THE LEFT AND CHARLIE KIRK

In 'Language and Human Development' (1), I argued that the child from age 2 to about 12 is in an information absorption state, or in more modern jargon, is programmable. Even though, as I then argued, the adolescent teenager becomes somewhat rebellious and a know-it-all, what he or she thinks they know is mostly what has been programmed during the learning period. In mature homogeneous societies this programming of the religious and cultural mores, and the general knowledge of the society, plays a major role in its stability.

Unfortunately, this programmable aspect of the human child plays a negative role in the current battle between the political Left and Western Civilization. In a democracy the majority of voters determine what the government does. Since by definition a half of all voters are below the median in intelligence, co opting the support of the lower half can be a winning strategy for controlling the government. This is the bread and butter of the Left, which these days is the Democrat Party.

The founders of our government knew this and alluded to 'Qualifications' to vote for the only direct representatives of the people – the House of Representatives. Presumably they hoped that even the lower half of the qualified voters would be intelligent and knowledgeable enough to make reasonable choices for their representatives. But inexplicably they left it up to the States to determine these 'Qualifications' for even the Federal elections. This is the Achilles Heel of our Constitution. In the last two centuries Constitutional Amendments have not only resulted in the Senate and even the Presidency determined by the popular vote (with a minor peculiarity resulting from the Electoral College), but in addition the States have eliminated any semblance of qualifications for voting. The current crop of elected Democrat politicians leave little doubt that, without 'Qualifications', the lower half of the electorate is not competent to vote for their government, or even their representatives.

The Left's Marxist movement is now over a century old. Its strategy at first was to co-opt the blue-collar workers by infiltrating the labor unions. This was less successful than they had hoped, perhaps because Western Civilization workers were reluctant to cede total control to the government. It helped that the rate of collapse of communist experiments across the globe woke up too many 'low information voters' (Rush Limbaugh's favorite term).

During the mid 20^th century the success of several despots in co-opting the youth – Hitler's Brown Shirts, Mao's Red Guard, etc. – led the Left to change their focus to the educational systems. This approach has the advantage that, as described above, the child is innately programmable until puberty, and that programming is almost impossible to undo.

Using the educational systems to program the youth is almost perfect, but a problem remained. The nuclear family can, if aware of the problem, block the ideological programming of the schools. Thus the Left launched a parallel effort to augment the takeover of the educational systems with the destruction of the nuclear family. Feminism pushed the married female to get a job and let professional baby sitters raise the young. This effectively blocked most efforts by the family to interfere with the programming of the young by the Left. The degree of support of socialism by the younger generations is testimony to the effectiveness of the Left's current game plan.

Charlie Kirk was a serious threat to the Left's indoctrination of the young. Charlie had to go. However, assassinating Charlie may have been the wrong strategy for nullifying his efforts. By making him a martyr they have lost significantly more ground with the young than they have gained. Fortunately, intelligence has never been the long suit of the Left. 

 (1)   Musings and Rants - 1985-2016,  Marcus Everett,   CKCPC3 Publishing, Nowata OK 

Democracy is Not a Panacea

Back in the early 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev visited the United States, presumably to learn why we seemed to be much more prosperous than his communist dictatorship. If I remember correctly, he was shown through a few stores and was 'blown away' by the cornucopia of goods available to the US consumer. He returned to the USSR with a determination to try to apply what he had seen to improving the lot of the Russian people. The problem was, he went away with the wrong impression.

Gorbachev mistakenly believed that the success of the US and the rest of the West was due to the fact that they were 'Democracies'. Apparently this was in part due to an overwhelming majority of Westerners also believing the same, so much so that leaders such as George W. Bush have tried to export Democracy to the Third World, mostly with disastrous results. Gorbachev returned to the USSR with the intent of moving toward a Socialist Democracy. This had in part the positive result of the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union, but did not lead to the economic results he had hoped for.

