Thursday, July 18, 2013

Progressivism is a puzzle. You're supposed to put the pieces together and connect the dots.

In "The New Democracy", by Walter Weyl, he writes the following: (page 166)
Nor do all these revolutionists comprehend that they are allies. One group in the community strives to end the exploitation of child labor. Other groups seek to extend and improve education, to combat tuberculosis, to reform housing conditions, to secure direct primaries, to obtain the referendum, to punish force and fraud at the polls, to secure governmental inspection of foods, to regulate railroad rates, to limit the issue of stocks and bonds of corporations doing an interstate business, to change the character and incidence of taxation, to protect and recreate our forests, to reserve and conserve our mines, to improve the lot of the farmer, to build up trade-unions among workingmen, to Americanize incoming immigrants, to humanize prisons and penal laws, to protect the community against penury caused by old age, accident, sickness, and invalidity, to prevent congestion in cities, to divert to the public a larger share of the unearned increment, to accomplish a thousand other results for the general welfare. Every day new projects are launched for political, industrial, and social amelioration, and below the level of the present lie the greater projects of the future. Reform is piecemeal and yet rapid. It is carried along divergent lines by people holding separate interests, and yet it moves towards a common end. It combines into a general movement toward a new democracy.

Walter Lippmann shows us how this is done.(in his day) This is the first three paragraphs of chapter 3, in Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion:

While censorship and privacy intercept much information at its source, a very much larger body of fact never reaches the whole public at all, or only very slowly. For there are very distinct limits upon the circulation of ideas.

A rough estimate of the effort it takes to reach "everybody" can be had by considering the Government's propaganda during the war. Remembering that the war had run over two years and a half before America entered it, that millions upon millions of printed pages had been circulated and untold speeches had been delivered, let us turn to Mr. Creel's account of his fight "for the minds of men, for the conquest of their convictions" in order that "the gospel of Americanism might be carried to every corner of the globe."1

Mr. Creel had to assemble machinery which included a Division of News that issued, he tells us, more than six thousand releases, had to enlist seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men who delivered at least seven hundred and fifty-five thousand, one hundred and ninety speeches to an aggregate of over three hundred million people. Boy scouts delivered annotated copies of President Wilson's addresses to the householders of America. Fortnightly periodicals were sent to six hundred thousand teachers. Two hundred thousand lantern slides were furnished for illustrated lectures. Fourteen hundred and thirty-eight different designs were turned out for posters, window cards, newspaper advertisements, cartoons, seals and buttons. The chambers of commerce, the churches, fraternal societies, schools, were used as channels of distribution. Yet Mr. Creel's effort, to which I have not begun to do justice, did not include Mr. McAdoo's stupendous organization for the Liberty Loans, nor Mr. Hoover's far reaching propaganda about food, nor the campaigns of the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., Salvation Army, Knights of Columbus, Jewish Welfare Board, not to mention the independent work of patriotic societies, like the League to Enforce Peace, the League of Free Nations Association, the National Security League, nor the activity of the publicity bureaus of the Allies and of the submerged nationalities.

Wow, look at that. Disparate and seemingly "unconnected" groups, all working for a common end. Just like Weyl said they would. What these progressives have achieved is (unfortunately) brilliant. Through their use of "disconnected" groups, they have successfully turned non-progressive people into people working for progressive change. In modern times, the AARP is a great example of this. The key is to make sure people don't figure the game out, as Weyl states:(still page 166)

This revolution, in the very midst of which we are, while believing that we stand firm on a firm earth, is a revolution not of blood and iron, but of votes, judicial decisions, and points of view. It does not smell of gunpowder or the bodies of slain men. It does not involve anything sudden, violent, cataclysmic. Like other revolutions, it is simply a quicker turn of the wheel in the direction in which the wheel is already turning. It is a revolution at once magnificent and commonplace. It is a revolution brought about by and through the common run of men, who abjure heroics, who sleep soundly and make merry, who "talk" politics and prize-fights, who obey alarm clocks, time-tables and a thousand petty but revered social conventions. They do not know that they are revolutionists.

What's dangerous about this is that it takes the term "useful idiot" and abolishes the word "idiot". A lot of the things people end up doing, particularly at many of these non-profit organizations, is hardly idiotic. Brandon Darby's story is a good example of this, because what he was doing down in New Orleans was handing out food and water to people who needed it. It was a relief organization. Where Darby differs from most is that because he was a member of leadership, he got to see the maluse of funds and the more hard-core ideological leanings of the organization. The average person who would only take the water bottles off the truck and hand out the water to people who need it would never have the opportunity to see these things, and would thus never question the organization. They would instead ask questions like this: "Why would anybody demonize an organization that gives water to people who are dehydrated at best, to coming close to dying from thirst at the worst?", not realizing that the organization they are working for is completely corrupt. This is the problem we face, and it demonstrates the "brilliance" of the progressives plots.

They have connected organizations which are seemingly unconnected on the surface. So why shouldn't conservatives connect the unconnected as well? The problem is, they're not unconnected. And any time someone dares to connect them, they get smeared as a conspiracy theorist. Watch what happens any time someone dares to point out what Soros does. As far as anybody is concerned, Soros is a pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow philanthropist. Here he is, the puppetmaster himself, largely re-iterating what Walter Weyl wrote 100 years ago:

When you try to, let’s see, improve society you affect different people and different interests differently and they are not actually commensurate. So you very often have all kinds of unintended adverse consequences. So I had to experiment. And it was a learning process. The first part was this subversive activity, disrupting repressive regimes. That was a lot of fun and that’s actually what got me hooked on this whole enterprise. Seeing what worked in one country, trying it in the other country. It was kind of what developed a matrix in fact that we had, national foundations, and then we had certain specialized activities

It's a matrix(his word), they're not disconnected. I've known this for quite some time as a matter of gut instinct, but back when I wrote this detailing how this coalition of non-profits and other progressive organizations form a sort of invisible government, I hadn't yet found Weyl's writing.

Now, lest someone call me a conspiracy theorist for daring to connect the writings of Weyl and Lippmann, I should probably remind everybody that Lippmann co-founded The New Republic with Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl was TNR's first Editor in Chief. They are connected.

So there you have it. More corrupt progressivism put on display, right from the original sources, from their own history. These are their founding fathers. This is why modern progressives do not want to discuss their own history, and it's why their history is one of the best tools we have at our disposal to push back against them.

http://tinyurl.com/krh6pb6

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting links to these old books. I shall read them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for bringing to the forefront an idea that needs to be said again and again.

    ReplyDelete