What are Liberals Afraid Of?

 

What are Liberals Afraid Of?

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) Sept. 24, 2022

            Because conservatives are prone to stand in the gap and yell “Stop!” to foolish notions, some liberals have raised the question, “What are conservatives afraid of?” First of all, one would display serious ignorance to argue that Thucydides, Cicero, William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Rush Limbaugh, Candace Owens, Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, and Thomas Sowell were afraid of anything. Of course six of these are old dead White men and one is an old dead White woman, but the others – all Blacks – are still alive, still conservative, and still unafraid to assert their conservative principles. I suspect their fearlessness has rubbed off on those who admire and appreciate them.

            To the contrary, it is the liberal mind that harbors fear and spreads its tentacles everywhere. I say “the liberal mind” rather than name names because I don’t want to offend any of my liberal friends. When liberals get offended they punch the pause button in order to stroke their offendedness which means that meaningful debate is aborted. Consider the following fears that modern liberals cannot seem to conquer (not classical liberals who stood strong in debate and were often persuasive, but today’s liberals who shout “offensive” or “fascist” at everyone with whom they disagree).

            Liberals are afraid of laughter. Perhaps they don’t laugh because they believe in the perfectibility of man but don’t see much perfection anywhere. Why do the conservatives on Fox and Newsmax laugh and enjoy their work while the liberals on CNN and MSNBC are so humorless, solemn, and angry? I’m very concerned about CNN’s Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer. These two men need some friends. So do their guests. Their sadness is understandable, however. LBJ’s Great Society did not produce a great society. His War on Poverty was a flop. The billionaires and millionaires of America could better address poverty by setting up a private poverty program to which I would gladly contribute. Liberals are sad because government largesse never works. Check out what it has done to poor American families.

            Liberals are afraid of localism. That’s why they don’t like the Constitution too much and want to change it drastically. They abhor the Tenth Amendment which draws the line on what the federal government can do but which has been disregarded by Congress for decades. Liberals simply love big government. To them localism smacks of uneducated types, local yokels, and deplorables who could never wisely govern themselves. Self-determination has never been as valued by liberals as it has by conservatives.

            Liberals are afraid of narrow interpretations of words and of law. In the spirit and words of their beloved Al Gore they embrace the Constitution as “a dynamic, ever-changing document.” In other words our Constitution doesn’t mean what the Constitution writers meant. It means what contemporary legislators and judges prefer. The Judiciary serves as their natural power base. Therefore, “originalism” and “strict constructionism” have no place in the liberal lexicon and therefore Clarence Thomas is their mortal enemy.

            Liberals – the contemporary ones, remember, but including the older ones who have allowed younger, outrageous liberals to take over – are afraid of expressive religious faith. Regarding such, one of them recently wrote. “Religious views should not – must not – inform public policy.” Dear Lord! Try that on George Washington, John Adams, and all the other Framers plus Abraham Lincoln and a host of others. Argue to an objective, even secular historian that Christianity (a religious “view,” I suppose) particularly the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the New Testament epistles have not informed America’s jurisprudence and common ethic.

            Liberals are also afraid of anything transcendent. Natural order means little to them or else they would recognize the sexual chaos spreading the land and the rank evil of the sexual grooming going on in only a few school systems in America but in many school systems in Canada and Europe. Maybe liberals don’t read newspapers or watch the news as much as they should. Maybe it’s their addiction to National Public Radio, but something makes them skittish about people of faith.

            Liberals are afraid of conservative parents and Donald Trump. This fear makes total sense in the liberal’s overall scheme of things because the family – being a little unit of government with parents being its reasonable leaders and children being their natural subjects/citizens – is the greatest impediment to the socialist/statist dream that lies deep in the liberal mind and heart. Trump, of course, is simply the most effective outlier liberals have ever faced. The man gives them the hibbie-gibbies.

            Finally, liberals fear this year’s midterm election. This fear is rational.

 

Roger Hines

September 22, 2022

Is America an Empire?

  Is America an Empire?

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) Sept. 17, 2022 

            Given the pomp and pageantry associated with the death of Queen Elizabeth II, it’s easy to hold negative feelings about royalty, the children of royalty, and their lifestyle. For instance, most members of royal lines have never worked a day in their lives, or at least not the kind of work that the majority of ordinary Brits and Americans have engaged in. It was the high living of monarchs and their disdain for the working class that led to peasant revolts throughout Europe for centuries.

            To the American mindset, shaped by the ideals of personal liberty and productive labor, monarchy is galling. To a people who venerate the individual as opposed to the state, and who believe in representative democracy, it is galling to read of nations in which a family or families have ruled supreme. The best examples of such are not in England or greater Britain but in Russia and Saudi Arabia. In Russia a royal family ruled the nation for exactly 300 years. The professing Christian Romanovs reigned over the peasantry that constituted 93% of the nation’s population. No wonder Lenin and communism, though their ideas eventually failed, found fertile soil in 1917. Three hundred years of hard peasantry can make a nation try just about anything.

            The same is true for Saudi Arabia. In that oil-rich nation, literally the “land of the Sauds,” the Saud family established an absolute monarchy in 1902 though the family itself emerged in the early 1700s.