What Gorbachev and the others do not seem to appreciate is that it is Capitalism and the Free Market (CFM) that is the secret behind the overflowing shelves of the Walmarts and the like of the Western World. Exactly which form of government is most compatible with CFM is certainly debatable, and may yet to be determined, but Democracy has been shown to be only MORE compatible with CFM than Communism, at least in the short run. China's economic success as a result of embracing more CFM in spite of retaining a totalitarian government illustrates my point. However, the degree to which China's rulers interfere with the Free Market may yet be its undoing.

The point to be made here is that Democracy is not the source of wealth and prosperity, nor is it even a guarantee of such that comes with CFM. In fact, pure Democracy may tend to destroy CFM in that allowing universal suffrage seems to engender anti-capitalist government. The envy of the lower classes of those that succeed in CFM leads to legislation and regulation that ultimately stifles economic activity. The egocentric nature of the individual that, because of Adam Smith's "invisible hand", produces the benefits of Free Markets is very detrimental to the same when lumped together to produce governmental laws and regulations. It is not unrelated that the West, as it has become more democratic, has also become more socialistic.

Austrian economic theory points out that economic control of production by a governmental body is a guarantee of disaster because, as Ludwig Von Mises noted, it cannot solve the problem of what he termed 'economic calculation'; i.e., it fails to properly ascertain what products to produce in what quantities. In the extreme case of such control as was the case in the Communist USSR, the result was disastrous. Unwanted goods piled up while the populace stood in lines for bread.

It is very unfortunate that, as the Western Democracies become more and more socialistic, the economic failures are blamed on Capitalism and Free Markets. This is the basic flaw with Democracy, in that when the mob is in control they will never admit that the problems they create are their own doing, and only total collapse will end the errors.

The Electoral College and the election of 2016

Once again the Election of the President of the United States by the Electoral College is the subject of much whining and criticism by the losers. As with the 2000 Election, the Republicans won the Electoral College but with the official popular vote won by the Democrats. I say official, since the possibility of voting fraud in many large urban areas leaves much doubt as to the validity of the popular total. In any case, in spite of massive Democrat wins in the urban areas, the fact that the overwhelming majority of suburban to rural counties in the country went Republican helps explain the Republican win of the Electoral College.

Which is why the Founders created the Electoral College in the first place. At the time, there were not so many large urban areas, but the fear was that the more populous states would, in a popular voting system, deny any real representation in the Federal Government to the smaller states. By creating the Electoral College system, the smaller states would have a somewhat better chance of having a say in the choosing of a President.

Furthermore, the method of choosing Electors specified by Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution leaves it up to the State Governments. To wit: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress...". Thus, as with the original Senate, the President was to answer more to the Sovereign States than to the people as a whole. Although the Senate as the voice of the States has been nullified by the Seventeenth Amendment and made a second House of Representatives, the State governments still have the authority to determine the selection of their Electors for the Electoral College. In practice this has been usurped by Party Politics in most states to a winner-take-all selection of Electors by the Party winning a plurality of the popular vote in the State.

The current implementation of the Electoral College is not in violation of the Constitution, although it is probably not in keeping with the intent of the Founders. I assume that each State has given its blessing in law or otherwise to the current situation. In spite of the fact that the Founders went to considerable ends to give the Sovereign States a meaningful voice in the Federal Government, they have ceded it over the years to the very plebiscite democracy that the Founders abhorred. The Electoral College could easily be the next victim to this tendency by being eliminated altogether.

As usual this author feels obliged, after complaining about the situation, to offer a suggestion for a modest improvement. Since the original Constitutional verbiage cited above is still in effect, the State Legislatures could direct that the Elector authorized by each Congressional District be appointed by the Party having a plurality in that District, with the two Electors granted to each state by virtue of their Senators being appointed by the Party having a plurality in the State, as is currently the case. Apparently this is the system used in two of the Fifty States: Maine and Nebraska. Even better might be to have the State Legislature appoint their two 'at large' Electors to recover a little of the representation of the Sovereign States that the Founders envisioned. Something like this would at least keep the States with large urban areas from denying any representation in the Electoral College to their rural areas. It also would be a minor step toward returning to the intent of the Founders.

