Quotulatiousness

April 4, 2026

If we think that “ordinary criticism and disagreement are bullying, then we have an infantilized and feminized culture”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray finds a highly accurate label for the pearl-clutching “elites” who — to a persyn — believe that your words are violence, but their violence (delivered through third parties, of course) is merely emphatic communication to the distasteful lower orders:

Donald Trump is a mean man. He’s a bully!

Oh no SCARY, he’s trying to BULLY the Supreme Court! I wrote at the Federalist this week about the stupidity of this argument — what is he implying he can do to the life-tenured justices, for crying out loud? — but I suspect I undersold the underlying sickness. Adults don’t use the word “bully” to talk about other adults, arguably outside of a few very narrow spaces involving things like domestic violence. It’s a preschool word. The easy recourse to toddler language at the New York Times is a sign of cultural regression. But it’s also a sign of habitual and persistent dishonesty. They’re pretending. I suspect they’ve pretended so much that they’ve forgotten they’re pretending, and the mask has become the face, but at root, they’re pretending.

We have fictional characters like Willie Stark and Frank Underwood because no one on the planet is dumb enough to think that politics is nice. The federal government spends $7 trillion a year, and the lure of that bucket of money brings out a bunch of throatcutters. This is possibly one of the most obvious realities of human existence. Politics is a knife fight. […]

Quite famously, members of Congress who suggested that they would oppose the legislative priorities of President Lyndon Johnson would get phone calls in the middle night from the man himself, waking them up and letting them know that they were dead men. He’s supposed to have said things like, “I’m gonna cut your balls off, you cocksucker”, though it’s not like anyone had a stenographer on the calls to nail the quotes. He was threatening and nasty on all days ending in -y, and got bills passed by, among other things, actually, physically intimidating people who didn’t roll over. He was a leaner. He got in faces, constantly and openly.

You gonna pass my bill [insert string of highly personal threats and profanity], or is your political career over? Pressure, threats, and horsetrading are the default behaviors, the normal stuff. Andrew Jackson got the Indian Removal Act through Congress by handing out government sinecures. The premise that I can take care of you or I can go to war with you, and it’s your choice which one happens is … politics. The make-believe story about Mean Donald Trump bullying the Supreme Court by tweeting at them or sitting in a chair where they could see him is playtime, clutching at Fisher-Price pearls. Somewhat remarkably, Trump appears to bully institutional opponents quite a bit less than the historical norm, and Lisa Murkowski can do whatever she wants without consequence. I am personally calling for Donald Trump to start actually bullying some people who have it coming, but be sure to have a fainting couch ready in the newsroom at Times Square.

Update, 6 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

April 14, 2025

Huế: Battle for the Heart of Vietnam

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Army University Press
Published 22 Nov 2024

The Battle of Huế is known for urban combat, destruction, and anguish. The city of Huế mattered to all the combatant forces. The city and its people paid the price. Interviews with noted subject matter experts Drs. Pierre Asselin, Gregory Daddis, James Willbanks, and Cpt. Wyatt Harper are augmented with archival audio and film, and detailed maps. This documentary places the Battle of Huế within the context of Hanoi’s 1968 Tet Offensive. How North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the United States perceived the Vietnam War in 1967 and 1968 are central to this documentary. Covered are the key moments of the battle — including the People’s Armed Forces of Vietnam (PAVN) and People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) planning and assault on Hue. The responses of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), Vietnam Marine Corps (VNMC), the United States Marine Corps (USMC), and the U.S. Army (USA) are addressed to offer insight into an informative example of urban warfare.

0:02:39 – Why the Tet Offensive
0:10:53 – Why Huế
0:15:53 – Military Decision Making Process | Doctrine
0:26:51 – Warfighting Function | Doctrine
0:27:59 – Paralysis by analysis | Doctrine
0:33:15 – Courses of action | Doctrine
0:38:22 – Weather and operations | Doctrine
0:40:52 – Huế Massacre
0:41:18 – My Lai
0:46:05 – Huế and Modern Warfare

January 24, 2025

The end of “affirmative action” in US government hiring

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Coleman Hughes outlines how the US federal government got into the formal habit of hiring and promoting staff based on things other than ability and merit during the Nixon administration:

Trump’s Executive Order 14171 is titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. It describes how vast swaths of society, including the “Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)”.

