Democracy. Democracy. We’re All for Democracy!

Communists, socialists, and fascists, as well as the usual American political suspects, Democrats and Republicans, have all advocated, and today still advocate, democracy.
 
The notion of a “soviet,” let me point out, was a locally elected communist council or committee, common in the USSR. Similar “elections” occurred in Maoist China. In World War II, the German people were “advised” to vote for the Nazi Party. And elections were also held in Mussolini’s Italy.*
 
Then, there are the “democratic socialists,” who seek to vote socialism into power. The problem with these “democrats,” as F. A. Hayek pointed out in 1944 (chap. 10), is that coercion, sometimes severe coercion, is required to implement the democrats’ policies, and lacking the will to coerce its unwilling citizens, ruthless dictators step in to put the Garden of Eden called socialism into practice.
 
The amount of blather today spoken and written about democracy approaches infinity. The word “blather,” according to the unabridged dictionary, means “to talk [or write] foolishly or nonsensically.” Somehow that word doesn’t seem accurate, and perhaps it is too kind. How about BS? Which means to talk or write in a way that sounds good to others, while not knowing or caring about the facts. You know, “Facts don’t matter, so I’ll just BS my way through.”
 
In today’s political context, BS is Goebbelsian propaganda. Say it loud and say it a lot, said Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief. After a while, even though there may be no factual basis for the blather—I mean, BS—uncritical readers and listeners will begin to believe it.**
 
I could go on but probably should stop here to talk about the real (accurate, objective) meaning of democracy.
 
Fundamentally, democracy means unlimited majority rule, and entails voting that the king’s subjects in the days of monarchy were not allowed to do. The empowerment that voting gave citizens was a significant appeal to the classical liberals.
 
In ancient Greece and Rome, there was voting, but no concept of rights. Citizens, meaning adult males, did possess certain legal protections. So, in 399 BC, Socrates, as an adult male citizen of Athens, was entitled to a trial after being accused of impiety and corruption of the youth. Conviction and condemnation to death was by majority vote.
 
Women, children, slaves, and resident aliens possessed no such protections.
 
The Greeks and Romans, as well as the founding fathers of the United States, viewed democracy as a form of tyranny—dictatorship of the many, as opposed to a dictatorship of the one or few. The many, as the founding fathers also believed, quickly degenerates into factions vying for power.
 
“Direct democracy,” a term bandied about sometimes today, means everyone votes on every issue and delegate in the government, which is impossible in any sizeable country, though the state of California attempts it every election with its nearly infinite list of propositions that clutter the ballot.
 
The original US form of government was a constitutional republic, a considerably limited authority constrained by a Bill of Rights. The House of Representatives, one from each district, was and still is elected by the citizens of those districts, but the Senate was elected or chosen by the respective state legislatures. This provided a balance of power between the national government and the states.
 
The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1913 at the insistence of the early progressives, established the election of senators by statewide plebiscite, making most of the federal government popularly elected. Only the election of president, via the electoral college, retains a small semblance of the original balance of powers.
 
The Bill of Rights prohibits the government (and criminals) from taking certain actions. Most importantly, it prevents the majority from voting away our rights. The problem today is that blather, or rather BS, reigns supreme in discussions of rights. Does anyone in public life know what the concept means? No, they don’t care. They only say what sounds good.
 
Rights are freedoms of action, that is, the freedom to take any action I choose to sustain and enhance my life, which includes the acquisition, use, and disposal of property, without being coerced one way or another by the government (or by a criminal), dealing with others through voluntary cooperation. “One way or another” means the government cannot force me to do what I do not want to do, such as get a vaccine or serve in the military, or force a woman to get an abortion. Nor can it forcibly prevent me from doing what I do want to do, such as raise my prices or increase the water pressure in my shower, or forcibly prevent a woman from getting an abortion.
 
Freedoms of action also especially include speaking and writing as I see fit, such as criticizing the government, providing one understands the presuppositions and complications I discussed last month.
 
Today’s “democracy” is in fact an oligarchy of unelected bureaucrats, many of whom are totalitarians both in spirit and practice. The system has also been described as “government by lobby,” because big businesses spend enormous amounts of money to influence congress and the bureaucrats to pass laws and regulatory rules in favor of the lobbyists.
 
Our de facto system is fascism: nominal—meaning "in name only"—private ownership of business and personal property, as well as of each of our lives, but extensive government regulation and control of it all. The system is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship, ruled by the despotic elites in power. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out (esp. chap. 1 and 2), any mixed system, unless corrected, must move inexorably to full dictatorship, a system we came close to enduring over the past five years.
 
Sometimes, one will hear the words “liberal democracy” or “constitutional democracy,” but the meaning of both depends on what is understood as “liberal” and “constitutional.” If, respectively, classical liberalism and the US Bill of Rights are meant by the adjectives, they are accurate. Voting is then used essentially to select new leaders thus ensuring a peaceful transition of power.
 
