Looking for the "Big Win" - Progressives vs. Conservatives

However beautiful the strategy,
you should occasionally look at
the result - Winston Churchill

TRIGGER WARNING

I posted the Churchill quote the other day and got an immediate response from a friend who like to debunk my quotations that offend some people on the left. I'm not sure whether he objected to it being Churchill who said it or that Winnie suggested that results might be a valid way to evaluate whether or not your "beautiful strategy" is working or not.

Anyway he shot back, "And the conservative agenda. The war on drugs: screaming success, right? Prohibition: big win, right? Trickle-down economics: now that was a real winner!"

My left-leaning buddies like to taunt us conservatives with our supposed failures like playground bullies in second grade with their thumbs in their ears and their fingers flapping, going "Nanny, nanny boo boo! As though shouting talking points at us is an actual argument. I've talked here before about the Satanic propaganda system. In the Garden the serpent started off with a lie assumed to be truth because he said it was so. "Thou shalt not surely die!" Because he said it with authority, Eve didn't question that part of the argument, setting her up for the second part, "Thou shalt be like gods!" She believed the second lie because she accepted that the first lie was general knowledge (everybody knows....) and assumed that it was therefore true. 

You know intellectually, of course, that saying something was a failure doesn't make it so and nanny boo-boo isn't proof that your premise is correct. Emotionally, however, your instinct to belong to the herd makes such statements, however false they might be. FEEL right. If you can get past the feeling right bit, you may discover that the truth is somewhat different than the herd believes. Remember the members of the herd believe that if they follow the running butt in front of them they'll be okay. They believe this right up until they run off the cliff hot on the heels of their fellow cattle.

So let's examine the assumptions about "the big win" we have failed to get.

The Failure of Prohibition:  

Pre-Prohibition family fun

Everybody, even Seventh day Adventists whose grandparents and great grandparents fought for and voted for Prohibition, now think that Prohibition failed because mobsters used it as a way to commit crimes and make money.  Well Prohibition may have been repealed, and criminals committed crimes, but that doesn't mean Prohibition failed. America's booze-soaked culture prior to prohibition had gotten to such a point that families with small children served whiskey at breakfast like we serve orange juice today. Most people don't remember this, but it was common for kids 8-10 years old to drink wine and beer in pre-Prohibition America. Early childhood alcohol consumption was considered normal. A little white lightnin' in a baby bottle was well-known as a way to quiet a fractious child.

There are disinformation sites on the Internet that say Prohibition increased alcohol consumption. These are pressing a propaganda message says that prohibiting a thing makes it more desirable. Has pornography become less attractive by making it more available? These heavily massaged statistics are a lot of baloney, propagated by people who wanted easy access to booze. But, at the same time, here are some stats about what was going on at the time of Prohibition.

• Wife beating and lack of family support decreased 82%
• Drunkenness decreased 55.3%
• Assault decreased 53.1%
• Vagrancy decreased 52.8%
• Disorderly conduct decreased 51.5%
• Delinquency decreased 50.0%
• Deaths due to cirrhosis decreased 50.0%
• The number of inmates in jails and prisons decreased 75%, and
  many correctional institutions were closed entirely
• General domestic complaints decreased by two-thirds
• County hospital death rates were historically low
• Alcohol became almost unavailable
• Prostitution decreased
• The national crime rate (excluding Chicago) declined 38%; in Chicago, the crime rate declined 25% (despite the best efforts of Al Capone, the O'Banions, the Genna Brothers and Bugs Moran)
• Savings accounts tripled
• Real estate values increased dramatically, due to home improvements
• Families became better clothed
• Attendence at churches and schools became more regular
• Factory job attendance and job performance greatly increased
• Demand for services at welfare missions decreased by half

America's alcohol-fueled culture was causing the dissolution of families, rampant alcoholism, economic ruin and misery. What prohibition actually accomplished was to reset the way the American culture looked at alcohol. Thanks to prohibition alcohol came to be viewed as a vice by American mainstream culture. Instead of tacit approval of drinking, Americans were reset to a standard disapproval of drinking, especially around kids. Instead of embracing alcohol, after prohibition, Americans merely tolerated it. AND the rates of alcoholism which dropped dramatically during prohibition, never have come back to pre-Prohibition levels. America as a nation, in effect spent a generation in rehab kicking the habit during Prohibition. So Prohibition was actually a BIG WIN. We are a far more productive and sober nation than we were before Prohibition.

