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The Liberal Ideological Complex
h/t InstapunditIn 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the danger of a military-industrial complex. This powerful public-private collaboration, he said, had the potential to exert "unwarranted influence" over America's democratic processes. A half-century later, there are still those on the left who cling to this fear. But it seems that Eisenhower's warning had its intended effect--and perhaps then some. In 1961 defense spending constituted 9.1 percent of the gross domestic product, and there were 2,483,000 uniformed military personnel. Today, defense spending is 3.2 percent of GDP and 1,390,000 men and women serve in the uniformed military. If this behemoth is threatening America's democratic processes, it is not doing so very successfully. There is, however, another interlocking public-private collaboration that is at once more insidious, more powerful, and more straightforwardly partisan: the liberal ideological complex. We do not always see this collaboration so clearly, because we tend to view each aspect of it as unique and not part of a larger picture. We look, for example, at public sector unions as a labor issue. We look at funding for Planned Parenthood through the lens of abortion policy. We look at EPA regulations and grants in terms of global warming and job destruction. And so on and so forth, down to the smallest, most narrowly tailored grant awards of the federal government. Yet in each of these cases, the complex functions in essentially the same way. Federal funds are provided for organizations that carry out liberal policies. In turn, these groups employ like-minded staff and both the leadership and the staff of these groups contribute money, time, and services to the politicians who favor this use of federal funds. This creates a vicious circle in which campaign funds are indirectly skimmed off the top of taxpayer-funded organizations, all in the service of liberal ideology. When progressives helped to replace the spoils system with government by so-called experts, they aimed to professionalize the government. The goal was to put policy decisions into the hands of intelligent and highly trained bureaucrats who would know the interests of Americans better than average Americans did themselves. Here is the basis for the extraordinary willfulness of progressive government, a matter that has been remarked upon frequently. What has been less clearly observed is the effect of progressive government upon the governing class itself. ...While there was perhaps never any such thing as objectivity in governance, the belief that there was kept executive branch actions within certain bounds and restrained partisanship and ideological predispositions. So too did the traditional idea that except for national emergencies and wars, government spending and government revenues should be kept in rough balance. This world is gone. Over the past decades, we have seen the rise of executive branch governance in the service of the liberal ideological state. This kind of governance is marked by four characteristics: (1) a bias toward increasing the size and scope of government across every department and agency, no matter which political party controls the White House or Congress; (2) a nonmilitary executive branch workforce comprised overwhelmingly (though in different degrees in different departments) of liberal officials, who are ideologically disposed to support this growth, and who are no longer representative of the populace as a whole; (3) a broad support system of direct government funding for liberal groups that reinforces the bias toward ever larger and more intrusive government; and (4) the development of a privileged set of rules and rewards for the governing experts (including compensation levels, bonuses, guaranteed job security, defined benefit retirement systems, and a different set of standards by which to measure their own actions as opposed to those of the governed). That's the dragon that Sir Donald will have to take on Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2016-12-19 |
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