“Democratic republic” is also heard. When used and understood as Thomas Jefferson understood it—voting under a constitution and bill of rights to select leaders—it is accurate. If not, it is likely more BS.
 
Today, the blather and BS are so common in political discussions that the concept of democracy becomes whatever the speaker wants it to mean, which makes it a buzzword to scare the ignorant and unthinking into going along with the speaker and to disparage his or her opponents.
 
Democracy in fact is a form of dictatorship.
 
 
* Aristotle tells us (1295a11–12) that barbarians even elected their despotic monarchs.
 
** On BS, think of your local used car sales rep, no offense intended to those reps who shoot straight and are honest. There are many.

Intellectual Cowardice and Pre-Censorship as the Expressway to Dictatorship

Ayn Rand identified the four characteristics of dictatorship: “one-party rule—executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of private property—and censorship.”*

The United States today is not there—yet. But it has elements of all four characteristics and speculation in some quarters says that a November election loss of our current president could fast-track the path to dictatorship, especially if one-party rule becomes established at the national level.

We have not had executions for political offenses, though we do have and have had considerable prosecutorial misconduct, including threats and actual use of solitary confinement along with pressure on witnesses not just to “sing,” to use Alan Dershowitz’s choice words (1; Applying Principles, pp. 68-70), but also to “compose.” Nationalization and expropriation? Some, but most occurs insidiously through creeping, and in some cases galloping, controls and regulations.

Censorship is the most concerning issue, because, as Rand puts it, “censorship is the tombstone of a free country.” Freedom of speech,” she says, is “the dividing line . . . between a ‘mixed economy’ and dictatorship” (“The Fascist New Frontier,” loc. 1684, The Ayn Rand Column.)

Today, we are working our way through that dividing line with a series of preludes to censorship, or pre-censorship actions, that are strictly speaking not censorship. Freedom of speech presupposes property rights, which means property owners have the right to deny what you may write or say on their property. Censorship is always an action by the government to silence dissent. Though the Federal Communications Commission exercises extensive control over the broadcast media, the print media are still relatively untouched by the government. Yes, exceptions can be found, but we are all still predominantly free to publish and speak freely on our own or as agreed to by a publisher or venue operator.

The most overt form of censorship would be an official bureau of the government, perhaps at the cabinet level and perhaps called “The Department of Truth and Social Justice,” that dictates what can and cannot be written or spoken. The preludes to censorship less overtly involve government and in some cases are performed entirely by private individuals or organizations. Preludes to censorship are more devious, as their goal is to soften citizens up and get them to accept the overt form.

There are several degrees of pre-censorship.

The most glaring, because it involves the legal system, is nonobjective law. An abundance of vague and overly broad laws gives us what I call dictatorship by excessive law. Such laws are what enabled Stalin’s chief of secret police to boast, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime” (Applying Principles, pp. 68-70; 2). When thousands of such laws are on the books, anyone can be arrested for anything, making it especially easy to silence dissent. (I include judicial gag orders in this category, because of the arbitrariness of many judges.) Nonobjective law plays no small part in today’s federal prosecutorial misconduct.

Nonobjective law in turn supports scapegoating, the ancient practice of blaming one person or one group of people for the flaws and mistakes of ruling elites who thereby can claim moral superiority. Nonobjective law makes it easier then to legalize and justify purges and pogroms.

Both nonobjective law and scapegoating, as Ayn Rand points out, are required to sustain a dictatorship. “In Soviet Russia,” says Rand, “the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.” And it still is business people, though some are promoting and funding the enemies of capitalism and the country’s march to dictatorship. Fools that they are, they don’t seem to believe, or know about, Lenin’s warning: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

But today’s scapegoats are also “unwoke” whites, Asians, and, unfortunately, again, Jews (not to mention any black person who rejects “wokeness.”)

Publicly funded educational institutions are a second form of pre-censorship, as they are obligated, but woefully fail, to uphold the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The same applies to private institutions that have “freedom of speech” clauses in their charters. These institutions that fail to protect free speech on their campuses, by default, are performing a role similar to that of government censor. Fortunately, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is waging major legal battles to defend teachers and students and their First Amendment rights.

Other pre-censorship actions silence dissent without any apparent government intervention. They appear to be, and often are, actions of private individuals or organizations to exclude opinions with which they do not agree. Though difficult to find, government interventions may be present in some cases.

Social media exclusion is one such prelude that enjoys a government intervention. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act labels “interactive computer service[s]” forums for “political discourse” and, at the same time, exempts them from the legal liabilities of publishers. Yet some of these “forums” also perform the functions of publishers by canceling political discourse they do not agree with. This, critics point out, allows social media to be both private forums and de facto government censors.