In response, Trump has ordered the executive branch and its agencies “to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements”.

That is a lot of preferences and mandates. Trump’s executive order accurately describes the enormousness of the DEI bureaucracy that has arisen in government and private industry to infuse race in hiring, promotion, and training. Take, for example, the virtue-signaling announcements made by big corporations in recent years — such as CBS’s promise that the writers of its television shows would meet a quota of being 40 percent non-white.

And so, we will now see what federal enforcement of a color-blind society looks like. We’ll certainly see how many federal employees were assigned to monitor and enforce DEI — Trump has just demanded they all be laid off.

The most controversial part of this executive order is that it repeals the storied, 60-year-old Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Johnson’s original order mandated that government contractors take “affirmative action” to ensure that employees are hired “without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin”.

The phrase affirmative action, however, has come to have a profoundly different meaning for us than it did during the 1960s civil rights era. Back then, it simply meant that companies had to make an active effort to stop discriminating against blacks, since antiblack discrimination was, in many places, the norm. Only later did the phrase come to be associated with the requirement to actively discriminate in favor of blacks and other minorities.

One of the great ironies of affirmative action is that it was not a Democrat but a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who did more than anyone to enshrine reverse racism at the federal level by establishing racial quotas. According to the Richard Nixon Foundation, “The Nixon administration ended discrimination in companies and labor unions that received federal contracts, and set guidelines and goals for affirmative action hiring for African Americans”. It was called the “Philadelphia Plan” — the city of its origin.

For the first time in American history, private companies had to meet strict numerical targets in order to do business with the federal government. Philadelphia iron trades had to be at least 22 percent non-white by 1973; plumbing trades had to be at least 20 percent non-white by the same year; electrical trades had to be 19 percent non-white, and so forth.

In the intervening decades, this racial spoils system has not only caused grief for countless members of the unfavored races — it has also created incentives for business owners to commit racial fraud, or else to legally restructure so as to be technically “minority-owned”. As far back as 1992, The New York Times reported that such fraud was “a problem everywhere” — for instance, with companies falsely claiming to be 51 percent minority-owned in order to secure government contracts. In a more recent case, a Seattle man sued both the state and federal government, claiming to run a minority-owned business on account of being 4 percent African.

November 30, 2024

QotD: Unrealized promises of a “Great Society”

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Black unemployment, which had been the same as that of whites in the 1950s, from the early 1960s rose above white unemployment. The gap between black and white unemployment widened. Welfare programs funded by presidents Johnson and Nixon expanded rolls to an appalling extent — appalling because welfare fostered a new sense of hopelessness and disenfranchisement among those who received it. “Boy, were we wrong about a guaranteed income!” wrote that most honest of policy makers, Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1978, looking back on a pilot program that had prolonged unemployment rather than met its goal, curtailing joblessness. The “worker versus employer” culture promoted by the unions and tolerated by the automakers suppressed creativity on the plant floor and in executive officers. Detroit built shoddy autos — the whistleblower Ralph Nader was correct when he charged that American cars were not safe. Detroit failed to come up with an automobile to compete with those made by other foreign automakers. Whereas in the 1930s American automakers’ productivity amounted to triple that of their German competitors, by the late 1960s and 1970s, German and Japanese automakers were catching up to it or pulling ahead. In the end the worker benefits that union leaders in their social democratic aspirations extracted from companies rendered the same companies so uncompetitive that employers in our industrial centers lost not merely benefits but jobs themselves. Vibrant centers of industry became “the rust belt”, something to abandon. […] What the 1960s experiment and its 1970s results suggest is that social democratic compromise comes close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy.

Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History, 2020.

October 24, 2024

Did the Media Lose the Vietnam War?

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published Jun 21, 2024

In late April 1975, dramatic images from Saigon are beamed across the world. North Vietnamese troops proclaimed final victory. Just how did the US lose the Vietnam War?
(more…)

September 10, 2024

Why the US Left Vietnam

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published Apr 19, 2024

With violent anti-war protests at home and discipline problems on US bases, President Nixon promises to withdraw American troops from the Vietnam War, but that doesn’t mean an end to the fighting. As US troop numbers drop, the war expands across borders and in the air as more weapons are pumped into the South.
(more…)

June 19, 2024

Why the US Lost the Tet Offensive Despite Beating the NVA

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published Feb 16, 2024

After years of boots on the ground and bloody combat in Vietnam, US officials are publicly confident. The strategy of eliminating the Viet Cong is working. The North Vietnamese communist forces are on their last legs and victory is only a matter of time. Or so they say. But as 1968 and the traditional lunar new year festivities begin, US and South Vietnamese troops find themselves on the receiving end of a formidable North Vietnamese surprise attack: The Tet Offensive.
(more…)

October 23, 2023

QotD: The real meaning of “Watergate”

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was reflecting this week on my brief stint, many years ago, as a newspaperman. It was a job I loved. I signed on not too many years after the Watergate scandal, and journalists were still flush with heroic ideas about themselves. Woodward and Bernstein — and all reporters by extension — had toppled a corrupt presidency and saved the republic and the Constitution from the kind of behind-the-scenes government tyranny dramatized in such thriller films as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.

[…]

Recently, reading Mark Levin’s Unfreedom of the Press, I was reminded that, before reporters went on their great crusade against Richard Nixon, they had overlooked a whole lot of corruption in the Democrat presidents who preceded him.

Levin tells how John F. Kennedy, with the knowledge of his brother and Attorney General Robert, nudged the IRS into auditing conservative groups. With Kennedy’s approval, the FBI was also employed to investigate those the administration disliked, including Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Baines Johnson would later increase the politically motivated auditing and spying. None of this was uncovered until later on.

Ben Bradlee — the editor of the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story — was well aware of his pal Kennedy’s misuse of the tax and investigative agencies. Not only did he not report it, he allowed himself and his paper to be manipulated by information JFK had wrongly obtained.

This totally changes the Watergate narrative. Nixon’s dirty tricks and enemy lists may have been creepy and wrong, but the press exposure of these misdemeanors came after years of ignoring similar and worse malfeasance by Democrat administrations.

That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised — despised in part because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused.

Andrew Klavan, “‘Watergate’ Doesn’t Mean What the Press Thinks It Means: The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised”, The Daily Wire, 2019-08-31.

October 14, 2023

Why Did the Vietnam War Break Out?

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 10 Oct 2023

In 1965, US troops officially landed in Vietnam, but American involvement in the ongoing conflict between the Communist North and the anti-Communist South had started more than a decade earlier. So, why did the US-Vietnam War break out in the first place?
(more…)

May 10, 2021

They don’t make politicians like Lyndon Johnson anymore … thank goodness

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Another of the reader-contributed book reviews at Astral Codex Ten considers the personal history and astounding political career of LBJ, as told by biographer Robert Caro:

2: LBJ’s guide to amassing power

(i) Seduce older men

(Eww, not like that.) LBJ had a gift for becoming a “professional son” to any powerful man. At college, LBJ sat at professors’ feet and stared at them as if they were God’s gift to the educational system. LBJ constantly ran errands for the college president, Prexy Evans, and wrote glowing editorials about him.

LBJ’s fellow students were not amused. One said:

“Words won’t come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty — how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was.”

But this flattery paid off. Evans put LBJ in charge of the financial aid program. Yes, really. And when other students wrote nasty comments about LBJ in the yearbook (e.g. the time he stole the Student Council elections), Evans ordered professors to cut out those pages with razors.