            Equally galling is the fact that monarchs around the world have lived and existed on the public dime. For Elizabeth II this is only partially true. According to most sources the Queen received a tax-payer funded sovereign grant each year from the treasury, but she also owned estates and artwork inherited from her father, King George VI, that are worth millions. In 2016 the Sunday Times estimated the queen’s net worth to be 340 million pounds ($442 million). No doubt this figure has grown since then.

            Unlike the Sauds, Elizabeth and her son, the new King Charles III, are constitutional monarchs.  Unlike England prior to the Magna Carta, their duties are performed as heads of state but not heads of government. It might surprise most Americans to know that while Britain essentially gave her empire away, she still maintains a Commonwealth, a loose held group of 14 nations that includes Canada and Australia. These nations are bound by a common language and culture but are in no way subservient to the British crown.

            It’s hard to contradict the argument that the British Empire, before dissolving, exercised soft power upon its subject nations. Wherever her ships sailed and anchored, high culture (education, medicine, pride, inspiring architecture) followed. Who can argue that India, now the world’s largest democracy, or Hong Kong, now a part of China, were not made better places because of the ubiquitous English language and the benevolent rule of monarchs like, say, Elizabeth?

            In 2020 Black Lives Matter protested in several United Kingdom nations. They argued that the UK was as guilty as America of slavery without acknowledging that slavery was abolished there three decades before it was in America.

            If Britain gave the word empire a good name, America has given it an even better one. Yes, America is an empire and has been since 1945. But like Britain, America has not behaved empirically. After crushing Japan, America picked her up. After soundly defeating Germany, America cleaned her up. Empires can do bad things, but good things as well. It was the pulpits of New England that ended slavery in America and the nearly single-handed work of one man, William Wilberforce, who ended slavery in Britain. But it was the British Empire that spent the rest of the 19^th century ending slavery around the world.

            Just who is still the world’s greatest military power today? The greatest economic engine? The most charitable nation on earth? The answer is America. But empires die. Rome did, Britain did, and the Soviet Union did.  Americans should worry about how our behavior in Afghanistan affected our world status (withdrawing without informing our staunchest allies). If we are not concerned about the violence sweeping the nation, we should be. And if we heed the leftist voices who denigrate our nation at every turn, we’re finished.

            It is not a selfish act for either an empire or a small nation to first promote the prosperity of its own people, but the most powerful actor on the world stage must also seek the well-being of other nations. Americans best select for leadership men and women who fully understand this and are fully committed to this noble imperial task.

 

Roger Hines

September 15, 2022   

When Words Lose Their Power … Because of Alteration

When Words Lose Their Power … Because of Alteration

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) Sept. 10/11, 2022

            “What’s in a name? A rose by any name would smell as sweet,” cried Juliet to Romeo. Juliet’s grief was brought on by the fact that her family and Romeo’s family were feuding. She, a Capulet, and Romeo, a Montague, were not allowed to marry because of the feud. Their problem was their names.

            Bill Shakespeare produced this bit of language analysis for us, but American poet Emily Dickinson analyzed words far less dramatically. “Some say a word is dead once it is said,” she wrote. “I say it just begins to live that day.”

            Words can and do live forever, or almost. When my father said to me, “Son, you can’t do anything right,” the words pierced my soul and lived there for eight years. I was fourteen. Although I held the words close, I knew my father didn’t mean what he said. I always did exactly what he asked me to do and in the way he expected. Having bungled a task that caused him much distress, I actually understood his dissatisfaction. Even so, his words lived on.

            Eight years later on the day before my college graduation, I asked my aging father if he still planned to go to the ceremony. My mother had died just four months earlier and my younger brother and I were the only children still at home. Characteristically my father began to rub the back of his neck to ponder my question. Then he said, “Son, I don’t think I can make that long trip after all. You and Carlton go on without me. You know I’m proud of you and you know Mama would be too.” Words can and do cancel other words.

            Words can also flip in meaning. Rhetoric comes to mind. Historically the word has meant “the art of speaking and writing effectively.” Today in most usage the word means hot air as in “The candidate was engaging in rhetoric.” Such pejorative expressions – those that take on negative meaning – are countless. Tyrant once simply meant ruler. Today it means a brutal ruler, thanks to Genghis Khan, Stalin, and others who polluted leadership.  

            Alas, our political lexicon is also undergoing semantic change. The words liberal and conservative are becoming less and less useful to describe our political views. Never-Trumper Republicans and neo-cons are moving so close to liberals they can hardly be called conservatives. Are we, like the Brits with their new “conservative” but former liberal Prime Minister becoming a “uni-party” nation? Not as long as MAGAites and other deplorables stay engaged. Political parties live and die. Heart-felt beliefs live on under one name or another. Does anybody believe the Tea Party is really over? Only its name and leader have changed.