Two additional preludes to censorship were identified by Philosopher Bertrand Russell. He states that “legal penalties [government censorship] are . . . the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts.” The two greater obstacles, though I would dispute Russell’s ranking (government censorship can silence all dissent), are “economic penalties and distortion of evidence.”

Economic penalties restrict or prevent writers, speakers, and teachers from writing, speaking, and teaching—ultimately from earning a living. This includes today’s politically correct cancel culture and disinvitations, not to mention the deliberate refusal to acknowledge alternative points of view, along with character assassinations, that is, guilt by accusation or outright lies to have writers, speakers, and teachers removed from their professions. Character assassination under Marx and Engels, as Ludwig von Mises points out, became literal assassination under Lenin.

Distortion of evidence, Russell’s second obstacle, refers to smears and Goebbelsian propaganda (1, 2). Smears are the first half of the ad hominem fallacy—“Mr. X is immoral,” in infinite variations—with no pretensions to a follow-up argument that Mr. X’s ideas are false. In our postmodern age, reason, logic, and facts and truth are out. Instead, Goebbelsian yelping is all that is left and the yelping, unfortunately, as philosopher Stephen Hicks pointed out (1, p. 200; Applying Principles, pp. 33-36), performs the role of Iago to the Enlightenment’s Othello, namely to inject doubt into modernity’s values and “let that doubt work like a slow poison.”

In a proposed preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell’s 1945 USSR allegory, Orwell described a number of Goebbelsian preludes to censorship that were used in England during World War II. The preface, however, titled “The Freedom of the Press,” was vetoed by his publisher and was not known to exist until 1972.

Libels, double standards, suppression of criticism, and flagrant sins of omission during Orwell’s time all came from the press and intellectuals, not the UK government’s Ministry of Information. Their goal was not to offend Stalinist Russia. “In this country,” Orwell writes, “intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.” Fear of public opinion, he says, is motivator of the press’s and intellectuals’ cowardice.

“Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin,” continues Orwell, “but it is quite safe to attack Churchill . . . . Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” Orwell called it “veiled censorship” when the government was not involved.

Orwell concludes, “These people [the press, intellectuals, and all the other gutless compromisers] don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.”

Final word about our current plight: “non-negotiable demands” left over from the 1960s and transported to the present, threats, intimidation, riots, arson, bombings, and other forms of violence, whether performed by private individuals and organizations or with the sanction of government officials, constitute totalitarian attempts to stage a putsch, the result of which would be the end of free speech and the establishment of dictatorship.

* The recent shutdown mania has given us a taste of dictatorship, stemming mostly from our Progressive mayors and governors. “Airtight,” the working title of Ayn Rand’s first novel We the Living, is an apt description of what it feels like under dictatorship. Rand’s main character shouts at her communist antagonist (p. 385): “You've driven us all into an iron cellar and you've closed all doors, and you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst!” (“Sensory deprivation” is how prisoners have described their time locked away.)

Goebbelsian Propaganda and the Rawlsian Reductio to the Rathole—In Our Current Case, Criminals and Terrorists

In a previous post, I argued that our current culture has become “Goebbelsian,” meaning that a torrent of hyperbole, BS (Applying Principles, pp. 307-09), half-truths, and outright lies, best described as smears, has become the norm in communication. It is a way of life for much of our press and many politicians.

Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. His strategy was to tell a big lie, then say it loud and a lot, until the ignorant populace begins to believe it. The contemporary strategy, since rational people often do not believe the first lie, is to switch to a second lie, and then to another, and then another.

Switching generates confusion and a disbelief in the possibility of truth. The postmoderns, of course, have been teaching for many years that reason, logic, and truth are out, leaving each of us with our own “narratives,” which I prefer to call fictions.

Facts, to most of these “thought” leaders, don’t matter.

Yesterday, the “lethality” of a coronavirus was the message of the day. Today, it is “defund the police.” Tomorrow it will be something else. An underlying theme for decades has been “America’s systemic racism to protect white privilege.” As with Goebbels, today’s leftist propaganda is agenda driven—to destroy capitalism and now to remove or defeat our current president (who represents capitalism). But I want to identify a more fundamental point driving the agenda: the ethics of altruism, the doctrine of self-sacrifice.

“Compassion” is the buzzword used to intimidate and silence anyone who may object to this leftist propaganda. “You’re not compassionate toward the poor, the black, women, LGBTQ’s, etc.” Why? “Because you can’t feel what they feel. You enjoy white (rich, male, straight) privilege.”

The problem with this ruse is that too many rational people (non-leftists) don’t buy the alleged discrimination the propagandists say these groups of people (Marxist classes) are still experiencing in the year 2020. Rational people also therefore do not buy the guilt trip that is being laid on them.

