What Democrats Mean by ‘Paying Your Fair Share’

What Democrats Mean by ‘Paying Your Fair Share’

By Thomas Sowell 

At the recent televised debate among candidates for the Democrats’ nomination for president, Hillary Clinton declared that “the wealthy pay too little” in taxes and “the middle class pays too much.”

Some people might wish to argue about whether that is true or not, but no rational argument can be made on either side of this issue, because the words used are completely undefined. Nor is Hillary Clinton the only one who talks this way.

It is one of the many signs of the mindlessness of our times that all sorts of people declare that “the rich” are not paying their “fair share” in taxes, without telling us concretely what they mean by either “the rich” or “fair share.”

Whether in politics or in the media, words are increasingly used, not to convey facts or even allegations of facts, but simply to arouse emotions. Undefined words are a big handicap in logic, but they are a big plus in politics, where the goal is not clarity but victory — and the votes of gullible people count just as much as the votes of people who have common sense.

What a “fair share” of taxes means in practice is simply “more.” No matter how high the tax rate is on people with a given income, you can always raise the tax rate further by saying that they are still not paying their “fair share.”

Advocates of higher tax rates can get very specific when they want to. A recent article in the New York Times says that raising the tax rate on the top one percent of income earners to 40 percent would generate “about $157 billion” a year in additional tax revenue for the government.

This ignores mountains of evidence, going back for generations, showing that raising tax rates does not automatically mean raising tax revenues — and has often actually led to falling tax revenues. A fantasy expressed in numbers is still a fantasy.

When the state of Maryland raised its tax rate on people with incomes of a million dollars a year or more, the number of such people living in Maryland fell from nearly 8,000 to fewer than 6,000. Although it had been projected that the tax revenue collected from such people in Maryland would rise by $106 million, instead these revenues FELL by $257 million.

There was a similar reaction in Oregon and in Britain. Rich people do not simply stand still to be sheared like sheep. They can either send their money somewhere else or they can leave themselves.

#share#Currently, there are trillions of dollars of American money creating jobs overseas, in places where tax rates are lower. It is easy to transfer money electronically from country to country. But it is not nearly so easy for unemployed American workers to transfer themselves to where the jobs have been driven by high tax rates.

Conversely, there have been some reductions in high tax rates that brought in more tax revenues at the lower rates. This happened as far back as the Coolidge administration in the 1920s. It also happened in the Kennedy administration in the 1960s, the Reagan administration in the 1980s, and most recently in the Bush 43 administration. There was a similar reaction in Iceland.

RELATED: What Would Reagan Make of the Current GOP’s Tax Debate?

There is nothing inevitable about either a higher or a lower amount of tax revenues, whether the tax rate is raised or lowered. The government can only set tax rates. How that will affect the tax revenues actually received depends on how people react, and you can know that only after the fact. Sophisticated projections have often been laughably wrong.

Contrary to the way some people on the left conceive of the world, neither rich people nor poor people are inert blocks of wood, to be moved about like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design from on high.

Even outright confiscations of people’s wealth, including whole industries in some countries, have failed to spread prosperity, and have even led to collapsing economies.

But politics is not about what happened in the past. That is left for historians. What politicians are interested in is what they can get the public to believe in the present and to vote on in the future. Plans to “soak the rich,” who are not paying their “fair share,” have worked politically, time and time again — and may well work yet again in the 2016 elections.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His website is tsowell.com. © 2015 Creators Syndicate Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425829/raising-taxes-rich-fair-share

Environmental activists turn up the rhetorical heat (DP: excellent summation of radical greens, Malthus to now)

Environmental activists turn up the rhetorical heat

BY JOEL KOTKIN

What is the endgame of the contemporary green movement? It’s a critical question since environmentalism arguably has become the leading ideological influence in both California government and within the Obama administration. In their public pronouncements, environmental activists have been adept at portraying the green movement as reasonable, science-based and even welcoming of economic growth, often citing the much-exaggerated promise of green jobs.

The green movement’s real agenda, however, is far more radical than generally presumed, and one that former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach said is defined by a form of “misanthropic nostalgia.” This notion extends to an essential dislike for mankind and its creations. In his book “Enough,” green icon Bill McKibben claims that “meaning has been in decline for a long time, almost since the start of civilization.”

And you may have thought the Romans and ancient Chinese were onto something!

Rather than incremental change aimed at preserving and improving civilization, environmental activists are inspired by books such as “Ecotopia,” the influential 1978 novel by Berkeley author Ernest Callenbach. He portrays an independent “green” republic based around San Francisco, which pretty much bans fossil fuels and cars and imposes severe limits on childbearing. These measures are enforced by a somewhat authoritarian state.

Malthusian roots

“Ecotopia” also draws on the green movement’s Malthusian origins, which well predate concerns over climate change. Robert Malthus (1766-1834), a Protestant cleric and scholar, believed that rapid population growth would lead to mass impoverishment and starvation.

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” helped revive the Malthusian ethos, in decline during much of the 20th century, with his hoary predictions of imminent mass starvation in the Third World. Not that he had much hope for richer countries.

“By the year 2000,” he predicted, “the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people. … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Good thing Ehrlich is not a professional gambler – and that he didn’t control policy apparatus. Among the policies embraced by Ehrlich was the possible feasibility of placing “sterilants” in the water supply, and he advocated tax policies that discouraged childbearing.

Overall, Ehrlich’s dire predictions proved widely off the mark – food production has soared, population growth slowed and starvation declined – but his influence lives on. One of his closest acolytes, John Holdren, is President Obama’s top science adviser. Ehrlichian views would not be popular among the nonaffluent electorate, in contrast with more popular approaches that actually improved people’s lives, like cleaning up the air and water.

While Holdren may be too politic to embrace naked Malthusianism in the White House, many mainstream environmentalists continue to embrace strong steps to discourage people from having children. Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy, concluded that not having children is the most effective way for an individual in the developed world to reduce carbon emissions. In the United Kingdom, Jonathon Porritt, an environmental adviser to Prince Charles, has claimed that having even two children is “irresponsible” and advocates that the island nation reduce its population in half in order, in large part, to combat climate change.

Downsizing humanity

In Callenbach’s “Ecotopia,” the domineering state followed somewhat social democratic lines and emphasized an egalitarian culture. This idea could even work, if California was limited to the wealthy counties around the San Francisco Bay and, perhaps, had millions fewer poor people – including many immigrants – than it does now.

An Ecotopian state seems best-suited to a country that has a relatively homogeneous, wealthy population, like Finland or Norway. Green movements flourish among those who already have a high level of materialism – nice cars, homes, secure retirements – and do not require broad-based economic growth to make their lives better. Their relative wealth allows them to focus primarily on the environment, even at the expense of other people.

