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Liberal Frankensteins
From Greece to California, the liberal dream is dead.
by VDH

This Fourth of July, what remains is the Founders� vision of a limited 
government; the idea of a population united by common values, themes, 
and ideas; a republican form of checks-and-balances government to 
prevent demagoguery, factions, and tyranny of the majority; the 
sanctity and autonomy of the nation-state; and individual freedom and 
liberty as protected through the Bill of Rights. Everything after and 
against that has proved a failure.

Indeed, what makes this Fourth different from recent celebrations is 
the ongoing repudiation of almost everything antithetical to the 
Founders� views � the redistributive, all-powerful welfare state, the 
therapeutic arrogance that believes human nature can be altered by an 
omnipotent well-meaning government, the postmodern notion that 
nationhood and borders are pass�, and the utopian idea that war can be 
declared obsolete and the need for defense transcended. From Greece to 
California such dreams are dead.

The European Union is unwinding for two very simple reasons. First, it 
is not a constitutional state, but a loose conglomeration of nations 
run by elites who are not responsible to the people. For decades the 
undemocratic nature of rule from Brussels was masked by politically 
correct edicts on everything from global warming to anti-Americanism. 
But as the money runs out, the elites� fraud becomes impossible to hide.

Second, Mediterranean countries were allowed to cook their books in 
such a way that northwestern European money would continue to be loaned 
to the siesta cultures that had not produced goods and services to 
justify the influx of foreign capital and the attendant lifestyle it 
ensured. Now we are well past any chance that German money can be paid 
back; the only mystery is over the conditions of the default � whether 
slow and incremental, or sudden and cataclysmic � and whether it will 
leave in its wake a downsized EU or no EU at all.

In other words, the notion that platitudinous elites could, by their 
proclaimed virtue, establish a constitutional union without real 
democratic values proved unrealizable. More important still, socialism 
came to an end with fiscal insolvency. This happened, of course, most 
dramatically in southern Europe, where climate and culture conspired to 
hasten its demise; but northern Europeans now realize that they too 
have a rendezvous with a Greek-like reckoning unless they increase 
worker productivity, curb government, prune the power of 
public-employee unions, bring market-based incentives back into the 
workplace, reestablish national sovereignty, raise the retirement age, 
and address the declining demography that is so often the handmaiden of 
socialism. In short, EU elites have done what the half-century-long 
threat of Red Army tanks and missiles never could: destabilize Europe 
to the point of anarchy.

Here in the United States, we await the imposition of Obamacare, 
despite the fact that the public does not want it, the nation cannot 
afford it, politicians regret it, and companies seek exemption from it. 
Our current pace of $1.6 trillion annual deficits, for all the talk of 
Keynesian gymnastics, is unsustainable � and even acknowledged as such 
by those who are most responsible for the latest round of fiscal 
irresponsibility. As we near 50 million Americans on food stamps, 
another year of 9-plus percent unemployment, and the third $1 
trillion�plus budget deficit, even statists are beginning to see that 
statism does not work � a fact brought home not just by the disaster in 
Greece, but also by the growing divide between a successful red-state 
paradigm and California-like blue-state doldrums. What saves the United 
States for now is only the fact that, unlike California, it can print 
money � plus the fact that there is no red-state version of America to 
flee to.

On the immigration front, there will still be some quibbling, but the 
liberal argument for open borders has been lost, both here and in 
Europe. The United States simply cannot afford any longer the $50 
billion that flows to Latin America each year in remittances, coupled 
with multibillion-dollar costs for providing social services to seek 
parity for illegal aliens, in addition to vast new outlays in education 
and criminal justice. California elites swear that a 
multimillion-person community of illegal aliens has nothing to do with 
our near-bottom ranking in public-school math and science scores, but 
privately even the most die-hard unionist teachers confess that it 
does. When Los Angeles has more resident Mexican nationals than do most 
cities in Mexico, and when the liberal paradigm of the salad bowl in 
lieu of the melting pot is into its fifth decade, then it is logical, 
not aberrant, that tens of thousands in the Rose Bowl would not merely 
cheer a Mexican soccer team over a home-team American one 
(understandable, though regrettable, garden-variety ethnic chauvinism), 
but trump that by booing even the mention of the United States.

Either federal law will be enforced and immigration will return to an 
orderly, legal process � where merit, education, and skill sets are 
used as litmus tests for would-be immigrants without regard to ethnic 
or racial background � or else Arizona, New Mexico, and California will 
soon become a dysfunctional region, where one class flees and quite 
another enters, and soon even illegal aliens seek a new, more northern 
border to cross. Open borders, non-assimilation, ethnic separatism, and 
tribalism lead to the Balkans or Rwanda � not, as envisioned, to a 
society patterned after the boutique diversity of the faculty lounge.

