Moderation as Vacuity

Americans sometimes claim to be moderate in their views.  "I don't believe in abolishing the Fed, for I am a moderate," is an example.  Moderation means limiting change to a moderate distance from present policy. But what if present policy is extreme?  Franklin Roosevelt might have said: "I don't believe in ending concentration camps for Japanese Americans. I believe in a more moderate course." Andrew Jackson might have said: "I don't believe in ending my policy of banishing all Native Americans east of the Mississippi. I believe in the moderate course of extending the Indian Removal Act to just one more tribe."

Is moderation as a mere increment meaningful in the context of policies whose effects are devastating or reprehensible?

There are other possible meanings, though. Perhaps moderation underlies a claim that state action is not a moral but a pragmatic question. "Only extremists hold that theft is wrong under all circumstances. We moderates hold that taxing some to redistribute to others is a pragmatic course."  Here, however, the claim is contradictory. If  morality that prohibits theft is extreme, why is the morality that motivates redistribution of wealth not an extreme? If it is wrong to say that theft is wrong, why is right to say that income inequality is wrong?

Since all government action involves violence, and since the elimination of violence is a prerequisite to the foundation of civilization, all government action involves moral choice.  Choice about violence,murder, or theft is inherently moral, and all government action involves violence, murder, or theft. Therefore, all government action is extreme if  extreme  is to be defined as making state decisions on the basis of morality.

A third possible meaning of moderation is that it accords with the majority.  The majority in America believe the claims made on television and in newspapers.  The writers in these sources are not well educated, and they have demonstrated a repeated capacity for advocating erroneous courses of action. One example was the Vietnam War.  Another was, in New York City, the urban renewal policies of Robert Moses.  A third was the Iraqi War and the strategy behind it. A fourth is America's monetary policy.  Ancient Athens lost the Peloponnesian War because it chose to invade Sicily, a decision that was politically popular. America's disastrous invasion of Iraq was similarly popular, and I was among the mistaken supporters.

In other words, defining moderation as incremental decision making, pragmatism, or accordance with majority rule potentially leads to policies that are extreme.  A fourth definition is mathematically certain, but it is also self-contradictory and equally vacuous.  The ancient Greeks defined sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη)  as temperance or moderation in the sense of  being well balanced.  Aristotle spoke of a range of virtues such as prudence, justice, and courage as well as sophrosyne. Moderation, in Aristotle's view, is the mean between two extremes.  Courage is the mean between rashness and cowardice, for instance.

Perhaps moderation in state action can mean the mean between two extreme courses of action.  In this sense, though, current American policies are not moderate.  An economy in which public debt is in excess of $55,000 per man, woman, and child, forty-four percent of whom have no savings, is hardly a mean between two extremes. It is an extreme. The same may be said of monetary policy. The tripling of the money supply in 2008 and 2009 can hardly be called a mean between two extremes: Historically, monetary expansion of that magnitude has led to economic collapse. Nor can we say that a nation that subsidizes one industry, banking, to the extent that the US government has is taking actions that are the midpoint between two extremes.

Moderation can be defined as a small increment over current policy, pragmatism, majority rule, or the mean between two extremes, but none of these meanings is inconsistent with policies that are genocidal, horrific, radically redistributive,  or economically destructive.  Americans' claim that their choices are moderate, like their claim that they are free or their claim that they are prosperous, is a chimera.

Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Unschooled on Race and Conservatives

Leonard Pitts, Jr. writes a spin piece in today's Seattle Times (h/t Adam Schmidt on Facebook).  Pitts  argues that African Americans would be insane to support conservatives because conservatives have always been anti-Black. 

Pitts illustrates the historical ignorance that characterizes the American left and its pitiful media. Social conservatives in New England were the leaders of the abolitionist movement.  For example, John Brown's father was associated with Oberlin College, where Charles Finney, leader of the Second Great Awakening, was president. Oberlin, a Calvinist Presbyterian School, was the first college to admit African Americans in 1835.  Wikipedia writes of Charles Finney:

In addition to becoming a popular Christian evangelist, Finney was involved with the abolitionist movement and frequently denounced slavery from the pulpit. In 1835, he moved to Ohio where he became a professor and later president of Oberlin College from 1851 to 1866. Oberlin became active early in the movement to end slavery and was among the first American colleges to co-educate blacks and women with white men.^[8]