The left now has to go further down the rathole to find additional “classes”—criminals and terrorists—to feel compassion for. This goes beyond societal status to blatant immorality and injustice, stretching the rational person’s credulity. (A rathole, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a seemingly bottomless or unfillable hole.” Leftists who wear the  environmentalist hat have moved further down to the unhuman and inanimate: trees and rocks that we must feel compassion for. Have we hit bottom yet?)

If you object? “Well, it’s obvious you have no compassion! We must have compassion for the least well off and that includes illegal aliens and nonviolent criminals.” Looting and burning buildings? “That’s just property. We have to understand the looters’ plight.”*

Where does this come from?? It comes from the epistemological requirement of consistency and the ethical and political “maximin” principle of Harvard philosopher John Rawls.

The doctrine of self-sacrifice means to give up a higher value to a lower or non-value. As I wrote in Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 43-44):

Self-sacrifice means, for example, the pursuit of a career to please one’s parents instead of the career one truly loves and wants. It means marrying a person one does not love—again, to please those “significant others” who may disapprove of your choice’s religion, social class, race, or ethnicity. It means doing your job because it’s your duty, not because you enjoy it. It means giving birth to a child you do not want and enslaving yourself to a mistake or accident that occurred when you were young.

According to altruism, all of these actions are moral, making you virtuous. To be consistent, it also means you must care about and give up your values for the sake of those who are less well off, even if the sacrifice drags you down to their level. That is the ultimate goal of altruism and it is the goal and meaning of Rawls’ maximin principle.**

“Maximin” means to maximize the minimum. It does not mean to raise the least well off up to the level of those who are in a better situation. It means, if necessary, according to Rawls, to drag those in the middle and upper social regions down to the level of the lower. This would then make society truly just—socially just—and equal, that is, egalitarian. Rawls states (p. 227):

All inequalities should be arranged for the advantage for the most unfortunate even if some inequalities are not to the advantage of those in the middle positions.

It is not just a redistribution of wealth, but also of social position. The poor are not just to be given some of the wealthy’s money, but also their status.

This is Marxism and Marx’s updated determinism. The fundamental assumption is that all social and economic positions in society are dealt to each of us at birth, but some, those in the higher positions, acquired additional status and wealth by stealing from the poor and downtrodden. Such people, whether bourgeoisie or white, straight males or capitalists must be punished to rightly achieve justice.

In today’s world, the worst off “poor” are not those who live in slums, but those who have been prevented from coming to this country or who loot and destroy property. The least advantaged, when the altruist premise is pushed to its most consistent extreme, are illegals and criminals—and terrorists.

Sacrificing everything we have worked for and earned is the ultimate giving up of higher values for the sake of lesser or non-values.

As I wrote in 2016, the reductio of bureaucracy (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21) is the concentration camp. Because, as Victor Frankl wrote about his experience in such a camp, “the list had to be correct.” Totalitarian societies are massive bureaucracies and the camps are just one more bureau.

So similarly, the reductio of altruism is the sacrifice we must all make to criminals and terrorists (and trees and rocks).

Says who? The left. The preaching of sacrifices is how they seek and, if not stopped, gain power.

Ayn Rand warned us: “It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”

Rand also taught us that the smallest minority on earth is the individual, not groups or Marxist classes (or trees or rocks). This means, simply, we should all be advocates and promoters of philosophical individualism! This also means we each can then work hard and strive to lift ourselves up beyond our “original (Rawlsian) positions.”

Our current president, incidentally, is not an altruist, which is why he is so hated. He does not want to sacrifice anyone’s interest, including our national interests, to anyone else. He in fact wants every individual to be able to lift him- or herself up to as high a level as possible!


* One synonym of compassion is pity and one definition of pity is “a somewhat disdainful or contemptuous feeling of regret over the condition of one viewed by the speaker as in some way inferior or reprehensible.” An appropriate description of leftist condescension.

** Rawls apparently did not like the maximin designation, since he saw it as coming from rational choice theory. He does, however, spend several pages discussing it in his major work, A Theory of Justice (chap. III, sec. 26). The words have become associated with his theory.

On the Path to Dictatorship: Why Our Current President Must be Reelected

Democratic socialists have always paved the way for brutal totalitarian dictators, historically and logically. Our current president is the only person standing between us and such a dictatorship. Here are my reasons why.

Democratic socialists, as Hayek taught us (1, p. 158; 2), don’t have the guts to enforce their coercive policies. Dictators do, with blood. “Armed robbery and murder” is how George Reisman (part I) describes the means of establishing and maintaining a socialist society. This is true historically wherever socialism has been implemented and by logical necessity of the initiated coercion the socialists aim to impose on citizens.

“Progressivism” is the Left’s euphemism for democratic socialism (and sometimes communism). It is a specter, to use Marx’s word, that has haunted American culture and political life since the 1890’s (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13). Today, its coercive policies are nakedly explicit.