LBJ would repeat this flattery with President (Franklin) Roosevelt, Speaker Rayburn, and Senator Russell.

(ii) Treat your employees like dirt

LBJ wanted his staff to be absolutely loyal, so he could direct them like chess pieces. He found their weak points — their weight, their divorce — and mercilessly taunted them. I’m not going to describe the crude things he did.

Before his marriage, LBJ treated Lady Bird like an angel; once they were married, he treated her like one of his employees.

[…]

(v) Use money in new and exciting ways

LBJ funneled government contracts to Brown & Root, a construction company. In return, they gave his campaign gobs of money. During the 1948 election, two of his campaign staff ate at a cafe and then accidentally left behind a brown paper bag containing $50,000 in cash (more than $500,000 in today’s money). Luckily no one stole it.

Using all of this money, LBJ was able to make the media say whatever he wanted about his opponent, Coke Stevenson. He hired “missionaries” to hang out in bars and spread rumors about Stevenson. Thousands of federal workers also repeated LBJ’s talking points.

(vi) Cheat

But Stevenson was a storybook character, so money couldn’t defeat him. He simply told the people of Texas that he would continue to do the right thing, and they believed him. LBJ had lost the 1941 Senate election because Pappy O’Daniel had cheated better than he did. Now LBJ would cheat, and he would cheat big.

In 1940s Texas, basically every type of election fraud was real: Dead people voting, county bosses writing down whatever numbers they wanted, Mexicans being hired to cross the border and vote, etc. By buying tens of thousands of votes, LBJ was almost able to close the gap between him and Coke Stevenson. That wasn’t enough, so six days after the election, Luis Salas “found” 200 more votes for LBJ, giving him a margin of victory of 0.01%.

September 29, 2020

The Lamprey Party of America

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that we need a modern Thomas Nast to add to the political menagerie of elephants and donkeys:

“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.

A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.

The 19th century political caricaturist and editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) is famous for identifying Republicans as elephants and Democrats as donkeys. He also created the Tammany tiger, and Santa Claus as we know him today.

Mr. Nast was a handsome and clever fellow, a Bavarian immigrant, to whom we all owe a great deal, but I have long thought that more animals need to be added to America’s political menagerie, none of them as wholesome and savory as elephants and donkeys. Lampreys are eel-like fish, sort of vertebrate leeches or underwater vampires, that attach themselves to larger fish with their circular, tooth-lined mouths, hitching a free ride, punching a hole through the legitimate fish’s flesh, and feeding on its blood. They look and feel (I am informed) slimy and disgusting. The freedom movement needs a cartoonist (I can think of one or two) capable of rendering a cartoon lamprey in all of its horrifying malevolence.

What party would be represented by a lamprey? Well, it has gone by several names, and it’s filled with familiar and despicable figures. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, described as “to the left of all Republicans, except Susan Collins, and … Democrat Senator Joe Manchin” is a lamprey, riding along on the Republican party, parasitically sucking its lifeblood, never contributing anything to advance its progress. She voted with Obama a stunning 72.3% of the time. I could say Murkowski is a “never-Trumper”, but she was a lamprey long before the Donald ever came along. My wife Cathy, first made aware of Murkowski’s malevolent role in American politics, exclaimed, “Alaskans! What the hell is wrong with you?”

Another well-known lamprey is Willard “Mitt” Romney, who viciously opposes all of Trump’s undertakings, foreign and domestic, and whose father George was a leader of the cabal in 1964 who betrayed fellow-Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and helped Democrats and the media stab him in the back, electing that murderous gangster Lyndon Baines Johnson. George Romney would have called Barry a “deplorable” if the term had been current back then, for the same reasons the political elites despise President Trump today. They believe only they are fit to determine how to live your life. The delusion seems to be hereditary.