<sup>Pitts is also wrong because, later in the 19th century, the Mugwumps, who tended to support laissez faire as well as reforms such as the Pendleton Act, tended not to be anti-Black. They were the post-bellum Republican elitists during the period of carpetbaggers and Reconstruction.  During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan's first victims were African American Republicans.  George Wallace, the leader of 1960s racism, was a Democrat and a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As Pitts points out, the worst racists were Democrats. Although Pitts calls them conservatives, the racist Democrats voted for Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt just as the northerners did. Pitts's argument is circular:  racism is conservative, therefore, conservatives are racists.  But the advocates of limited government were not necessarily more racist than the supporters of big government and big business--the GOP.  On the one hand, it is true that Andrew Jackson, the founder of today's Democratic Party, was a racist and that his Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney was responsible for the Dred Scott decision.  But the New York labor unions were probably more anti-African American than Jackson was.  That The Miami Herald's syndicated columnist Pitts is apparently unfamiliar with the Draft Riots and organized labor's sympathy for the South during the Civil War is an embarrassment to the pathetic legacy of American journalism.</sup> 

Pitts's argument is tautological:  racists are conservative, therefore conservatives never stood up for blacks.  In fact, the first “conservatives” might be said to have been the pro-laissez faire Mugwumps, who favored the gold standard, opposed tariffs, and favored limited government.   The founder of The Nation, EL Godkin, was not overly supportive of African Americans, but he was no racist.  The Republican Party in the late 19^th century was a big government, pro business party, and mostly laissez faire (at least in words).  

At the same time, the Progressives, especially Woodrow Wilson, were frequently overt racists.  Eugenics was a significant facet of Progressivism, and as C. Vann Woodward points out in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Jim Crow exploded during the Progressive era, not the Gilded Age, which was characterized by policies and leadership that conservatives support today. 

One source of Pitts's confusion (besides being due to an ideologically extremist university and educational system that indoctrinates in left wing groupthink rather than educates, leaving people like Pitts ignorant) is that popular lingo confuses laissez faire with conservatism and social democracy or socialism with liberalism. Thus, the Wikipedia article calls Charles Finney "progressive," but he would be considered a social conservative today. 

On the one hand, the first big government socialist president in American politics was Theodore Roosevelt, and he was not a racist. On the other hand, the first president who was a conservative (defined in opposition to the first "liberal," Roosevelt) was William Howard Taft, and he wasn’t a racist either.  Roosevelt backed Taft before he learned that Taft would not support regulatory solutions to the trust issue—that he would instead support a litigated settlement in the Standard Oil case.  The Taft Supreme Court (Taft was the only president to later become Chief Justice) was  conservative.  Roosevelt ran against Taft in 1912, electing racist-cum-Progressive Woodrow Wilson in Taft’s place.  Wilson began the American socialist project by pushing through the income tax and the Federal Reserve Bank the following year, 1913.  He also implemented Jim Crow in Washington, DC.

Princeton, of which Wilson had been president, has been well known as the most anti-Semitic of the Ivy League universities.   Here is what Wikipedia says about Taft:

Taft met with and publicly endorsed Booker T. Washington's program for uplifting the black race, advising them to stay out of politics at the time and emphasize education and entrepreneurship. A supporter of free immigration, Taft vetoed a law passed by Congress and supported by labor unions that would have restricted unskilled laborers by imposing a literacy test.^[63]

Moreover, the Southern Democrats, the racists,  repeatedly supported left-wing Democrats. They voted for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson.  It was not until the 1960s that racism and the Republican Party crossed paths.  By then, both parties had become advocates of Progressivism and supporters of the Roosevelt/Rockefeller agenda. In 1944, the entire Jim Crow South voted for the paragon of American socialism, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Alabama, for example, the state remembered for Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott of the 1950s, voted 81% for FDR.  In 1952 and 1956, the most social democratic candidate between FDR and BHO was Adlai Stevenson.  In 1956, the ONLY states in which Stevenson won were the Jim Crow states:   Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.

So Mr. Pitts, you're a doody head.