Socialism is not just government ownership of the means of production, which the Left certainly is seeking, but it is also, more fundamentally and menacingly, government ownership of you, and all of us, the citizens. Taking our guns, so we can’t defend ourselves, and shutting down free speech, so we can’t criticize the dictators and propose radically different ideas, are just the first steps.

Government ownership of you is what total control means and that is what produces the totalitarian state. (And fascism is a form of socialism that only differs superficially.) Here is Ludwig von Mises on the path to socialism and how its acolytes are treated along the way:

As soon as a socialist deviated an inch from the orthodox creed, Marx and Engels attacked him furiously, ridiculed and insulted him, represented him as a scoundrel and a wicked and corrupt monster. After Engels' death the office of supreme arbiter of what is and what is not correct Marxism devolved upon Karl Kautsky [Marxist philosopher and theoretician].

Sound familiar? Just substitute today’s versions of the post-moderns’ political correctness for Marxism. The goal is the same, to silence dissent. Mises continues:

In 1917 it passed into the hands of Lenin and became a function of the chief of the Soviet government. While Marx, Engels, and Kautsky had to content themselves with assassinating the character of their opponents, Lenin and Stalin could assassinate them physically” (Theory and History, pp. 131-32).

Assassinations and gulags are the end—the dead end—of socialism, that is, unless you happen to be one of the elites who lives well, that is, again, unless you offend the wrong person and end up with a bullet between the eyes.

The list of past and present socialist assassins is lengthy: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, and Maduro. For 130 years, Progressives have been moving us ever so inexorably closer to that end.

Our current president, and his constituency, seem to know this, at least implicitly, if not in some respects, explicitly. The Left is attacking and eroding the American sense of life. The president and his constituency represent it.

The dishonest blather—and “blather” is too kind a word to describe the babblingly vicious attacks made on our president—whether about his alleged “rude,” “crude, or “mannerless” words and behavior or his alleged dishonesty, are the Left’s projection of what they have done for 130 years and are doing in spades today. Our president may have rough edges and speak bluntly, which makes him transparent, but the Left talks out of both sides of their mouths and holds hearings in basement star chambers.

The Left, however, does rightly feel legitimate fears that the president is out to destroy their fiefdoms. The “good ‘ol boy” networks of lobbyists, the unelected deep state, and corrupt politicians are what he accurately calls “the swamp.” The mixed economy, after all, is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship. Freedom requires dismantling these Machiavellian strongholds.*

It is absurd to say that our current president would establish a dictatorship. That is the Left’s Goebbelsian smear campaign. So what if he sometimes falls back on ad hominem attacks? The Left’s smears are nonstop and far worse, stemming from their updated Marxian polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-10; 2) that celebrates relativism and the collapse of reason, logic, and Enlightenment values.

So what if the president talks nicely to dictators? Seriously? How do you conduct a negotiation by saying to your opposite, “You’re evil! Now, let’s talk.” The essence of good negotiation is sticking to principles, especially the principle of national self-interest, something our president has practiced far more consistently than his predecessors. He refuses to sacrifice himself to others and our nation to other countries.

And so what if the president is not an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism? Seriously again? That is a reason not to vote for him?

He is proud to be an advocate of capitalism as he understands it. He is proudly self-interested—for himself and for both the nation and his constituents. He is proud to be rich and wants everyone else to become rich. He is proudly and vehemently opposed to socialism and any kind of leveling of society to its lowest common denominator.

I did vote libertarian in 2016 because I thought the Republican candidate was “too socialistic” and that my California vote was a useless throwaway, but I immediately changed my mind when I saw the putsch mentality and fervent hatred take over political discussion. I have since written some twenty blog posts touching on political issues and essentially defending our current president. I plan to vote Republican next November!

Would a winning Democratic candidate in 2020 really establish a dictatorship? Probably not, because the American sense of life is still strong enough to provide pushback against the worst trying to rise to the top. But in twenty, forty, or sixty years?

The American sense of life must be articulated explicitly to the electorate. Our current president, with his confident selfishness and equally confident condemnation of the swamp are good starts.


* And then there are the Pravdas and Izvestias that whine and cry when the president describes them as “enemies of the people,” which they are. If they had any guts or integrity, they would be upholding the principles of a free society and writing factual stories about the Left—a Left that would surely shut them down as soon as acquiring power or attach them to the government. On the dead end of an unelected deep state, see my 2016 post, “The Reductio of Bureaucracy” (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21), where I argue that the final product of bureaucratic management is to be found in the gulags of totalitarian dictatorship.

Naïveté, Gutlessness, and Concessions: On the Anatomy of Compromise

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” This is the motto of the left and I quoted it in an earlier post.