But this is not the reality for most of California – or the United States – where income disparities have grown in recent decades, and society has become ever more diverse. This reality may make people less enthusiastic about embracing calls by greens to lower living standards, particularly in the high-income countries.

Adviser Holdren, for example, in the past has called for “dedevelopment,” or the conscious ratcheting down of economy growth. A similar school of thought has risen in a well-organized European political drive to promote “degrowth,” which seeks to limit fossil fuels, suburban development and replace the current capitalist system with a highly regulated economy that would make up for less wealth through redistribution.

Perhaps those most cruelly treated under the neo-Malthusian regime would be developing countries, whose per capita energy use is far lower, something the greens hope to keep that way. Prince Charles, for example, embraces the “intuitive grammar” of ultradense slums such as Mumbai’s Dharavi, which, he claims, have perfected more “durable ways of living” than those in the suburbanized West.

The influential environmental group Friends of the Earth applauds recycling in Dharavi as an “inspiration” for the urban future. California’s environmental pioneer Stewart Brand openly endorses efforts to “Save the Slums” because they will save the planet.

A third way?

Prominent environmental thinkers, like the Guardian’s George Monbiot, maintain that, to save the planet we have to “redefine humanity” in a way that circumscribes opportunity. Some in the West, and even here in California, do seem to be willing, for the sake of Ecotopia, to throw opportunities for middle-class and working-class people under a bus.

But it’s highly doubtful that people like Vladimir Putin, the Iranian ayatollahs, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi or China’s President Xi Jinping are ready to sacrifice their people’s well-being to please comfortable Western greens. India has no plans to restrict building new coal plants – the country has tripled coal imports since 2008.

In the West, however, green politics increasingly demand not just reductions in, but the elimination of, fossil fuels. The progressive website Common Dreams, for example, proposes eliminating fossil fuels, Ecotopia-style, within five or six years in order to ensure a “reasonable margin of safety for the world.” Another goal is to demonize fossil fuel producers along the lines of what was done to the tobacco industry.

As we can see in California, such steps will greatly increase energy costs and especially hurt middle- and working-class people. Is there any alternative that gets us to reduced carbon emissions without exacerbating poverty? One alternative perspective comes from what has become increasingly defined as eco-modernists, a movement that maintains that “humans are capable of using technological innovation to solve critical environmental problems, such as climate change, at the same time as allowing economic growth to eradicate poverty in developing countries.”

Unlike some conservatives, eco-modernists do not consider climate change irrelevant or simply the product of a vast left-wing conspiracy. Instead, eco-modernists embrace many of the things environmentalists once at least considered, including expanded nuclear power and, most critically, a gradual shift from coal to much cleaner natural gas, which, as the Breakthrough Institute notes, has driven most of the reductions in greenhouse gases in America.

Fundamentally, eco-modernists see using technology, including in conservation, to improve the environment without asking Africans to do without electricity or Californians to do without decent jobs, which seems a cruel and self-defeating way to promote necessary environmental changes. But this approach does not appeal to many mainstream environmentalists like the Guardian’s Monbiot, who, using Robert Bryce’s term, tend increasingly to be “absolutists.”

In the past, one could count on political leaders to find ways to address such conflicts over priorities without undermining the livelihoods of their voters. But it may be too late for that expectation.

Progressive pundits increasingly envision the presidential election in 13 months as a “last chance,” as one put it, to stop “climate change catastrophe.” Even Gov. Jerry Brown, formerly more pragmatic, now uses extreme language about “extinction” – once again peddled by the irrepressible Ehrlich – in connection with climate change. If you believe that Gaia’s reckoning is imminent, after all, you can only accept the most extreme, draconian steps, whatever the effect on living standards and economies. And while you’re at it, bring on those sterilants!

Hillary Clinton’s shift from favoring to opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, despite strong union support for the project, makes clear that climate change policy will be at the center of the campaign, pitting the energy and manufacturing states of the U.S. interior against those controlled by the coastal gentry, among whom climate change has acquired something of a religious aspect.

The only way to break the grip of the Ecotopian fantasy will be for others – including what’s left of traditional Democrats – to join with Breakthrough and other pragmatic thinkers to come up with sensible alternatives to address the climate issue. Rather than accept the intimidating treatment of the greens and their media enablers, mainstream businesses and middle-class voters need to insist on practical ways to preserve the planet without destroying humanity.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange and the executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/people-687876-environmental-change.html

Red States Outperform Blue In Managing Taxpayer Money

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Red States Outperform Blue In Managing Taxpayer Money.

Pop quiz: What do the most fiscally sound states have in common? Good weather? Oil? Blind luck? Or is it conservative policies such as keeping taxes low, regulations reasonable and spending under control?
A new report from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center ranks all 50 states based on 14 measures designed to determine whether states can pay their short-term bills and meet their long-term obligations — debt, pension liabilities and such. The data go through 2013.
The best-run states have enough cash to pay its current bills, enough revenue coming in to meet its fiscal year needs, a cushion for economic shocks, and management long-term liabilities.
The worst states, in contrast, have “tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities — constituting a significant risk to taxpayers in both the short and the long term.”
When USA Today looked at the Mercatus ranking, they noticed that a few of these states have a lot of oil. “Energy-rich states are leading, and Northeastern states with big pension obligations lagging,” it said.
But that doesn’t explain why states like Florida or Ohio rank so high. Or why California, which has an overabundance of natural resources, is the seventh worst state in terms of fiscal health. (Oil-rich Texas, by the way, ranks 19th.)
Nor can you attribute states’ fiscal health to things like the weather, since few are likely attracted to North Dakota for its winter season. And
Luck can’t be the reason either. Ohio (seventh from the top) suffered from rust-belt deindustrialization as much as Pennsylvania (ninth from the bottom).
Location a factor? Doubtful. Otherwise, why would Illinois be so much worse off than the three other states that border Lake Michigan?
There’s only one factor these fiscal winners and losers share in common. And that’s their political leanings. Of the top 10 states in the Mercatus ranking, just two — Florida and Ohio — voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in the past four elections, and just one — Montana — has a Democratic governor. Even if you look at the 25 best-performing states, only three could be considered reliably liberal.
At the other end of the list, just two of the 10 lowest-ranked states — Kentucky and West Virginia — have voted for the Republican in the past four presidential elections.

America has voted for the Democrat in the last two presidential elections. . . .

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Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

IS OBAMACARE SPIRALING DOWNWARD?

IS OBAMACARE SPIRALING DOWNWARD?