Americans Likely to Vote Against Incumbents

Mike Marnell, crusading publisher of the Lincoln Eagle of Kingston, NY, sent me a link to a recent Marist Poll which found that about equal proportions of Americans are likely to vote for (42%) and against (43%) incumbents.  This is better than last year, when only 37% said that they would vote against incumbents and 51% said that they would vote for them.  The poll also found that 56% say that the nation is headed in the wrong direction.  That seems high for a republic.  The poll also found that 55% of Democrats say that they will support an incumbent while 52% of Republicans say that they will vote for someone else.

The Marist blog posts a table which shows the distribution of the population that feels the country is headed in the wrong direction. Liberals feel that the country is headed in the right direction and independents, Republicans and conservatives feel it is heading in the wrong direction.

This seems hopeful for the nation at large, although Mike is concerned that the predominance of Democrats in New York will prevent improvement here.  I have been thinking of buying some land in a more civilized locale, like West Virginia.  According to this site a two bedroom house in West Virginia on 22 acres costs $165,000.  Why would anyone want to live in New York any more?

Symmetry of Waste: Why Aren't Big Government Advocates Pragmatic?

For much of its history, proponents of "state activist liberalism," have claimed that expansion of government is "pragmatic."  This claim was set against three historical patterns.   First, the American ideology until the early twentieth century was freedom.  Expansion of the state could be posed as a more modern alternative.  Second, the pragmatism of William James and Charles Sanders Pierce was popular in the early twentieth century and state activist liberals used its rhetoric.  Third, the public became alarmed at economic developments in the late 19th century, specifically the development of large railroads and trusts that seemed to have economic power.   The large businesses claimed to exercise the right of free contract and laissez-faire in a tone that reflected social Darwinism.  In fact, the railroads and Standard Oil depended on government support.

The response to concerns about big business was big government. This meant legislation like the Sherman Anti-trust Act and the Interstate Commerce Act which aimed to regulate trusts and railroads.  These steps were extended during the Progressive era, when Theodore Roosevelt proposed the Federal Trade Commission and the regulation of trusts.  In his speeches, Roosevelt proposed most of the social legislation that was subsequently adopted during the New Deal.

However, the claim of pragmatism is that what works will be maintained and what fails will be terminated.  One of the earliest laws, the Sherman Anti-trust Act, did not work.  In fact, the Sherman Anti-trust Act resulted in firms growing larger each decade because it illegalized collusion among small firms, providing an incentive for mergers and takeovers. 

Without tracing the ensuing history, government was repeatedly extended, especially in the 1930s, 1960s and 1970s.  Yet, no one ever asked whether any of the programs worked or not.  No one asked whether the Fed was responsible for the greater economic instability and higher unemployment of the twentieth century than of the 19th century.  No one asked why welfare programs induced rather than reduced poverty and dependency.  No one asked why only three percent of government programs are terminated but 80 percent of businesses fail in their first five years.  Failure is an essential component of innovation.  Most ideas fail, and to find a good, workable idea many prototypes must be tried. But government programs never fail, hence they are not tested by reality.  They are not pragmatic.

It is not just that advocates of big government do not reject programs that fail.  Advocates of big government do not even QUESTION whether or not the programs that they advocate work.  There are no mechanisms in place to test whether social security, for example, works better than another alternative; or whether the post office is the optimal mode of mail delivery.  Not only is the information not known, the questions are scrupulously avoided.  To ask pragmatic questions is heresy to "state activist liberals."

In order to understand the reason why questions about program efficacy are avoided one needs to follow the money.  Government functions by borrowing money.  Banks make a profit off the lending.  The Federal Reserve Bank exists to expand the money supply so that the banks can profit by lending to the state. 

Banks do not care if the reasons for their lending work.  They want bigger government because they can lend more. Moreover, expansion of the state leads to monetary expansion and monetary expansion further subsidizes banks' profit margins.  This is so because increased government borrowing leads to crowding out of private sector borrowers.  Interest rates rise, the economy slows and the Fed can justify expansion of the money supply (lowering interest rates) to "stimulate" the economy to "help small business."  The result is that the Fed purchases treasury bonds from banks, and the monetary base expands.  The banks create a multiple of the reserves out of thin air, and business borrows.  Banks collect interest.  Much of the expanded money is diverted to privileged hedge funds, Wall Street and corporations.