Its meaning? Say and do whatever will work to achieve power. Cloak your words and actions in “democracy” or, as in today’s “anything goes” cultural atmosphere, call anyone who disagrees with you a racist or fascist or, perhaps worst of all, someone who is deplorably lacking in compassion and, of course, is selfish. When one issue fails to work, move on to the next, with relentless energy.

In our Goebbelsian culture facts don’t matter. Truth and objectivity are out.

BS (Applying Principles, pp. 307-09) is the accepted method of communication, which means: say what sounds good and true to advance your agenda, not what is good and true.

How do we oppose this leftist juggernaut and why do the leftists seem to have so much energy? The answer to the second question, aside from their envy-ridden and hatred-driven motivation, is that the leftists’ most important value is politics and the drive for power and control. The rest of us have lives and careers beyond politics.*

Opposing the leftist juggernaut, in answer to the first question, is more challenging and requires, of course, thorough knowledge to answer any arguments the left may put forth, though intellectual argument today is rare. It even more importantly requires realism not to be naïve in the face of their pretended sincerity, and courage to stand fast against their onslaught. It requires the refusal to compromise our principles.

Insincerity needs to be called out as such, not swallowed as its opposite and taken seriously. Fabricated accusations of all kinds are rampant today and need to be named and condemned with moral indignation, as we would do to any nonpolitical friend or acquaintance who lied to or BS’d us.

Why so much insincerity? It’s built into leftist theory: Marx’s rejection of a universal Aristotelian logic (polylogism, Applying Principles, pp. 309-10), updated today as postmodern group identity theory, and Marx’s premise that anyone who is wealthy, especially business people and their companies, stole their wealth from the group currently held up as having been exploited. No one who is wealthy or a capitalist deserves truth or objectivity, even if such virtues were possible.

To take these leftists seriously makes us vulnerable to compromising our principles. When we compromise, the left moves forward with greater and greater confidence, because they do not compromise. Their greater consistency is precisely what today has moved them further and further left, perhaps too far, having underestimated the “deplorables” of middle America.

Ayn Rand (in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, chap. 14) has provided an interesting “anatomy of compromise” to help us understand what we must and must not do in debates. She suggests three rules (paraphrased): (1) when two people or groups hold the same basic principles, the more consistent wins, (2) when two people or groups collaborate, the more evil or irrational wins, and (3) when opposite principles are clearly defined, the more rational wins, but when hidden or evaded, the more irrational wins.

All three can be seen operating in debates about or with the left. Indeed, the rules have been present and operating in US politics for many decades. The right (conservatives and Republicans), by “me-tooing” and often outdoing the left with leftist policies, are the biggest compromisers.** Both sides accept altruism and self-sacrifice as the correct ethics and both sides accept the use of initiated coercion by the government to violate individual rights as the proper method of governing society.

Let’s look at these premises and apply Rand’s rules. The left is far more consistent (rule one), which is why they are winning. The left wants full (totalitarian) governmental control. The right makes concessions by trying to uphold a mixture of freedom and control, that is, the “mixed economy.”

The right is, and has been for decades, collaborating with the left by granting them sincerity and apologizing for them by saying, “they mean well” (rule two). But they don’t.

And the right is foolish when it thinks the concept of rights used by both sides means the same thing (rule three). Rights to conservatives and Republicans usually means individual rights, but to the left it means group identity. In accordance with rule three, this difference is hidden and evaded. It should be exposed for what it is: group privilege to take wealth away from those who have earned it.

The worst premise accepted by the right is that of altruism and self-sacrifice as the proper ethics of a free society. The left also accepts altruism, but is quite clear about its meaning (rule one): everyone must sacrifice to the state; everyone, especially the well-off, must pay higher and higher taxes so their wealth may be redistributed to the groups that are allegedly less well-off and allegedly have been victimized by those who are wealthy; and the United States must sacrifice itself and its wealth to all other countries in the world, especially those in the so-called third world.

To collaborate with the left by saying, “we are just as compassionate [altruistic] as you are” is a disastrous trap. The left simply responds by saying, “No, you’re not, because we want to do this, this, and this,” that is, move further and further left. Those on the right, as a result, often end up saying nothing, as unfortunately was demonstrated by many congressional conservatives and Republicans over the past two years (rule two).

To fight the leftist juggernaut, conservatives and Republicans must endorse rational self-interest and reject any form of self-sacrifice as a valid morality. They must then explain it clearly and openly (rule three).

Naïveté, gutlessness, and concessions and compromise are not the path to maintaining the freedom and prosperity of this country. The left wants to tear it down. Giving in will only hasten the process.

What is slowing this destruction is the sense of life of our current president and his constituents, the “deplorables” of middle America. As I have written before, sense of life is an emotion, but emotion is not enough to defend the American way of life and Western civilization. Strong, articulate intellectual arguments are needed, as well as realism and courage to stand up to the left.