April 12, 2020

QotD: The Gini coefficient

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At least for now, most progressives acknowledge that markets and economic growth are necessary. But progressives in academia contend that growth has proved itself secondary to equality efforts — something to be exploited, rather than appreciated. Not just nationally, but worldwide, policymakers and the press regard the subordination of growth to equality to be a benign practice, as in the recent line in the Indian periodical Mint: a policy aimed at “reducing inequality need not hurt growth.”

The redistributionist impulse has brought to the fore metrics such as the Gini coefficient, named after the ur-redistributor, Corrado Gini, an Italian social scientist who developed an early statistical measure of income distribution a century ago. A society where a single plutocrat earns all the income ranks a pure “1” on the Gini scale; one in which all earnings are perfectly equally distributed, the old Scandinavian ideal, scores a “0” by the Gini test. The Gini Index has been renamed or updated numerous times, but the principle remains the same. Income distribution and redistribution seem so crucial to progressives that French economist Thomas Piketty built an international bestseller around it, the wildly lauded Capital.

Through Gini’s lens, we now rank past eras. Decades in which policy endeavored or managed to even out and equalize earnings — the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt, the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson — score high. Decades where policymakers focused on growth before equality, such as the 1920s, fare poorly. Decades about which social-justice advocates aren’t sure what to say — the 1970s, say — simply drop from the discussion. In the same hierarchy, federal debt moves down as a concern because austerity to reduce debt could hinder redistribution. Lately, advocates of economically progressive history have made taking any position other than theirs a dangerous practice. Academic culture longs to topple the idols of markets, just as it longs to topple statutes of Robert E. Lee.

But progressives have their metrics wrong and their story backward. The geeky Gini metric fails to capture the American economic dynamic: in our country, innovative bursts lead to great wealth, which then moves to the rest of the population. Equality campaigns don’t lead automatically to prosperity; instead, prosperity leads to a higher standard of living and, eventually, in democracies, to greater equality. The late Simon Kuznets, who posited that societies that grow economically eventually become more equal, was right: growth cannot be assumed. Prioritizing equality over markets and growth hurts markets and growth and, most important, the low earners for whom social-justice advocates claim to fight. Government debt matters as well. Those who ring the equality theme so loudly deprive their own constituents, whose goals are usually much more concrete: educational opportunity, homes, better electronics, and, most of all, jobs. Translated into policy, the equality impulse takes our future hostage.

Amity Shlaes, “Growth, Not Equality”, City Journal, 2018-01-21.

March 9, 2020

QotD: The wrong lessons learned from World War II

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Americans learned several misleading lessons from World War II. The first and greatest error was overestimating the effectiveness of military force. World War II — the last conflict in which the world’s great powers went toe-to-toe against each other, with no holds barred — created a new understanding of how wars are fought and won. But wars since then have not fit this paradigm, and many of our subsequent military mistakes came as a result of misapplying World War II’s lessons.

Lyndon Johnson led the country into a massive military commitment in South Vietnam in part because of misplaced faith in what the United States could accomplish by force of arms. The Johnson administration convinced itself that fighting modern wars was a branch of management science, akin to running a large corporation like General Motors, and that America’s military was a versatile instrument that could be dialed up or down to deliver precisely calibrated levels of violence, tailored to meet any foreign policy challenge. World War II also led many Americans to conclude that liberal democracy could be imposed on foreign peoples through the application of what George W. Bush’s administration would later call “shock and awe.”

It turns out that, even in the age of precision weapons, military power is a blunt instrument, ill-suited to nation-building, except in rare circumstances and at great cost. Germany and Japan — our preferred examples — are highly idiosyncratic. Liberal democracy flourished in each only after the deaths of millions of citizens and the reduction of their societies to rubble. Americans haven’t shown much stomach for projects of this scope after 1945.

E. M. Oblomov, “The Greatest Generation and the Greatest Illusion: Success in World War II led Americans to put too much faith in government—and we still do.”, City Journal, 2017-12-28.