The classically tragic notion that deterrence � based on military 
preparation, balance of power, and eternal vigilance � alone prevents 
wars is returning, as the postmodern idea that international good will 
and multilateral policing can ensure world peace has almost sputtered 
to an end. Colonel Qaddafi is not impressed by an indictment from The 
Hague, and so far he is not backing down in the face of the combined 
air power of France and Britain. Qaddafi fears no new Napoleon or 
second Wellington, and he will leave only if the United States, for 
either good or bad reasons, decides to lend Europe the military 
wherewithal to end the Libyan regime.

In the last hundred days, the world has seen not only how weak and 
divided are the European members of NATO, but also how the 
once-celebrated European notion of �soft power� means very little in 
the world of perpetually savage nations. What stops China from carving 
out a new co-prosperity sphere in Asian waters, Russia from 
reconstituting a hegemony over the former Soviet republics, Turkey from 
ending the notion that the Aegean is a Hellenic lake, a new alliance of 
radical Arab states from attacking Israel, a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran 
 from threatening its Jewish and Arab rivals, and North Korea from 
invading the south is only lingering worries over a U.S. military 
response or an American-led alliance of resistance � not international 
sanctions or condemnation, a U.N. decree, an Arab League resolution, an 
International Criminal Court writ, an IMF or World Bank reprimand, a 
lecture from an EU grandee, or the EU rapid response force.

Back home, we have suffered through decades of declining test scores 
and rising teachers� salaries, and we now have a trillion dollars in 
college loan debt, more remediation for incoming college freshmen, 
weaker skills apparent in graduating college seniors, an omnipresent 
-studies curriculum, and a new national dialogue over whether college 
is even worth it � not just in terms of whether college degrees raise 
salaries sufficiently to justify huge loans, but whether the new 
therapeutic race, class, and gender curriculum is antithetical to 
classical liberal arts with their emphasis on reading, written 
expression, math, and science.

Modern university education has achieved the dubious result of turning 
out a self-described sensitive, caring mind that has never been more 
ignorant of the past and the present. The modern therapeutic university 
has managed all at once, with its various �centers,� reduced teaching 
loads, empty faculty research, and legions of new administrators, to 
put tuition costs beyond the reach of most Americans, to spark an 
entire new competing industry of no-frills, private, for-profit 
certificate-granting trade schools, and to end the old idea that a 
student�s B.A. degree was synonymous with competency or a faculty 
member�s Ph.D. with wisdom.

We live in an age in which advocates do not believe in their own 
advocacy: A �planet is doomed� Al Gore refuses to fly economy; a 
statist John Kerry won�t pay taxes on his yacht unless he is caught; an 
anti-war Barack Obama won�t honor the War Powers Act he once deified; 
and the liberal congressional and media establishment will not put 
their children in the D.C. schools that are the reification of their 
own ideology.

In short, the generation that came of age in the 1960s succeeded in 
bringing to life the Frankenstein�s monster it designed in its own 
image � but suddenly it seems terrified of the very thing it created.






-- 
"Without America there is no "Free World"."

The reason that Progressivism-Socialism-Communism always fail, is that you 
eventually run out of other peoples' money.

Obama and the Democrats: continuing the Cloward-Piven "Progressive" 
socialist agenda of borrowing, taxing and insanely spending the country 
into collapse and global socialism.

To be a good democrat, you have to believe that businesses create 
oppression and governments create prosperity.

"The one thing that's being pushed in this country, is the motto: The 
harder I work, the more I owe society. The less I work, the more society 
owes me. We  can't be a great country with that motto." - Charles Payne.

All forced-collectivist societies can be roughly divided between the Makers 
( producers of goods and services ) and the Takers ( moochers and looters 
who get the government to initiate force against the Makers by proxy, to 
supply their alleged needs. )




-- 
"Without America there is no "Free World"."

The reason that Progressivism-Socialism-Communism always fail, is that you 
eventually run out of other peoples' money.

Obama and the Democrats: continuing the Cloward-Piven "Progressive" 
socialist agenda of borrowing, taxing and insanely spending the country 
into collapse and global socialism.

To be a good democrat, you have to believe that businesses create 
oppression and governments create prosperity.

"The one thing that's being pushed in this country, is the motto: The 
harder I work, the more I owe society. The less I work, the more society 
owes me. We  can't be a great country with that motto." - Charles Payne.

All forced-collectivist societies can be roughly divided between the Makers 
( producers of goods and services ) and the Takers ( moochers and looters 
who get the government to initiate force against the Makers by proxy, to 
supply their alleged needs. )