Dan Riehl at Riehl World View points to a document that should be mandatory reading for everybody who cares about preserving constitutional liberty in this country. It’s a piece by Netroots guru Chris Bower at Open Left on “Positive Feedback Loops.”
What are Positive Feedback Loops? They are policies and programs designed to “make America a more progressive place, and thus make all other progressive policy more likely to be enacted.” In other words, they are ways to rig the game to insure that the Left wins.
Frankly, this is one of the scariest things I have read in a long, long time because it confirms my worst fears about the totalitarian temptation that underlies so much of the Left’s approach to American politics and public policy. It is an agenda based on a fundamental mistrust of individuals to choose for themselves in a free society.
In the Bowers/Netroots scenario, unions must be given the power to short-circuit the secret ballot process to facilitate organizing the workplace because unionized employees “are much more likely to support progressive economic policies, and to vote Democratic, than other non-union workers.” At what point does the logic of this view dictate that unionization be made mandatory in all workplaces, regardless of the desires of the employees or employers?
Similarly, invoking the full power of the federal government to decide who gets to own media in America is essential to “help destabilize the impact of the Republican Noise Machine, and create a more diverse, responsive national media …” Aggressively enforcing the mis-labeled “Fairness Doctrine” is the Netroots’ preferred tool for crushing conservative dissent, just as it was for liberals in the Kennedy/Johnson years, as documented here by former CBS News head Fred Friendly.
Stacking the deck in Congress is to be achieved by giving full congressional representation to “anti-Republican strongholds” in the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and Puerto because “these are not places that are particularly friendly to the values of the conservative movement, and granting them equal representation within their own country would expand progressive and Democratic power long-term.”
And Leftist proposals like Hillarycare aren’t in the final analysis about serving human needs but about obtaining and consolidating Netroots power by “re-locating spending in programs Americans won’t want to give up, such as universal health care or cheaper, clean energy investment.” This tactic “would to at least some extent shift the economic balance of power away from conservatives and toward progressives.”
The extremes of Left and Right are always enemies of individual liberty. For the Left, what Revel called “The Totalitarian Temptation” is always there because it offers a justification for short-circuiting and removing all those pesky obstacles to the government-run millenium on Earth. For the Right, the authoritarian temptation is always there to justify using government to enforce somebody’s narrow vision of order and virtue, always for the common good and often on the basis of a religious paradigm.
Either way, individual liberty is sacrificed on the altar of advancing social progress at the barrel of a gun because after all is said and done, government is pure and simply force organized to achieve somebody’s idea of the way things ought to be.