Women and Big Government

Women are naturally pro big government. Since they cannot physically prevail against the larger male, they must rely on convincing one or more males to defend them. By passing laws that they think will require males to defend them, they see big government as a form of legal jiu-jitsu. Before Women's Suffrage women had to convince their male acquaintances of the necessity of such laws in spite of the more powerful and dangerous government the laws imply. Once they obtained the vote, it became obvious that they no longer needed the acquiescence of the males - they could, as in jiu-jitsu, use the male's strength against himself, so to speak. Thus we see that, after a century of women voting, government has grown into a nanny state - providing the female with not only protection against physical harm, but guaranteeing food, shelter, health care and anything else her little heart desires. The Welfare State is the direct result of Women's Suffrage. In fact, it has evolved to the point that, in the welfare class, the presence of the male is actually discouraged.

The historic flaw in democracy is the Tyranny of the Majority, i.e., the tendency of 51% of the electorate voting to have the remaining 49% for dinner (and not as guests!). Since there is naturally a slight majority of females in the population, there is a ready-made majority to exploit. The Left has done just that, with the constant drumbeat of more promised security, more freebies, more equality, etc., that appeal to the supposedly underdog females. The fact that, in almost every election, the female vote is significantly in favor of more government proves the point.

Western Civilization was built by males, and over centuries ceded many rights and protections to women. But ceding control will almost certainly be its downfall.

Democracy and Demagoguery

As has been said by many others, and covered in several 'Rants', democracy does not work. Whether any government 'works' in the sense of being a stable and contributory adjunct to a prosperous and free society remains to be proven. A more focused question here is whether any representative government can work in the above sense, and the original objective of the Founders of the United States Government had hoped that they had achieved such a goal. We are close to definitively proving them to be wrong.

It is fairly obvious to this author that a fully enfranchised citizenry of a representative government system such as ours is doomed at the outset. Maybe in a pure democracy (everyone voting on every piece of legislation) the majority would mostly avoid shooting themselves in the foot on taxes and similar matters, but then again there is the spectre of the 'tyranny of the majority' in which any identifiable minority faction will be exploited to benefit the majority. In the representative version, there will always be a majority - poorer, dumber, more ignorant or just envious - that are vulnerable to demagoguery. This has been the evolution of the situation in the U.S., particularly as we have embraced universal suffrage over the last century or more.

Over the last century the Democrat Political Party has utilized demagoguery to gain and remain in power a large percentage of the time. Class Warfare, 'something for nothing', free lunches, you name it, have won the game for them over and over. The Republican Pary has adhered to fiscal and constitutional principles more closely, and has suffered defeat for their efforts more often than not. As a Maryland politician said when a reporter questioned her for telling one group one thing and another group the opposite, "I tell them what they want to hear". Demagoguery works!

The problem in the Republican Party in the 2016 Presidential race is that, contrary to the norm, a bonafide demagogue is in the running. And although it seems that somewhat less than a majority of registered Republicans are taken by the demagoguery, a sufficient plurality is gullible enough to possibly make him the Republican candidate in November. At that point we would have a Democrat demagogue against a Republican demagogue, and could very likely prove the thesis of my first paragraph. A century of democratically elected representation has brought us to the brink of implosion, and one more demagogue may very well be the final straw.

It is possible that one of the several principled Republican candidates can pull off both the nomination and the election, but the odds are against it. As the pilot of the PSA jet said seconds before it plowed into a San Diego neighborhood in 1978, "Brace yourself".

Returning to the abstract question of whether any variation of representative government can work, it doesn't seem too hopeful. Perhaps conditioning suffrage on demonstrating with some sort of standardized competency exam a rudimentary knowledge of the functions of government would help, but then the inevitable question is: who defines the exam? It seems all too likely that all forms of government are vulnerable to ultimate demise - monarchies and dictatorships to mortality and representative versions to demagoguery.  Sad.