* There is an analogy between the political and criminal personalities, and no doubt some in politics exhibit a criminal element, because they relish the coercion and control of others. “Take my crime away, and you take my world away,” is what one offender said to Stanton Samenow. Replace the word “crime” with “politics” and you have one explanation of the leftist’s motivation and energy.

** The press and business need to be mentioned. Many journalists blow with the wind and today that direction is to the left. They are not introspective to identify their hidden biases, or, in some (many?) cases, are explicit in their biases and therefore are complicit with the left. And contrary to their pretensions, courage is not a virtue of most of the press. Nor is it of most business people, especially those who cave to the email blasts threatening them with boycotts unless they remove advertising from certain cable broadcasters. Granted that business people are busy running businesses, they need to understand that they are the primary targets of leftist attacks. It would be nice if they showed some spine.

On the Worst—and Best—Rising to the Top

When initiated coercion is legalized, it attracts those who are willing to use it.*

Those who are more willing to use legalized, initiated coercion than those who are hesitant will advance faster in the system. Eventually, the more willing rise to the top. The more willing, then, use the initiated coercion against those they have bypassed and anyone else who gets in their way.

This in essence, though not his words, is the identification made by F. A. Hayek in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom (chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top”).

The identification explains how and why an interventionist, increasingly bureaucratized government becomes a dictatorship.

The way Hayek put it is that “democratic statesmen” expect citizens to approve of their coercive policies peacefully through discussion and majority vote. As this does not work, and leads to chaos, those with “lower moral and intellectual standards” step in to take over. They appeal to the “docile and gullible,” uniting them with a “hatred of an enemy” and “envy of the better off.”

A casualty along the way is language, meaning the rise of Goebbelsian propaganda, with the word “liberty” being the first to go, or rather, turned on its head, Orwellian fashion, into its opposite.

By “democratic statesmen,” Hayek means the democratic socialists who thought they could avoid a Marxist violent revolution by voting their brand of initiated coercion into power. Instead, they paved the way for the Lenins, Stalins, Mussolinis, and Hitlers of the twentieth century.

The “docile and gullible” in today’s political climate are the patsies of the socialist/fascist left. They are those alleged victims who in reality are beneficiaries and opportunists of our entitlement culture. They are the ones who clamor for coerced handouts and privileges in the name of reparations for past discrimination and in the form of protections and other initiated coercions against the hated enemies, their alleged current persecutors.

The “hated enemies” of today have congealed around several targets. Historically, ever since the rise of the early Progressives from their democratic socialist beginnings, and continuing in the present, the favorite Marxist whipping boy has always been, and still is, big business—“America’s Persecuted Minority,” as Ayn Rand so aptly put it.

Other hated targets include white straight males and, of course, our current president, and anyone who dares to disagree with the socialist/fascist left’s mantra.

Envy of those “better off” targets is the motivation of our contemporary “democratic statesmen” and their “docile and gullible” followers.

Envy—not a self-confident, self-responsible, and independent psychology.

The way, indeed, is being paved for a modern-day . . . well, who knows what.

In contrast to the upward mobility of the worst in government, the most competent and able, self-responsible, and independent individuals—the best—rise to the top in free-market businesses.

When ability is recognized and rewarded, as in a private, profit-making business in a totally free market, which means where there are no interfering regulations imposed as a result of initiated coercion, the most competent at identifying what will improve human life and most able to deliver created goods and services to their customers will advance.

In business, competence and ability are rewarded. In a bureaucratized government, willingness to develop new laws and regulatory rules and the desire to execute them, which means more opportunities to coerce, is the criterion of advancement.

In business, the criterion and means of success, and therefore the means to high profits to sustain and grow the business, is customer satisfaction, that is, making products better than the competition to meet the objective needs (the requirements for an improved life) and wants (optional tastes) of the customer.

The day to day work, whether by employee or entrepreneur, entails a myriad of detailed communications, both outside the company, with customers and suppliers, and within the company, to employees in the various departments necessary to run the business. All of this “myriad detail,” then, must be coordinated to produce and deliver the product in a timely, need- and want-satisfying manner.

Those who possess the greatest ability to communicate with others and to motivate them in a positive way, and who can retain the greatest detail, which includes surveying the company for means of improvement and, especially, the market for opportunities, will be the ones to advance.

Today, however, we do not have the kind of freedom I have described above. Today, we live in a “mixed economy,” which means a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

Business people today are harassed by thousands of regulations—legalized, initiated coercion—that deflect attention from the proper operation of their companies.

As a result, the incentives become mixed. Some incentive of customer satisfaction remains, but much of the time today is spent on compliance with the regulations, many of which conflict with customer satisfaction.

Increased prices is the most obvious conflict, but reduced supply and elimination of some products from the line also follow the increased regulation.