January 21, 2020

Amity Shlaes’ Great Society: A New History

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, Edward Short reviews the latest American economic history book by Amity Shlaes:

In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes revisits the welfare programs of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to show not only how misguided they were but also what a warning they present to those who wish to resurrect and extend such programs. “The contest between capitalism and socialism is on again,” the author writes in her introduction. Despite the Trump administration’s thriving economy, or perhaps because of it, Democratic Party progressives are calling for new welfare programs even more radical than those advocated in the 1960s by the socialist architect of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Michael Harrington. In the new schemes for wealth redistribution, student debt relief, socialized medicine, and universal guaranteed income that make up the Democrats’ political platform in 2020, Shlaes rightly sees a recycling of Great Society hobby horses — and she worries that a good portion of the electorate may be taken in by them. “Once again many Americans rate socialism as the generous philosophy,” she observes, and she has written her admirable, sobering study to make sure that readers realize that the “results of our socialism were not generous.”

Reviewing how ungenerous makes for salutary reading. After all, socialism of any stripe, whether in Russia, South America, Europe, or America, has always been an inherently deceitful enterprise. Shales captures the essence of this imposture when she describes one of its manifestations as “Prettifying a political grab by dressing it up as an economic rescue.” In totting up these receipts for deceit, Shlaes has done a genuine public service. […]

On display here are all of Shlaes’s strengths as an author: her clear and unpretentious prose, sound critical judgment, readiness to enter into the thinking of her subjects with sympathy (even when she regards it as mistaken), and, perhaps most impressively, understanding how history can help us fathom what might otherwise be obscure in our own more immediate history.

Accordingly, she describes the influence that Roosevelt’s New Deal had on Johnson, who saw it as a model for maintaining and consolidating his Democratic majorities, as well as focusing his Cabinet’s talents. “The men around Johnson,” Shlaes points out, including Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Richard Goodwin, and Sargent Shriver, “felt the weight of his faith on them, and strove hard. Vietnam would be sorted out. There would be a Great Society. Poverty would be cured. Blacks of the South would win full citizenship. The Great Society would succeed.” Yet the president’s men could not help asking “by what measures” it would succeed.

Moynihan’s answer to this question is one that still mesmerizes social-engineering elites. The Great Society would be achieved by social science. “Progress begins on social problems when it becomes possible to measure them,” Moynihan declared. Improved quantitative analysis would give the centralized power of planners a new credibility.

Whether Johnson himself ever truly believed in such claims is questionable. When aides asked the exuberant Texan what he thought of the risks of going forward with his wildly ambitious program, his reply epitomized the hubris at the heart of his Great Society: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

January 12, 2020

QotD: Progressive snobbery is part of the kink

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Do they really hate ordinary people that much?

Yes, they do. For liberals, the distinction between the “dumb masses” and their enlightened selves renders life meaningful. Disdain for ordinary folks is not just an ancillary trait of liberalism. It is fundamental to the its nature.

At its heart, liberalism is a gnostic religion, and the essence of that religion is the believer’s faith that he possesses the means of changing the world for the better. The belief that the world must be changed requires there to be a mass of individuals whose lives are in need of change. Following this logic, it is the liberal, not those deplorables in need of change, who knows what must be changed. For liberals, there must be a mass of people in need of this knowledge for life to make sense.

Above all, liberalism is a hubristic faith. Its followers share the fatal flaw of pride in their own intellectual capacity. This is why liberalism appeals so strongly to those in the knowledge trades: teachers, journalists, writers, psychologists, and social workers. The sense of “knowing more than others” is its strongest attraction – particularly to the young, who otherwise know so little. Liberalism confers, or seems to confer, almost immediate power and authority to those who embrace it.

The left’s obsession with superior knowledge runs through its entire history. As Woodrow Wilson remarked, the “instrument” of political science “is insight. A nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.” Lyndon B. Johnson thought “a president’s hardest task” is “to know what is right.” And the most hubristic of all is Obama’s “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Yes, we are wonderfully bright, and we’ve been waiting eons for ourselves to appear.

Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.

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