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN OBAMACARE

It has been a while since I read an “Obamacare death spiral” article, and this article by Akash Chougule of Americans for Prosperity stops short of claiming that Obamacare is in one now. However, it does contend that with co-ops failing and enrollment in non-co-op programs slowing, President Obama’s signature program is in a “downward spiral.”

Let’s look first at the co-ops. They were inserted into Obamacare as a kind of quasi-public option. The co-ops are non-profit organizations governed by boards controlled by policyholders. In other words, as Merrill Mathews of Forbes puts it:

[T]he co-ops would get rid of those greedy, self-interested actuaries and insurers who were profiteering on the backs of the sick. Not full-blown socialized medicine, but a good start.

Actually, not so good as things are turning out. According to Chougule, as of this week nine of the law’s 23 state co-ops have collapsed. Consequently, more than 600,000 people who enrolled in co-op health plans will lose their insurance at the end of this year.

Ironically, many of them were forced into the co-ops to begin with when Obamacare caused the cancellation of their private insurance policies in 2013. In other words, they will have lost their health insurance twice because of the law.

To make matters worse, nearly all of the remaining co-ops are in trouble. Chougule says that 22 of the 23 co-ops lost money in 2014 despite receiving $2.4 billion in taxpayer support. (The nine that have already failed received more than $1 billion combined). Many of those that haven’t yet failed received letters from the feds demanding that they take urgent actions to avoid closing.

Why are co-ops failing? Chougule explains:

In an attempt to gain market share, the co-ops are offering policies at rates that don’t come close to covering Obamacare’s enormous costs. As a result, enrollment in their plans far exceeded projections, making their financial holes even worse.

He points to the case of the Nebraska-Iowa shared co-op:

Offering artificially low rates, it enrolled ten times more people than expected. This resulted in premium income far below patients’ medical claims, forcing the co-op into liquidation. Now 100,000 people will have to find other plans.

As for slowing enrollment, a matter I discussed here, the White House recently said it expects just 1.3 million new enrollees in 2016. Chougule notes that this number is far below the 8 million originally predicted for 2016.

The key question, though, is who is enrolling, and here’s where the central conceptual problem with Obamacare lies. It offers a disproportionate enrollment incentive to people who have higher health costs and qualify for larger subsidies. The possibility of a downward spiral is therefore obvious:

As costs [imposed by highly incentivized enrollees] continue to rise, so do the premiums on healthier and wealthier enrollees in traditional, non-co-op plans. Understandably, the latter then enroll in smaller numbers. That in turn forces even higher premiums on the remaining enrollees, creating a downward spiral: Over time, the enrollee pool becomes poorer and sicker and incurs ever-increasing costs.

This phenomenon, one suspects, is a significant factor in the disappointing enrollment figures the White House is projecting.

The combination of failing co-ops and declining enrollment in non-co-op plan by healthy, non-subsidized individuals creates a huge challenge to Obamacare. The program may not be on “death spiral” alert, but it isn’t looking sound.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/10/is-obamacare-spiraling-downward.php

The 'Affordable Housing' Fraud

  

Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of "affordable housing," as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters.

A recent survey showed that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was just over $3,500. Some people are paying $1,800 a month just to rent a bunk bed in a San Francisco apartment.

It is not just in San Francisco that putting a roof over your head can take a big chunk out of your pay check. The whole Bay Area is like that. Thirty miles away, Palo Alto home prices are similarly unbelievable.

One house in Palo Alto, built more than 70 years ago, and just over one thousand square feet in size, was offered for sale at $1.5 million. And most asking prices are bid up further in such places.

Another city in the Bay Area with astronomical housing prices, San Mateo, recently held a public meeting and appointed a task force to look into the issue of "affordable housing."

Public meetings, task forces and political hand-wringing about a need for "affordable housing" occur all up and down the San Francisco peninsula, because this is supposed to be such a "complex" issue.

Someone once told President Ronald Reagan that a solution to some controversial issue was "complex." President Reagan replied that the issue was in fact simple, "but it is not easy."

Is the solution to unaffordable housing prices in parts of California simple? Yes. It is as simple as supply and demand. What gets complicated is evading the obvious, because it is politically painful.

One of the first things taught in an introductory economics course is supply and demand. When a growing population creates a growing demand for housing, and the government blocks housing from being built, the price of existing housing goes up.

This is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge. Economists have understood supply and demand for centuries — and so have many other people who never studied economics.

Housing prices in San Francisco, and in many other communities for miles around, were once no higher than in the rest of the United States.

But, beginning in the 1970s, housing prices in these communities skyrocketed to three or four times the national average.

Why? Because local government laws and policies severely restricted, or banned outright, the building of anything on vast areas of land. This is called preserving "open space," and "open space" has become almost a cult obsession among self-righteous environmental activists, many of whom are sufficiently affluent that they don't have to worry about housing prices.

Some others have bought the argument that there is just very little land left in coastal California, on which to build homes. But anyone who drives down Highway 280 for thirty miles or so from San Francisco to Palo Alto, will see mile after mile of vast areas of land with not a building or a house in sight.

How "complex" is it to figure out that letting people build homes in some of that vast expanse of "open space" would keep housing from becoming "unaffordable"?

Was it just a big coincidence that housing prices in coastal California began skyrocketing in the 1970s, when building bans spread like wildfire under the banner of "open space," "saving farmland," or whatever other slogans would impress the gullible?

When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the "complex" question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?

However simple the answer, it will not be easy to go against the organized, self-righteous activists for whom "open space" is a sacred cause, automatically overriding the interests of everybody else.

Was it just a coincidence that some other parts of the country saw skyrocketing housing prices when similar severe restrictions on building went into effect? Or that similar policies in other countries have had the same effect? How "complex" is that?

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

http://www.creators.com/conservative/thomas-sowell/the-affordable-housing-fraud.html

WHOSE SHRINKING ISLAND?

WHOSE SHRINKING ISLAND?

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN BARACK OBAMA, DEMOCRATS,REPUBLICANS

Yesterday President Obama riffed in front of a Democratic audience, attacking the only enemies he cares about–Republicans. He described Republicans as “extreme,” and said,among other things, “Washington Republicans are alone on their own shrinking island.”

Put aside the hatefulness for a moment. Like so much that Obama says, this characterization is delusional. National Journal published this map of the United States, by Congressional district, after the 2014 election. It can easily be seen that one of our parties is turning into a “shrinking island,” but it isn’t the Republicans:

Currently, Republicans control the House by a whopping 247-188 margin, and the Senate 54-46. But those aren’t the most important numbers: at the state level, the GOP is more dominant than it has been for almost a century. As of 2015, 32 states have Republican governors, compared with only 18 that are governed by Democrats. Republicans control a stunning 68 of the nation’s 98 partisan legislative chambers, more than double the Democrats’ 30 chambers.