In order to create the non-pragmatic version of "state activist liberalism" the government relies on two institutions: the media and the public schools.  The public schools fail to educate children, causing the majority to lack the basic cognitive skills needed to read, write, do basic math or follow a news story.  The graduates of American public schools are sub-literate, sub-numerate and lacking in basic reasoning skills.  At the same time, the graduates are ideologically trained to believe in government; in socialism and in state expansion. "Social justice education" is one of the fundamental goals of the banker-oriented education system.

The more capable, elite students are taught to scrupulously obey direction.  They are trained that the opinions of information sources such as newspapers and television are authentic while the opinions of friends or one's self are invalid.  They are trained to trust mass media rather than common sense.  The "other direction" that David Riesman described in the 1950s was a function of the financification of the US economy.

I've rarely met a "liberal" or left winger who was capable of thinking for him or herself. Rather, they parrot a newspaper or television station.   Many conservatives parrot radio and television talk shows.  Naturally, the newspapers and television stations are financially responsive to or owned by banks or other Fed-related institutions. 

There is a complete absence of pragmatism among both "conservatives" and "liberals".  "Conservatives" applauded the absurd Bush prescription drug plan and the Iraqi and Afghanistan Wars while "liberals" applauded the bailout, the stimulus and the absurdly designed Obama health care law.  Neither ends the other's programs.  The "liberals" have not ended the wars, which they claimed to oppose, and the "conservatives" have not cut back on the massive waste in Washington.  There is a perfect symmetry of waste.  The interest paid to the banking system mounts.

Letter to the Olive Press

Dear Editor:

One of my neighbors took some offense at my recent characterization of Democrats as thieves in the pages of the Olive Press. My neighbor is not a thief, and that is probably true of a majority of the 36% of Americans who are registered Democrats. Nevertheless, I stand by my letter. For there are two kinds of Democrats: (a) thieves and (b) those fooled by (a). Category (b) Democrats might blame 2,500 years of propaganda. In Open Society and Its Enemies Karl Popper argues that Plato was the first to propagandize for collectivism by identifying collectivism with altruism. But collectivism has almost always helped the rich at the expense of the poor, not the reverse. Thus, "limousine liberals" advocate a class- and self-interested view.

The (a) category goes back to the days of Boss Tweed and "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall". In 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) extended the federal edifice that the Progressive Republicans led by Theodore Roosevelt (TR) had established. The crux of the New Deal was FDR's abolition of the gold standard, which permitted the Federal Reserve Bank unlimited power to create ("print") money. The chief function of the Federal Reserve Bank has been and still is to expand the money supply by printing new reserves and then depositing them in money center banks who have the power to print a multiple of the money, as much as six times, of which they lend a disproportionate share to Wall Street. If you doubt that a disproportionate share goes to Wall Street, check out Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed about Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). The banking system had lent this early hedge fund 100 billion dollars when it collapsed. One hundred billion that time was more than one percent of the entire economy but LTCM employed only about 200 people. This kind of thing has accelerated during the Bush-Obama administration, with Obama donating untold trillions to his supervisors on Wall Street.

On the local level, the corruption of the Democrats never disappeared, even with the diminution of Tammany Hall in the 1930s under the Mayor Fiorello Laguardia (R-NY). Today, government employees, school teachers, and businesses who receive contracts, that is, category (a) Democrats, unabashedly steal from their neighbors. Category (b) Democrats, confusing collectivism with altruism, confuse the schoolteachers', government employees' and contractors' greed with altruism.

At the level of federal government operations, the edifice that TR and FDR created opened the door to special interest politics. No one knows how much of the federal government's operations budget actually performs any valid "service". Newspapers avoid questions like this, preferring to cheer for the bailout and Obama. My guess is less than 20% goes to any public interest purpose. 80% of your federal taxes are squandered.

Today we are facing a health reform bill, that category (b) Democrats have been told will help the poor. It will not. If you compare the performance of health industry stocks over the past two years with the stock market in general, the fall in the health stocks has been two thirds smaller than in the stock market generally, 8% versus 23%, since January 2008. The stock market thinks that the health reform bill will be a boon to the health industry. This will not be the case for the general economy. New regulations will increase costs; health benefits will be reduced; and the uncovered poor will be forced to buy coverage. It makes category (a) liberals happy to know that people making $50,000 per year will have to pay $6,000 for coverage. For these will be forced to sell their homes and live in city projects while category (a) limousine liberals can buy their houses as investments as they congratulate themselves about their liberal consciences.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