Twenty years ago it would have been accurate to claim that the essence of liberalism is tolerance and that the essence of conservatism is restraint. That was before weasel words took over. Tolerance has been turned on its head. Today’s liberals are the best example of intolerance. Liberals have forsaken their grandparents’ 1960s cry for free speech, now discounting anyone with whom they disagree and canceling history they don’t like. On college campuses liberal students have shouted down conservative speakers for the last eight or nine years, claiming that conservative views make them feel unsafe. Animals have been allowed to run the farm not only in places like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Berkley, but at the University of Texas, University of Missouri, and small colleges everywhere.

 What’s happening is the fulfillment of George Orwell’s prophecy. This British writer, once a democratic socialist, warned Britons and Americans that convoluted language would one day be the favorite tool of politicians to sway thought. Think “reproductive freedom” which really means abortion; “disinformation” which means any idea that varies from the accepted leftist position of the day; “equity” which is the weasel word for the totalitarian trinity of socialism, communism, and fascism; and “postmodernism” which argues that all things including gender are a social construct, not a natural order.

Well, at least my father didn’t use weasel words when I disappointed him. It’s a shame that for eight years I held his words against him. It’s also a shame, and dangerous, that too many citizens are not paying attention to the words being tossed around, and altered, by the liberal establishment: by government, media, corporations, education, medicine; you name it.

Language, like politics, is downstream from culture. If words are the vehicles on which our thoughts ride, we best check out the vehicles of every person or institution who wants our vote or our children.

 

Roger Hines

September 8, 2022  

Colleges, Biden, and Labor Day

Colleges, Biden, and Labor Day

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) Sept. 3/4, 2022

            One morning during my eighth grade year in school I handed my first period math teacher, Coach Durward Smith, a note from my parents. It explained why I had been absent the day before. In my mother’s barely legible handwriting it read, “Please excuse Roger’s absence yesterday. We had to keep him home to help dig sweet potatoes.”

            Coach Smith, an affable guy, read the note then looked up at me and said, "Hold your hands out.” After I nervously obeyed, he added, “Well, I see you really did dig sweet potatoes.” He was referring to the grimy sticky spots of sweet potato juice that had clung to my hands in spite of all efforts to wash them off.

            Recalling this occasion recently, I began to ponder the status of the work ethic today. Are Americans still hard workers? Have we become so educated that we now look down on labor and laborers? Are we teaching our children that work of whatever stripe is honorable and beneficial? How many members of Congress have never held a private sector job? Since our President has been in office since age 27, what could he know about the private sector or common labor?

            For anyone who wonders how we got from Plymouth Rock to President Biden’s loan forgiveness notions, consider the fact that when the Pilgrims landed in the New World in 1620, it was work or die, meaning produce your own food or die. Walmart had not yet reached the shores of New England. Frozen or processed foods had not been thought of. It would be 155 years before the sturdy settlers had a national government and 312 years before that government would  implement its first pervasive welfare system. Amenities we take for granted today being obviously unthinkable at the time, work was required of men, women, and children alike. Besides, did their Bible not declare that “he who will not work will not eat?”

            Nothing has undermined the rugged American work ethic as much as higher education. I remember when the “Get thee to college” chant began. Actually it began in the late 50’s. Which makes me wonder: Is the fact that so many product labels read “Made in China” a result of our half-a-century emphasis on higher education and our de-emphasis of labor skills? What happened to Industrial Arts?

            Has anyone noticed that when it comes to self-importance, acquiring great amounts of money doesn’t really puff people up so much, but education along with its degrees and titles does? When paid “contributors” or other guests on cable news are interviewed from their homes, why do they position themselves in front of their esteemed bookshelves? I would be pleased to see them in front of a barn, beside their lawnmower, or fresh out from under the hood of their car.

Just who are our essential workers today?  They are not college graduates. They are primarily truck drivers, electricians, plumbers, automotive mechanics, and farmers, to name only a few. The average age of plumbers in the United States today is 60, which should tell us something about our labor force and what we are not doing about it.

Truth is the nation is currently run by the Intelligentsia, college-educated people who have never worked on a car, driven a truck, plowed a field, or dug sweet potatoes. Very few political leaders are former surveyors like Washington, or store owners like Truman. A background in government, absent of any experience in labor or entrepreneurship, can turn one into a socialist who thinks government planning and government subsidy are and should be the cure for all ills. Thus, the doofus idea of college loan forgiveness, an idea that has non-college graduates paying the bill for college graduates.

Federal student loans and grants were initially intended to help low-income Americans. They have become what the Wall Street Journal has called “all-you-can-eat entitlements.” And we know why. The current President needs the votes of college kids.

Colleges have more deans than Amazon has delivery trucks. Colleges can profit from taxpayer subsidies without accountability. Their costs, like medical costs, have been out of whack for years. Student loan forgiveness enables colleges, leading them ever closer to the free-flowing spigot of government largesse.

So Monday is Labor Day, a holiday made official by Congress in 1894, the year of my hard laboring father’s birth. Now that is a significant co-incidence. My father hated for any of us children to miss school, but everybody’s gotta eat and sweet potatoes rot easily if not gathered soon.

Come Monday, my thoughts will turn to deplorable people, men and women like my parents who still keep things running. Happy Labor Day.

 

Roger Hines

September 1, 2022