One of America’s parties is turning, increasingly, into a Washington, D.C.-based island that has alienated most voters. But that describes the Democrats, not the Republicans, and Barack Obama is a major reason for the Democrats’ downhill slide. But neither self-knowledge nor contact with reality has ever been a strong suit for President Obama.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/10/whose-shrinking-island.php

Hillary Is Wrong: The NRA Is More Popular than She Is

Hillary Is Wrong: The NRA Is More Popular than She Is

By Charles C. W. Cooke 

‘What is wrong with us,” Hillary Clinton inquired bitterly in Florida this month, “that we cannot stand up to the NRA and the gun lobby, and the gun manufacturers they represent?” She struck a hero’s pose: “We need to act and we need to build a movement. It’s infuriating!”

Implicit in Clinton’s lament was a serious charge: That the “us” in the equation represents the majority of American voters, and that the “NRA” represents an insidious force that has been successful in thwarting that majority’s will. Such presumptions are all-but ubiquitous in progressive-leaning circles. The NRA, President Obama told Marc Maron confidently in August of this year, has developed such an “extremely strong” “grip” on Congress that even “common-sense” reforms cannot make it into law. This, Obama submits, is democratically unjust. “I would particularly ask America’s gun owners,” he griped in a recent press conference, “to think about whether your views are being properly represented by the organization that suggests it is speaking for you.”

Seductive as it might be, there is little within the facts to recommend this approach. As Gallup confirmed just this week, the NRA is not a fringe organization that has managed somehow to impose a greatly undeserved octopus’s grip, but a mainstream plank of American civil society with approval ratings of which the vast majority of national politicians could only dream. “Despite a year of blistering criticism,” the polling firm notes, “58% in the U.S. have a favorable opinion” of the NRA — a number that “includes the highest recording of ‘very favorable’ opinions (26%) since Gallup began asking this question in 1989.” That trend line is moving upwards.

RELATED: What Gun-Control Advocates Mean but Dare Not Say: Guns Should Be Confiscated

To grasp just how impressive these numbers are in context, consider that since June 2009 there has been just one week during which the twice-elected president of the United States has been that popular. Per Gallup’s favorability tracker, Obama’s latest approval rating is just 46 percent, twelve points lower than the NRA’s. This is no aberration. Over the last two years, the NRA’s rating has never dropped below 54 percent. Over the same period, Obama’s has never hit 50. A similar story obtains for Hillary Clinton, whose current favorability rating (42 percent) is 16 points below the NRA’s. PerHuffPost Pollster, the last month in which Clinton enjoyed NRA-like approval numbers was December of 2012 — before she re-entered the political field and set about reminding voters precisely why they dislike her. Who, one has to wonder, do we need to “stand up to” whom?

RELATED: Hillary Clinton Is Openly Promising to Amend Federal Gun Laws by Executive Order

#share#It is customary for Second Amendment advocates to be told with a sneer that the NRA is “fringe” or “extreme” or even “un-American,” and that it does not so much represent public opinion as shill for a narrow and reactionary minority whose influence has become disastrously outsized. It is less typical, however, for the sneerers to follow their hasty logic through to its obvious conclusion. Over the last six years, the NRA has both enjoyed an average approval rating that is five to ten percentage points higher than Obama’s and suffered from considerably lower disapproval numbers to boot. In and of itself, this does not make the make the NRA substantively “right” or Obama substantively “wrong”; it does not tell us exactly what their critics like and what they loathe; and it does not help us to break down the extraordinarily complicated and often downright paradoxical polling results that mark the contemporary gun-control debate. But, in a system with pronounced democratic features, it does have an important bearing on the question of what is “normal” and what is “out of touch,” and it does help us to intuit who better represents the majority and who is running hopelessly against the tide. Most important of all, it raises an important question: If, as its critics insist, the NRA is dangerously outré, then what, pray, should we make of President Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom are a great deal less popular? Is it time to “build a movement” against them?

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426014/hillary-clinton-nra-popularity-gun-control

Can California Be Saved?

Can California Be Saved?

By Victor Davis Hanson — October 22, 2015

Crime is back up in California. Los Angeles reported a 20.6 percent increase in violent crimes over the first half of 2015 and nearly an 11 percent increase in property crimes.

Last year, cash-strapped California taxpayers voted for Proposition 47, which so far has let thousands of convicted criminals go free from prison and back onto the streets. Now the state may have to relearn what lawbreakers often do when let out of jail early.

The state may be entering the fifth year of a catastrophic drought, but California has not started building any of the new reservoirs that were planned but long ago canceled under the unfinished California Water Project. Water may remain scarce, but legislators — many of whom have their daily water needs met by the ancient reservoirs and canals that their grandparents built — don’t seem overly bothered. They prefer to designate transgender restrooms, ban plastic bags at grocery stores, and prohibit pet dogs from chasing bears and bobcats.

Never has a region been so naturally rich but so poorly run by its latest generation of custodians.

RELATED: We Are All Californians Now

California endures some of the highest gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes in the nation. Yet its roads and public schools rate near the very bottom of U.S. rankings.

Traffic accidents in California increased by 13 percent over a three-year period — the result of terrible roads and worse drivers. Almost half of all accidents in Los Angeles are hit-and-runs where the drivers leave the scene.

California has lots of petroleum and natural gas. It used to be a pacesetter in building nuclear and hydroelectric plants. Yet because of inept governance, the state’s electricity and gasoline prices are among the highest in the nation.

Why is California choosing the path of Detroit — growing government that it cannot pay for, shorting the middle classes, hiking taxes but providing shoddy services and infrastructure in return, and obsessing over minor bumper-sticker issues while ignoring existential crises?

The cause is political. California is a one-party state, without any serious audit of authorities in power.

The California State Assembly currently includes 52 Democrats and 28 Republicans. The California State Senate has 26 Democrats and 14 Republicans.

RELATED: Expensive Housing Swallows Up Middle-Class Paychecks in Over-Regulated California

All of the state’s executive officers are Democrats. Both of its U.S. senators are Bay-area progressives. California’s House delegation is overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic. The party in power can do as it pleases without being held accountable at the polls.

But what turned a once bipartisan and purple state bright blue?

A perfect storm of events.  

#share#Higher taxes and increased regulations have driven out lots of small-business owners. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of disgruntled middle-of-the-road voters voted with their feet and left for no-tax Nevada, Texas, or Florida.

The state devolved into a pyramid of the coastal wealthy and interior poor — the dual constituencies of the new progressive movement.

A third of America’s welfare recipients reside in California. Nearly a quarter of Californians live below the poverty line.