Elitism in American History

Progressivism and social democracy are democratic liberal doctrines that introduce the possibility of an activist, authoritarian state that they aim to limit. Progressives of the early twentieth century management of large business enterprise, although many such as Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt argued for expansion of state action into the social welfare realm. The social democrats under the New Deal discarded the Progressives' interest in efficiency and instead focused on social welfare. Hence, American public policy debate became that that countered those interested in greater efficiency with those interested in increasing welfare transfers. The advocates of greater efficiency tended to emphasize management solutions in the tradition of the Mugwumps. Hence, their emphasis on low taxes was accompanied by an interest in limiting waste in government. These views seem to overlap with the Jeffersonian philosophy of limiting centralized federal government but the Progressives' most basic belief was that efficiency in overseeing big business could not be achieved without centralization of state power. Hence, their philosophy is fundamentally statist and centralizing and so is very much in the Federalist tradition. The social democrats too are descendants of Federalism. The anti-Federalist Jeffersonians and their Jacksonsian descendents believed that centralized institutions such as the central bank and Hamiltonian schemes to support business expansion were opposed to the interests of taxpayers and small holders. It is true that in Jefferson's day there were relatively few workers, but those supported Jefferson. Jefferson opposed the same common law that was used in the Philadelphia Cordwainers' case against unions, and the Jacksonian democracy saw a renewed support for the union cause in the form of the decision of Commonwealth v. Hunt, which changed American legal attitudes in unions' favor. However, the eighteenth century's anti-Federalists nineteenth century's Jeffersonians had a very different point of view from the twentieth century's social democrats. First, the anti-Federalists and Jeffersonians opposed the central bank. Second, they opposed government support for business. Third, they opposed taxation (the Federalists advocated taxes such as the Whiskey tax, not the anti-Federalists). Thus, the spirit of pro farmer and by extension pro worker laissez faire was fundamental to the earliest political debates in America. The elitism of the Federalists was associated with support for big business and big government. The claim that the state's power would be used to support workers and the poor had not occurred to the Federalists at that point. Part of the reason was that the Federalists were individualists who opposed political parties and factions, hence manipulative or political doctrines such as social democracy would not have occurred to them. There were indeed early rumblings of interest in governmental support for workers, such as during Jefferson's 1807-08 Embargo Acts, which caused unemployment in the cities. Some workers demonstrated for expansion of city employment to counter the unemployment that resulted from the embargoes.

The elitist philosophy of Federalism did not die with the Federalist movement in 1800. Federalism died in part because of internal fighting among Hamilton, Adams, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and other prominent Federalists. Much of their struggle had to do with the abrasive personalities of Hamilton and Adams and their unwillingness to think in terms of a unified party (Hamilton preferred Jefferson to Adams and Adams preferred Jefferson to Hamilton and Pinckney). However, the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans eventually broke into two parties, the Whigs of Henry Clay and the Democrats of Andrew Jackson. Of these, the Whigs trailed the Federalists and were precusors to today's Republicans while the the Jacksonians retained the anti-Federalist impulse, were pro-worker, pro-union and anti-elitist. The Whigs believed in big government and support for business, and in central banking. In contrast, the Democrats believed in states' rights and were relatively, but not perfectly laissez faire in orientation. Hence, the history of elitism can be traced directly from the Federalists to the Whigs to the Republicans. It is tragic that the anti-elitist philosophy of Jacksonian democracy became associated with slavery because of its states rights emphasis. Without the issue of slavery, the American debate would have been more clearly along class lines, with the general public supporting Jacksonian democracy and laissez faire, and the business and plantation elites supporting Federalist, Whiggish and then Republican big government and centralization. But the states rights and slavery issue confounded this alignment to a degree.

