimum wage laws, in some states, make it impossible for them to get jobs they realistically could perform. Because welfare, for many, is an attractive alternative. Because selling drugs is a good gig, now that police forces everywhere are on the defensive. In short, because of the policies that Bernie Sanders endorses. …

During the Q&A portion of the program, Sanders was asked how he would bring healing and resolution to the issue of racism as president.

I would hope and I believe that every person in this room today understands that it is unacceptable to judge people, to discriminate against people based on the color of their skin. 

Bullshit. Liberals enthusiastically endorse discrimination based on the color of people’s skin. It is called affirmative action.

And I would also say that as a nation – the truth is, that a nation which in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back on racist principles. That’s a fact. We have come a long way as a nation. 

Bullshit. The United States was founded on egalitarian principles which took a while to fully effectuate because the country was born in a world where slavery was common. (It still is, in many places where Anglo-American rule does not govern.) We fought a great civil war to validate the principles of our Constitution, whose promises of freedom had nothing to do with race, as Lincoln insisted. Granted, the Democratic Party fought a spirited rear-guard action on behalf of racism that lasted for more than a century. Bernie is an inheritor of that disgraceful history. …

But the point is that in 2008 this country took a huge step forward in voting for a candidate based on his ideas and not the color of his skin. 

Bullshit. No one would have imagined voting for Obama in 2008, but for the color of his skin. It was his only purported qualification for the office, and we have seen where that obsession with race has led us.

Next year, let’s have a genuinely color-blind election. On a level playing field, Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be disqualified by the color of his skin, but rather by the fact that his socialist ideas are idiotic.

There is lkely to be a Republican president in 2017, but perhaps more because the Democratic Party has dissolved into its own corrupt mess and has no plausible candidate to offer even to the vast uninformed section of the electorate that usually votes for it, than because the GOP has a really good candidate to nominate.

We are quoting this almost in full because we like it:

From Townhall. Kurt Schlichter questions the GOP candidates for the presidency:

CNN’s Republican debate on September 16^th will be conducted with dignity and gravitas by questioners like Hugh Hewitt and Jake Tapper, who will treat the candidates with a level of respect and courtesy that many of them just don’t deserve. They have to. I don’t.

On behalf of all infuriated conservatives, I demand the right to interrogate the candidates myself. I get to ask a question and a follow-up, and here are the rules. First, answer the damn question. It insults me when you think I’ll somehow forget what I asked, so bewitching is your oratory. Second, answer, then stop talking. If you use more words than the Gettysburg Address (272) you are so, so very wrong. Third, no clichés. If you use the phrase “for the children,” I get to slap you.

Here goes:

Jeb! Bush:

You support amnesty and Common Core, you won’t undo the Iran sellout of Israel on your first day in office and – as we always expected – you’ve come out in support of more gun control. Since you have adopted Hillary’s platform, why are you running as a Republican?

Why are you so damn special that despite there being 320 million other Americans, we can’t do any better than a third Bush?

Dr. Ben Carson:

You’re proud of not being a politician, but what makes you think D.C.’s establishment won’t chew you up and spit you out?

You’re a guy with tremendous accomplishments, morals, and character. Why do you even want to go to Washington?

Jim Gilmore:

Can you name one person you aren’t related to who wants you to be president?

In fact, are you even supposed to be here on stage tonight?

Chris Christie:

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room – what the hell were you thinking snuggling up to Obama?

Other than talking incessantly about killing terrorists – which is cool – in what way are you even remotely a conservative?

Carly Fiorina:

You’re the only female running in the GOP primaries. Would you even be on this stage if you were a dude?

You were a senior officer in a huge corporation that did a lot of government work. Why should we conservatives believe you won’t be just another crony capitalist shafting us and stealing our money for the benefit of your corporate pals?

Lindsey Graham:

Conservatives detest you, and the feeling is mutual. Are you in this as some sort of establishment stalking horse to make sure a real conservative doesn’t derail Jeb! by snagging South Carolina’s delegates?

Anything else interesting that you’d like to tell us tonight?

John Kasich:

You decided to go along with Obamacare in Ohio. Why, as a conservative would I ever support you in the primary over someone committed to the destruction of that socialist atrocity?

Like many, even most, conservatives, I think you’re a smug, sanctimonious jerk who hides his self-righteousness behind a vague, unfocused aura of pseudo-Christian progressivism. Why should I allow you to spend four to eight years in my face telling me how I don’t measure up to your allegedly Jesus-inspired standards?

George Pataki:

Since I really have no idea why you’re running, let me just ask you this: Who’s more badass, Captain Kirk or Picard?

Marco Rubio:

My family is half Cuban, and we loved you and your life story until you lied to us about amnesty – no, that’s not an invitation for you to try to convince us how your past embrace of amnesty was not really an embrace of amnesty. You lied to me once – why should I ever believe anything you ever say again?

Here’s your chance to be clear – do you agree with me and most conservatives that America has zero moral obligation to illegal aliens, that they should receive no government benefits, and that they should leave our country?

Ted Cruz:

I think you are a genius lawyer and a true conservative, but you are off-putting to people who aren’t movement conservatives … Do the math for me – how can you possibly win 270 electoral votes?

Wouldn’t you better serve conservatism as Chief Justice Ted Cruz?

Rand Paul:

[As with] your father, I can listen to you for a couple minutes, find myself nodding in agreement, and then BAM! you say something nutty, usually about foreign policy. How can I be sure you will do the most important thing a president must do – relentlessly and ruthlessly kill America’s enemies?

Chemtrails. Are they a thing?

Scott Walker:

The idea behind your campaign seemed to be that you’re a normal guy who would return us to normalcy, but we conservatives don’t want normalcy anymore. We want vengeance. Will you commit to ruthlessly annihilating liberalism wherever you find it?

More specifically, will you commit to destroying all federal government employee unions?

Mike Huckabee:

You combine a love of big government with a kind of religious paternalism that evokes an unholy love child of LBJ and Elmer Gantry. Can you sketch me out a scenario where you win the general election that doesn’t involve someone releasing tapes of Hillary gleefully vivisecting corgi puppies?

You play bass. Really, is that a president’s instrument?

Bobby Jindal:

[Tell us] as an Asian-American, can the GOP win over that growing minority group by addressing the systemic racism they face because of Democrat-dominated universities’ admissions policies?

I think you’d be a good president, but I don’t think you can win. Shouldn’t you agree to come on board with someone up here on stage who might win and agree to be his/her HHS secretary?

Rick Santorum:

You lost your Senate seat in Pennsylvania back in 2006, meaning you have failed in every election campaign since 2000. Why is this time different?

My country is falling apart and, like most conservatives, that’s my No. 1 priority. Why should I vote for you and re-fight the gay marriage battle that we’ve already decisively lost instead of saving our Constitution from these leftist creeps?

Donald Trump:

Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun watching you make the GOP establishment wince by raising subjects like illegal alien thugs that the elite wants hushed up. We’ve had some laughs. But if you are elected president, you will be the commander-in-chief. This is a no gotcha question – I led soldiers for 27 years, so this is personal to me and to millions of conservatives whose sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers serve. Can you give me one good reason why you are worthy of our trust to lead and to safeguard the lives of the incredible men and women of our armed forces?

I don’t have a follow-up to that question, because at the end of the day, no other question really matters.

Yes, an avatar of vengeance – that’s what America needs now.