Yet nowhere in America are there more billionaires. California’s long, thin coastal corridor has become a tony La-La land unto itself. Some of the highest housing prices in the nation and richest communities are clustered along the Pacific coastline, from the wine country and Silicon Valley to Malibu and Hollywood, dotted by marquee coastal universities and zillionaire tech corporations.

Meanwhile, poorer people in the interior, in places such as Madera and Delano — far from Stanford, Google, Pacific Heights, and Santa Monica — require ever more public services. The very rich don’t mind paying the necessary higher taxes, while the strapped, shrinking middle class suffers or flees.

RELATED: California’s Energy Policies: The Poor Are Hardest Hit

Demography also explains the new true-blue California. It is one of the youngest states, with a median age of 35. Voters tend to be more liberal before they reach 40 — and must take on increasing responsibilities, often for people other than just themselves.

California hosts more undocumented immigrants than any other state. Its percentages of minority and foreign-born residents are among the highest in the country. (One of four California residents was not born in the United States.) As with the young, immigrant groups are likewise traditional liberal constituencies, at least in the early generations.

RELATED: Why California’s Drought Was Completely Preventable

Good money in California along the affluent coast, for the most part, is not made the old-fashion way — in mining, timber, ranching, farming, and construction. Instead, California specializes in high-tech, social media, the Internet, government employment, academia, lawyering, and acting.

Profits usually involve programming, investing, financing, hedging, talking, dealing, suing, instructing, and regulating. The money is better, the physical work less grubby, and utopia seems attainable in a way impossible when growing lettuce, mining granite, drilling gas wells, producing two-by-fours, building dams, or shipping steel.

Could California change?

Only when voters of all persuasions decide to return to the old give-and-take politics that keeps politicians honest.

Or when water taps in the suburbs go dry.

Or perhaps when the state’s growing poor populations connect their exorbitant gas, power, and housing costs with an elite agenda of rich coastal liberals, who do not seem to care about the people working hard to glimpse what the elites take for granted.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2015 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425885/california-high-taxes-immigration-democrats

The Quiet Revolution: How the New Left Took Over the Democratic Party (DP: Lengthy essay but traces Marxism from inception up to Obama)

The Quiet Revolution: How the New Left Took Over the Democratic Party

By Scott S. Powell

Frustration with division and gridlock in Washington leads many Americans to impugn both political parties for the current broken and ineffective state of government. There is plenty of blame to go around, but below the surface there has been a quiet revolution going on in only one of the two parties -- the Democratic Party -- which is the main source of today’s irreconcilable division and moral confusion.
What’s remarkable is how the political and cultural center of American values has collapsed in the last two and a half decades with the Democratic Party having moved dramatically to the left. Recently, Democratic National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz could not explain the difference between the modern Democratic Party platform and that of socialism, while at the same time gushing over the prospect of Socialist Bernie Sanders having a prominent place at the 2016 Democratic Party convention.    