In heavily regulated industries, the “best” who rise to the top are likely to be the ones who are good at working with regulators, complying with the rules. In such industries, the business has become so bureaucratized that it operates much like a government bureau—meaning incompetent and indifferent to customer needs and wants.

It’s not uncommon for “successful” bureaucrats in these businesses to join government agencies to become regulators themselves and administrators of legalized, initiated coercion.

This is where we are today. Only time will tell how far the socialist/fascist left pushes us.


* “Legalized, initiated coercion” is the pernicious opposite of the constitutionally valid and rights-based self-defensive use of force.

Our Goebbelsian Culture and the Soviet Minders Who Claim to Protect Us

A smear, according to Merriam-Webster’s unabridged is “a deliberate and usually unsubstantiated charge or accusation intended to foment distrust or hatred against the person or organization so charged.”

As a logical fallacy, it is one-half of ad hominem. The fallacy runs as follows: “Mr. X is immoral. Therefore, his argument is false.” Today’s smear merchants, to use Sharyl Attkisson’s term, specialize in using the first sentence, embellished and sensationalized in varied ways, and omit any pretense of talking about logical argument.

In a world where facts don’t matter, our culture has become Goebbelsian. (See also (Applying Principles, pp. 293-95, 307-15)

Attkisson’s book The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What you Think, and How You Vote cites Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda from 1933-45, as one of the pioneers of smear-merchantry. The Gobbelsian method, in Attkisson’s words, says: “Tell a big lie. Focus and repeat—until the audience recites it in their sleep” (p. 12).

Smear merchants are unprincipled promoters who work for the highest bidder, and they have worked on both sides of the political aisle, but the difference today is that in the last twenty to twenty-five years that Attkisson chronicles, there are more “useful innocents” on the progressive Left who fan the flames of the smear.*

The fanners, says Attkisson, are the mainstream press, reporters eager for hot stories with legs, fed to them by the promoters and reproduced wholesale with little investigation on their part. The reporters, of course, are oblivious (or hostile) to the concept of objectivity in journalism and their own biased premises guiding the sensationalized slurs.

How do the smear merchants work? First, they funnel millions of dollars into nonprofit organizations that pretend to be unbiased watchdogs and protectors of the “public good.” (Words like “free” or “free society” are no longer used.) Next, they find influential targets to destroy, targets who are considered enemies of the “public good” (which means political correctness).

The organization assigns one Nazi- or Soviet-style “minder” (my term, not Attkisson’s) to read, listen to, or watch every word of the target, sitting in wait for the tiniest slipup, though the slip does not have to be actual. It may only be apparent, but once the smear merchants do their work, the audience will see it as actual.**

The slip, or alleged slip, is posted on the internet and distributed to hundreds of sympathetic members of the press who will then magnify and sensationalize it and express unforgiveable outrage, demanding not just groveling apologies but removal of the target from his or her influential post.

Part of the smear technique that is new in today’s world of the internet is the immediate use of social media and email. Media Matters, the most notorious and effective of these organizations, uses an algorithm and a small number of operatives to send thousands of social media messages and emails that appear to come from thousands of different people from all over the country. They all, of course, express the same outrage as the press.

The death blow for the target is thousands of emails sent to advertisers, who seldom have the spine to stand up to these kinds of assaults or the will or resources to verify the assertions. Advertisers then join the cabal for removal.

This is how Don Imus was removed from CBS radio and Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly were removed from Fox television. Sean Hannity was attacked in the same way, but he was prepared and has survived.

Imus, for example, made his name making shockingly offensive remarks as humor about a wide variety of people all over the political spectrum. The last straw for the Left were racial comments made in jest by him and his producer.

Beck, in a Media Matters campaign funded by wealthy Leftist George Soros, was accused of potentially inciting violence, domestic terrorism, and recklessly endangering innocent lives. O’Reilly was smeared for unverified charges of sexual harassment.

Hannity fought back loudly and at length on his television show and threatened to sue for slander and libel, which is what is necessary to defeat the smear merchants.

Joseph Goebels reportedly said, “A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” This is the essential modus operandi of the smear merchants.

What happens if someone from the other side of the aisle commits a slip? Nothing. Attkisson lists seven such actual, not apparent, slipups—double standards, she calls them. One slip was dismissed simply as a “lame attempt at humor” (pp. 52-53). Everything thereafter was right with the world.


* I begrudgingly use the kinder words of Ludwig von Mises. Mises used the words to describe naïve, alleged classical liberals who flirted with and made concessions to the communists. “Useful idiots,” my preferred choice, were words attributed to Lenin, apparently mistakenly, though Lenin had many such idiots to swallow and distribute his propaganda. Attkisson just calls the innocents “friendlies in the media.”

** “Tracker” is what the organizations call their minders. When the target commits a verboten slip, or pretended slip, many more trackers may be assigned to gather ammunition for the kill.