The transformation in the party orientation of elitism began to occur in the late nineteenth century. In 1884 the elite Republican Mugwumps bolted the Republican Party in favor of the candidacy of Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was a traditional Jeffersonian-Jacksonian candidate, favoring the gold standard and low taxes. The Mugwumps, supported the laissez faire philosophy, perhaps contributing to its identification with the wealthy. However, the Mugwumps also supported rationalization of government and civil service. Even more important, the Mugwumps represented the college-educated elite of the late nineteenth century. Whereas only about five percent of the American public had attended college in the 1880s, over 50 percent of the Mugwumps had attended college. The Mugwumps were very interested in shoring up professionalism in academia, education, social work, law and medicine. They were the first professional interest movement in American history. Thus, some Mugwumps did favor some forms of government intervention, such as improvement of housing standards, and virtually all favored the Pendleton Act and attempts to improve the management of government at the federal as well as the state level. The Mugwumps were predecessors to the Progressives and were the earliest advocates of enhanced focus on rationalizaton of government and support for the professional (and implicitly) economic interests of the professional classes. Thus, American reform took the form of an alliance between professionals interested in narrow interests of their specific professions coupled with rationalization of government. The impulse toward social democracy came in part from the fixation on professional problems, not from a socialistic or equalitarian impulse. Thus, specialists in housing reform and social work began the emphasis on government intervention to improve municipal housing. It was a narrowly defined professional response. The response had two implications: one broad and one narrow. The broad response was to legitimate needs in the cities that the economy would address only slowly as productivity improved and people became wealthier. The narrow response was that the professions gained in power, prestige and access to resources as the broad response gained currency. Hence, the pattern of government programs that combined rationalization with social welfare began to take root with the Pendleton Act. American elites, both in business and in the professions, found that they had much at stake in state largess, and so the American political debate, which became increasingly a debate among elite economic interests (business and rationalizers versus the professions) began to take the shape that it has today.

Opiate of the Masses

Merv of PrairiePundit posts Mark Steyn's article about capitalism and change (thanks to Larwyn). He notes that whereas the presidential candidates say that they favor change:

"it's capitalism that's the real "agent of change. Politicians, on the whole, prefer stasis, at least on everything for which they already have responsibility. ts."

But the change thatReInflateoCrat politicians advocate is not make believe. Politicians do create change. Progressive-liberal or political change is reactionary and exploitative. The name "progressive-liberal" refers not to progress or liberalization for the public, rather progress and liberalization for its privileged beneficiaries: lawyers, big business, academics and hedge fund managers.

In aiming to "deconstruct" American values, progressive-liberals aim to supplant them with values that serve their ends. Progressive liberals aim not only to staunch general progress and technological advance, which threatens established economic interests, but to intensify income inequality; shore up inept businesses; protect inefficient health care; make the poor poorer; and make the rich richer. All of this is done in the name of making the economy more efficient; reducing income inequality; providing general health care; and helping the poor. Progressive-liberalism is a vicious philosophy.

Universities have played a critical role in reinforcing exploitative political change . In the 1970s Milovan Djilas argued that communism and left wing ideology served the interests of a new class of journalists and intellectuals.

In America, political use of intellectuals to advocate and support economic exploitation of the poor takes on a specific pattern. American academics argue for cultural change that reinforces their power. They attack religious institutions and traditional values, and argue for a pattern based on groupthink, the "liberal Borg", whereby the New York Times sets an agenda which progressive-liberal cult members mindlessly follow. The progressive-liberal groupthink mentality is a social control process that serves specific economic interests. The new class, academics and journalists, is paid for this pattern with academic jobs, funding and the like.

The effect of the academics' purposed cultural domination and hegemony is to distract the public from state violence and exploitation. The public is made poorer by inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve Bank, while the media advises them that inflation is low. The dollar is artificially propped up and some jobs leave the country, and the media tells the public that free trade is to blame. There is massive waste in government, and the public is told that taxes are too low.

All the while, academia distracts from its exploitative purposes by raising crank political issues: terrorism is justice; defending America is imperialism; crime is justice; taxation creates wealth; free trade makes us poorer, and so on.

The Republicans have been too often part of this process. Republicans, such as Theodore Roosevelt, supported progressive-liberalism. This element never left the Republican Party. In those days, the Democrats were free traders and the Republicans supported exploitative tariffs. Support for hard money was a minority voice in both parties. It was not until 1896 that the Republicans became the hard money party.

It is primarily because of capture of academia that the progressive-liberals have been triumphant in the last century. Now that their ideas have been discredited, it is even more crucial to them to retain control of academia. Without the reinforcement of academic propaganda, it will be difficult for the progressive-liberals to appear to be anything other than what they are: the ideologists of corruption, narrow special interest and economic decline.

Conservatives need to state their case. The Republican Party is not necessarily a conservative or moderate conservative party. It has been a corrupt or progressive-liberal party for much of its history. Conservatives must ponder the way forward.