If people today could somehow be transported back to the time of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy, they would swear those standard bearers were Republicans with little in common with today’s Democratic Party. 
America’s two major political parties have always been fundamentally different. The Republican Party has been rooted in the moral principles and transcendent values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Democratic Party acknowledges that the starting point of the country may have been the Declaration and the Constitution, but since Woodrow Wilson many Democratic Party leaders have contended that progress requires constant adaptation, changing morals, and liberal interpretations of law and history. 
The progressive philosophy that the Democratic Party has come to embrace now has its roots less in the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of individual happiness and more in the tenets of race and class identity, equal outcomes, and an expanding welfare state. Since individuals vary in talent, ability, and motivation and the free market system produces unequal outcomes of success, a core principle of the Democratic Party is now redressing this disparity through the redistribution of wealth.
The strongest critique of early industrial capitalism came from the German philosopher Karl Marx, who believed that the contradictory forces of labor and capital inevitably bring about class struggle. This in turn, he argued, causes the working class proletariat to rise up and overthrow the capitalist order, seize the means of production, eliminate private property and create a new order that would equitably distribute resources from each according to his ability, and to each according to his need. The notion of conflict of interest between labor and capital, class warfare, and the need for redistribution of wealth, which has made its way into the Democratic Party, has its roots in Marx.
The proletariat never did revolt successfully en masse in any advanced industrialized state. Instead, Marx’s political and economic revolution was first staged in the largely agrarian nation of Russia, carried out by Marxist revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin made major contributions to Marx’s theories, so much so that Marxism-Leninism became the dominant theoretical paradigm for advancing national liberation movements, communism, and socialism wherever in the world radical revolutionary movements arose.
Among Lenin’s contributions was the theory of the vanguard. Since it was apparent that the proletariat masses were unlikely to rise up, Lenin argued that it was necessary for a relatively small number of vanguard leaders -- professional revolutionaries -- to advance the revolutionary cause by working themselves into positions of influence. By taking over the commanding heights of labor unions, the press, the universities, and professional and religious organizations, a relatively small number of revolutionaries could multiply their influence and exercise political leverage over their unwitting constituents and society at large.
It was Lenin who introduced the concept of the “popular front” and coined the phrase “useful idiots” in describing the masses who could be manipulated into mob action of marches and protests for an ostensibly narrow cause of the popular front, which the communist vanguard was using as a means for a greater revolutionary political end.
As Lenin was consolidating power in Russia, Antonio Gramsci was emerging as a leading Marxist theoretician in Italy and would found the Italian Communist Party in 1921. After being imprisoned by Mussolini, the Fascist prime minister of Italy, Gramsci authored what came to be called the Prison Notebooks, partially published in 1947 and in complete form in 1975, a legacy that made him one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. Gramsci argued that communists’ route to taking power in developed, industrialized societies such as Europe and the United States would be best achieved through a “long march through the institutions.” This would be a gradual process of radicalization of the cultural institutions -- “the superstructure” -- of bourgeois society, a process that would in turn transform the values and morals of society. Gramsci believed that as society’s morals were softened, its political and economic foundation would be more easily smashed and restructured.
Cultural Marxism was also in vogue at the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in Germany -- that is until 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Many members of the “Frankfurt School,” such as Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkeimer, and Wilhelm Reich fled to the United States, where they ultimately found their way into professorships at various elite universities such as Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. In the context of American culture, “the long march through the institutions” meant, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, “working against the established institutions while working in them.”
While the Frankfurt School was neo-Marxist, many of its adherents were less interested in economics and redistribution of wealth than in remaking and transforming society through attitudinal and cultural change. They incorporated Marxist class theory into sociology and psychology while also assimilating Freud’s theories on sexuality. Thus, Marx’s theory of the dialectic of perpetual conflict was joined together with Freud’s neurotic ideas, creating a sort of Freudian-Marxism. Their stated goal was a total transformation of society by breaking down traditional norms and institutions such as monogamous relations and the traditional family. This was to be accomplished by promoting and legitimizing unhinged sexual permissiveness with no cultural or religious restraint.
The countercultural influence of radicals like Marcuse and Gramsci has been advanced more by insinuation and infiltration than by confrontation. Their “quiet” revolution to remake society was intended to be diffused throughout the culture gradually over a period of time. Gramsci argued that alliances with non-communist leftist groups would be essential to the collapse of the capitalist bourgeois order. Marcuse believed that radical intellectuals needed to ally themselves with the socially marginalized substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and ethnicities, the unemployed and the unemployable.
While the influence of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School and Marxists like Gramsci was greatest in intellectual circles in a strategic sense,  Saul Alinsky arrived on the scene in Chicago in the 1930s with the tactical tools for the foot-soldiers of social and political revolution -- the community organizers and non-academic labor and single-issue activists. 
Alinsky had a certain charm and appeal to wealthy funders, and had no trouble raising considerable sums to establish the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago from department store mogul Marshall Field and Sears Roebuck heiress Adele Rosenwald Levy, as well as Gardiner Howland Shaw, an assistant secretary of state in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.
Alinsky also had other benefactors in Washington and Wall Street. Eugene Meyer, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1930 to 1933, bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy sale in 1933 for $825,000. During the difficult years of the Depression that followed, the Post carried stories that legitimized Saul Alinsky and his ideas. 
In keeping with Lenin’s famous quote that “capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” Alinsky once boasted, "I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday."
Alinsky's tactics had more in common with Gramsci and Marcuse than the revolutionary and violent approaches of Russian Marxists Lenin and Stalin. Alinsky, too, believed in gradualism and subversion of the system through infiltration rather than confrontation and revolution.
Alinsky believed that politics was war by other means, stating specifically that “in war the end justifies almost any means.” But he was more than a nihilistic progressive revolutionary. Alinsky’s handbook,  Rules for Radicals, first published in 1971, included an admiration for the prince of darkness, Lucifer, noting that he was “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom…”
By the 1960s Marcuse and Alinsky were recognized as two of the most influential leaders of the New Left, which gained strength and numbers by taking a leading role in the anti-Vietnam War movement. However, Alinsky and Marcuse were critical of the violent and confrontational tactics of many of the anti-war radicals, such as Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, preferring instead that radicals work behind the scenes and bore into the establishment. This was seen later in the 1960s with Alinskyites positioned to take advantage of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” programs, to direct federal money into various Alinksy projects.