The Failed Drug War:  

Now that the far left and right have banded together to use the so-called failure of Prohibition as an excuse to shut down the war on illegal drugs, now we get to see if the progressive's are right. Will making drugs legal and stopping the racist persecution of the poor, the potheads, the junkies and their suppliers, want to give up drugs. Will illegal hallucinogenic drugs will lose their fascination for teenagers. Will we make big tax dollars on the sale of legal drugs once the stigma is removed. I have looked at the early numbers and it looks like we're headed for a BIG LOSE.

The Failure of Trickle Down Economics:

Ronald Reagan's trickle down economics policy, though sabotaged at every turn by Democrat dominated Congresses, still managed to kick off the longest sustained economic uptick in history. Bill Clinton was smart enough to get out of the way of the Republican Congress during his administration long enough to allow the economy to blow through a slight recession during the Bush 40 administration. So how did government's attempted management of the economy under Obama and Democrats go? Well, we've just begun to emerge from the longest recession since the debacle of the Great Depression as extended and deepened under FDR. Even liberal economists are now admitting that FDR's New Deal government management only extended the nation' misery.

So yeah! They were all big winners.~  (sarcasm alert in case you missed it)

Progressivism's "Big Win":

Mussolini as "Atlas in front of Rockefeller Center.

Early progressive socialism - In the US our first big progressive president after Teddy Roosevelt dabbled in it, was Woodrow Wilson, Democrat. Wilson furthered the federal government's racism and put us in the middle of a bloody war he'd sworn he wouldn't get us into. Early progressive heroes of US progressives included the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and Adolph Hitler (the artist carved what looked like Mussolini's head on the body of a sculpture of "Atlas" at Radio City Music Hall in 1937. US progressives paid tribute to the Italian fascist along with Stalin and even Hitler. FDR sent staff members to visit the facist nations during the 30s hoping to learn "how they recovered so quickly from the depression and their own economic miseries. FDR came away with the idea that direct government control of economies was how to stop the Depression. All he really succeeded in doing is prolonging the Depression until he had to go to war against his fascist role models in 1941.

Then there came the Middle Ages of progressive collectivism - 176 million deaths by execution, starvation and torture under Chairman Mao. Ukrainian Kulottes were deliberately starved in millions under "Uncle" Joe Stalin to eliminate the middle class and tens of millions more went to the Soviet gulags and Siberian work camps (the collectivist version of slavery). More recently, two million were murdered and untold numbers lost their lives fleeing in small boats from the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam. Pol Pot slaughtered millions in the Cambodian killing fields. Socialists like Robert Mugabe and Idi Amin in Africa, Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela destroyed their countries economically and slaughtered their citizens in further millions in the name of the progressive Worker's Paradises that collectivism/socialism was supposed to create.

Even bastardized versions of the progressive gospel in which, for a time, capitalism supported socialism, proved inherently unstable and collapsed or are collapsing of their own weight. (see Denmark, Sweden, Greece and the rest of the EU) And yet people cling to the same old Marxist ideas, renaming it things like progressivism, communitarianism, or social democracy. Redefining old words and inventing new ones, they always hang on to the same failed idea that an elite bunch of self-proclaimed smart people (in N. Korea they call them "Dear Leaders") can save us all from ourselves.

I don't see a single "big win" in all the long history of the "progressive" movement's search for a way to create a man-made paradise. The only "win" I can see is that they successfully placed black folk once again in thrall to their Democrat masters using Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty as cover. The condition of black people is apparently so bad that multi-millionaire NFL players are taking a knee in protest. If I were a Democrat, that's a result I wouldn't want to look at either.

As it turns out only God can create a paradise and before He can do that, He has to convince human beings that the whole sin thing inevitably ends up in death and misery. Thus He has allowed us to destroy ourselves trying to do build alternative paradises and, as Old Blue Eyes sang it, "We did it ouuuuuuuuur way!" Letting little Festus fall flat on his face is sometimes the only way a parent can teach a child and that a child can learn that he is not omnipotent and immortal. It's probably the only way God can convince the human race that we aren't God and that we cannot do what He can. God, like a long-suffering parent has to let us fall on our collective faces. He is allowing His errant children to learn by experience that we don't have the right stuff to create paradises on our own hook.

Learning the hard way, though, can be very very painful.  Much better to learn something and then not repeat your earlier mistakes. As someone wise, no one knows exactly who, once wrote, "To repeat the same thing over and over hoping for a different outcome is, by definition, insanity." Seems there's a lot of that going around these days.

© 2017 by Tom King