Alinksy succeeded in what would be a crowning achievement: the recruitment of young idealistic radicals -- Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- who would go on to climb to the top of political power in the Democratic Party. Hillary wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College in 1969 on Alinsky’s methods and remained a friend of Alinsky until his death in 1972. A decade later, Barack Obama was trained in the methods and Rules for Radicals in the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago.  
Camouflage and deception are key to Alinsky-style organizing. When Barack Obama was organizing black churches in Chicago and was criticized for not attending church himself, he pivoted and became a regular church attendee, ultimately becoming a member at Jeremiah Wright’s radical Trinity United Church of Christ.  
The New Left did not simply fade away when the troops came home from Southeast Asia. It went mainstream, with many of the 60s radicals deciding to follow Alinsky’s counsel to clean up their image, put on suits and infiltrate the system. They would become professional revolutionaries who landed jobs in the knowledge industry: the universities, foundations, and the media and special interest activist groups.
By winning “cultural hegemony,” the acolytes of Gramsci, Alinsky, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School believed that the wellsprings of human thought could be largely controlled by mass psychology and propaganda. One of Alinsky’s unique contributions, explained as the seventh Rule for Radicals, was the tactic to avoid debate on the issues by systematically silencing, ridiculing and marginalizing people of opposing views. At the same time, allies in the media provided cover and a framework of acceptance for radical issues and leaders. Traditional values of morality, family, the work ethic and free market institutions were made to appear outdated -- even reactionary, unnecessary, and culturally unfashionable. Ultimately this evolved into what has become known as political correctness, which now envelops the culture.
By 1980, the counter-cultural alliances would include radical feminist groups, civil rights and ethnic minority advocates, extremist environmental organizations, and advocates of liberation theology, anti-military peace groups, union leaders, radical legal activist organizations like the ACLU, human rights watch-dog organizations, community organizers of the Alinsky model, national and world church council bureaucracies, anti-corporate activists, and various internationalist-minded groups. Working separately and together, these groups could count on a sympathetic media and favorable coverage, which facilitated building bridges to the Democratic Party and becoming vocal constituencies deserving attention and legislative action.
The New Left in America realized that it was neither necessary nor desirable to own the means of production as originally envisioned by Marx. Redistribution could be accomplished through progressive taxation that was enshrined by an enlightened Democratic Party. Corporate priorities could be redirected through sensational and biased media exposure, proxy contests, mass demonstrations, boycotts, activist lawsuits and regulatory actions. No need to be responsible for the means of production, when you could advance Marx’s anti-capitalist agenda from the sidelines by indicting individual corporations and the system of capitalism itself.
By the early to mid-1980s a third of the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives supported the budgetary priorities and the foreign policy advocated by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the leading revolutionary Marxist think tank in the United States, located Washington, D.C.  Robert Borosage, the director of IPS, was succeeding in one of his stated goals to “move the Democratic Party’s debate internally to the left by creating an invisible presence in the party.” The particular genius of Borosage and IPS was their strategy to spawn a myriad of spinoffs and coalitions, a force multiplier that took propaganda and the Leninist popular front strategy to a level never seen before in America.
Fast forward to 2008, and we find the long march through the institutions resulting in the New Left being embedded in constituencies that provided a base of support and policy positions for the Obama presidential campaign. And while Barack Obama had a very unconventional background of lengthy associations with Marxists and anti-American radicals throughout his formative years and early adulthood, a nearly twenty-year membership in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “hate America” church, and an extreme left-wing voting record, the major media–now enveloped with the blinders of political correctness–made little effort to report on his background or examine his substantive qualifications. Barack Obama was both the culturally cool and articulate black candidate who provided a means for national redemption for a racist past, while also being the one candidate who provided a blank slate upon which people could project their own desires for hope and change.
Upon assuming office, President Obama had no problem bypassing the Constitutional advise-and-consent role of Congress in his appointment of a record number of czars, many of whom were so radical they would have failed to pass Senate confirmation. One of the offshoots of former IPS director Robert Borosage was the Apollo Alliance, an organization that he co-founded in 2001. Apollo saw its political clout increase dramatically with the election of Barack Obama. Van Jones, a self-described communist and an Apollo Alliance activist, was appointed Green Jobs czar by President Obama. A month after inauguration, a centerpiece of Apollo’s policy agenda was packaged right into the $787 billion stimulus bill, which directed $110 billion to green jobs programs. At the time of the passage of that bill -- what came to be known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute the strategy…”
In a free society, extreme and derivative ideologies from the destructive legacy of Marx, Lenin, and the Frankfurt School can find some appeal to the alienated and disaffected. A constitutional republic like the United States should have sufficient strength to withstand most contradictions and absurdities held by a relatively small minority.
The problem today is threefold: the Left’s wholesale domination of much of the knowledge industry, a growing uninformed and disengaged electorate, and a failing two-party system. The normal process of checks and balances, which is made possible when compromise can be accomplished between the parties, simply no longer works. With the long march through the institutions having resulted in one of those parties no longer sharing much in the way of common ground -- in terms of a philosophical heritage and values of liberty, private property, and limited government -- compromise has become nearly impossible. The radicalization of the Democratic Party has so affected Congress and the current president as to render bipartisan solutions and reconciliation all but impossible.
In the end, what is important for Americans to realize is that the experiment with a left-wing president, like Barack Obama, is less an aberration than the logical outcome of the transformation of both the Democratic Party and the American culture. And the election of Hillary Clinton, a student of Alinsky and well-schooled and practiced in his teachings of deceit and camouflage would take the United States further along its trajectory of decline. Hillary’s election would effectively constitute an Obama third term.    
The big question is whether the nation can survive and prosper if the culture remains fractured with a majority adrift from the heritage, morality and values of liberty and personal responsibility that are at the heart of the Declaration and the Constitution.
Edward Gibbon, the renowned historian, published his first of six-volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in 1776, the year Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. Gibbon described six attributes that Rome embodied at its end: first, an overwhelming love of show and luxury; second, a widening gap between the rich and the poor; third, an obsession with sports and a freakishness in the arts, masquerading as creativity and originality; fourth, a decline in morals, increase in divorce and decline in the institution of the family; fifth, economic deterioration resulting from debasement of the currency, inflation, excessive taxation, and overregulation; and sixth, an increased desire by the citizenry to live off the state. 
One might hope that awareness of factors associated with Rome’s fall would prompt an awakening in America. But so many are now disengaged and relatively few people read books, let alone possess the capacity to reflect deeply about causality and historical parallels. Many feel atomized and helpless.  
Turning around America’s decline will require more than just political change. It’s vital to reestablish a positive and solid framework and foundation, around which a majority consensus could emerge and grow.  Such a foundation was well understood and articulated by George Washington -- revered by many as the greatest of all U.S. presidents. His timeless wisdom was conveyed in both his speech consecrating the nation at its birth and also in his Farewell Address delivered eight years later upon leaving office.  He said:    

 “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports… Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

Unelected and unaccountable judges and regulatory bureaucrats that are part of today’s ever-expanding federal government are only part of the problem. Clearly, American citizenry need to understand the roots and causality of the current national decline, and the need to embark on a new course with the capacity and energy to go deep and broad and transcend party politics. 
Life, liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and even the Constitution itself are now threatened by a secular progressive minority at war with God. Americans need a second Paul Revere moment to wake up and get serious about choosing and electing leaders with the courage to make hard choices and the conviction to correct the nation’s compass. 
Reestablishing the ascendency and authority of first principles that are at the heart of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is a monumental task. Accomplishing it would no doubt unleash an enormous amount of energy, leading to a more vibrant and bountiful economy that would in turn go a long way in securing other vital national needs, from restoring fiscal solvency to rebuilding the military and securing lasting peace.
Scott Powell is senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and author of Covert Cadre, a comprehensive book on the New Left in America published in 1988.  Reach the author at scottp@discovery.org.

Frustration with division and gridlock in Washington leads many Americans to impugn both political parties for the current broken and ineffective state of government. There is plenty of blame to go around, but below the surface there has been a quiet revolution going on in only one of the two parties -- the Democratic Party -- which is the main source of today’s irreconcilable division and moral confusion.
What’s remarkable is how the political and cultural center of American values has collapsed in the last two and a half decades with the Democratic Party having moved dramatically to the left. Recently, Democratic National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz could not explain the difference between the modern Democratic Party platform and that of socialism, while at the same time gushing over the prospect of Socialist Bernie Sanders having a prominent place at the 2016 Democratic Party convention.    
If people today could somehow be transported back to the time of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy, they would swear those standard bearers were Republicans with little in common with today’s Democratic Party. 
America’s two major political parties have always been fundamentally different. The Republican Party has been rooted in the moral principles and transcendent values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Democratic Party acknowledges that the starting point of the country may have been the Declaration and the Constitution, but since Woodrow Wilson many Democratic Party leaders have contended that progress requires constant adaptation, changing morals, and liberal interpretations of law and history. 
The progressive philosophy that the Democratic Party has come to embrace now has its roots less in the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of individual happiness and more in the tenets of race and class identity, equal outcomes, and an expanding welfare state. Since individuals vary in talent, ability, and motivation and the free market system produces unequal outcomes of success, a core principle of the Democratic Party is now redressing this disparity through the redistribution of wealth.
The strongest critique of early industrial capitalism came from the German philosopher Karl Marx, who believed that the contradictory forces of labor and capital inevitably bring about class struggle. This in turn, he argued, causes the working class proletariat to rise up and overthrow the capitalist order, seize the means of production, eliminate private property and create a new order that would equitably distribute resources from each according to his ability, and to each according to his need. The notion of conflict of interest between labor and capital, class warfare, and the need for redistribution of wealth, which has made its way into the Democratic Party, has its roots in Marx.
The proletariat never did revolt successfully en masse in any advanced industrialized state. Instead, Marx’s political and economic revolution was first staged in the largely agrarian nation of Russia, carried out by Marxist revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin made major contributions to Marx’s theories, so much so that Marxism-Leninism became the dominant theoretical paradigm for advancing national liberation movements, communism, and socialism wherever in the world radical revolutionary movements arose.
Among Lenin’s contributions was the theory of the vanguard. Since it was apparent that the proletariat masses were unlikely to rise up, Lenin argued that it was necessary for a relatively small number of vanguard leaders -- professional revolutionaries -- to advance the revolutionary cause by working themselves into positions of influence. By taking over the commanding heights of labor unions, the press, the universities, and professional and religious organizations, a relatively small number of revolutionaries could multiply their influence and exercise political leverage over their unwitting constituents and society at large.
It was Lenin who introduced the concept of the “popular front” and coined the phrase “useful idiots” in describing the masses who could be manipulated into mob action of marches and protests for an ostensibly narrow cause of the popular front, which the communist vanguard was using as a means for a greater revolutionary political end.
As Lenin was consolidating power in Russia, Antonio Gramsci was emerging as a leading Marxist theoretician in Italy and would found the Italian Communist Party in 1921. After being imprisoned by Mussolini, the Fascist prime minister of Italy, Gramsci authored what came to be called the Prison Notebooks, partially published in 1947 and in complete form in 1975, a legacy that made him one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. Gramsci argued that communists’ route to taking power in developed, industrialized societies such as Europe and the United States would be best achieved through a “long march through the institutions.” This would be a gradual process of radicalization of the cultural institutions -- “the superstructure” -- of bourgeois society, a process that would in turn transform the values and morals of society. Gramsci believed that as society’s morals were softened, its political and economic foundation would be more easily smashed and restructured.
Cultural Marxism was also in vogue at the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in Germany -- that is until 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Many members of the “Frankfurt School,” such as Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkeimer, and Wilhelm Reich fled to the United States, where they ultimately found their way into professorships at various elite universities such as Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. In the context of American culture, “the long march through the institutions” meant, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, “working against the established institutions while working in them.”
While the Frankfurt School was neo-Marxist, many of its adherents were less interested in economics and redistribution of wealth than in remaking and transforming society through attitudinal and cultural change. They incorporated Marxist class theory into sociology and psychology while also assimilating Freud’s theories on sexuality. Thus, Marx’s theory of the dialectic of perpetual conflict was joined together with Freud’s neurotic ideas, creating a sort of Freudian-Marxism. Their stated goal was a total transformation of society by breaking down traditional norms and institutions such as monogamous relations and the traditional family. This was to be accomplished by promoting and legitimizing unhinged sexual permissiveness with no cultural or religious restraint.
The countercultural influence of radicals like Marcuse and Gramsci has been advanced more by insinuation and infiltration than by confrontation. Their “quiet” revolution to remake society was intended to be diffused throughout the culture gradually over a period of time. Gramsci argued that alliances with non-communist leftist groups would be essential to the collapse of the capitalist bourgeois order. Marcuse believed that radical intellectuals needed to ally themselves with the socially marginalized substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and ethnicities, the unemployed and the unemployable.
While the influence of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School and Marxists like Gramsci was greatest in intellectual circles in a strategic sense,  Saul Alinsky arrived on the scene in Chicago in the 1930s with the tactical tools for the foot-soldiers of social and political revolution -- the community organizers and non-academic labor and single-issue activists. 
Alinsky had a certain charm and appeal to wealthy funders, and had no trouble raising considerable sums to establish the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago from department store mogul Marshall Field and Sears Roebuck heiress Adele Rosenwald Levy, as well as Gardiner Howland Shaw, an assistant secretary of state in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.
Alinsky also had other benefactors in Washington and Wall Street. Eugene Meyer, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1930 to 1933, bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy sale in 1933 for $825,000. During the difficult years of the Depression that followed, the Post carried stories that legitimized Saul Alinsky and his ideas. 
In keeping with Lenin’s famous quote that “capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” Alinsky once boasted, "I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday."
Alinsky's tactics had more in common with Gramsci and Marcuse than the revolutionary and violent approaches of Russian Marxists Lenin and Stalin. Alinsky, too, believed in gradualism and subversion of the system through infiltration rather than confrontation and revolution.
Alinsky believed that politics was war by other means, stating specifically that “in war the end justifies almost any means.” But he was more than a nihilistic progressive revolutionary. Alinsky’s handbook,  Rules for Radicals, first published in 1971, included an admiration for the prince of darkness, Lucifer, noting that he was “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom…”
By the 1960s Marcuse and Alinsky were recognized as two of the most influential leaders of the New Left, which gained strength and numbers by taking a leading role in the anti-Vietnam War movement. However, Alinsky and Marcuse were critical of the violent and confrontational tactics of many of the anti-war radicals, such as Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, preferring instead that radicals work behind the scenes and bore into the establishment. This was seen later in the 1960s with Alinskyites positioned to take advantage of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” programs, to direct federal money into various Alinksy projects.
Alinksy succeeded in what would be a crowning achievement: the recruitment of young idealistic radicals -- Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- who would go on to climb to the top of political power in the Democratic Party. Hillary wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College in 1969 on Alinsky’s methods and remained a friend of Alinsky until his death in 1972. A decade later, Barack Obama was trained in the methods and Rules for Radicals in the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago.  
Camouflage and deception are key to Alinsky-style organizing. When Barack Obama was organizing black churches in Chicago and was criticized for not attending church himself, he pivoted and became a regular church attendee, ultimately becoming a member at Jeremiah Wright’s radical Trinity United Church of Christ.  
The New Left did not simply fade away when the troops came home from Southeast Asia. It went mainstream, with many of the 60s radicals deciding to follow Alinsky’s counsel to clean up their image, put on suits and infiltrate the system. They would become professional revolutionaries who landed jobs in the knowledge industry: the universities, foundations, and the media and special interest activist groups.
By winning “cultural hegemony,” the acolytes of Gramsci, Alinsky, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School believed that the wellsprings of human thought could be largely controlled by mass psychology and propaganda. One of Alinsky’s unique contributions, explained as the seventh Rule for Radicals, was the tactic to avoid debate on the issues by systematically silencing, ridiculing and marginalizing people of opposing views. At the same time, allies in the media provided cover and a framework of acceptance for radical issues and leaders. Traditional values of morality, family, the work ethic and free market institutions were made to appear outdated -- even reactionary, unnecessary, and culturally unfashionable. Ultimately this evolved into what has become known as political correctness, which now envelops the culture.
By 1980, the counter-cultural alliances would include radical feminist groups, civil rights and ethnic minority advocates, extremist environmental organizations, and advocates of liberation theology, anti-military peace groups, union leaders, radical legal activist organizations like the ACLU, human rights watch-dog organizations, community organizers of the Alinsky model, national and world church council bureaucracies, anti-corporate activists, and various internationalist-minded groups. Working separately and together, these groups could count on a sympathetic media and favorable coverage, which facilitated building bridges to the Democratic Party and becoming vocal constituencies deserving attention and legislative action.
The New Left in America realized that it was neither necessary nor desirable to own the means of production as originally envisioned by Marx. Redistribution could be accomplished through progressive taxation that was enshrined by an enlightened Democratic Party. Corporate priorities could be redirected through sensational and biased media exposure, proxy contests, mass demonstrations, boycotts, activist lawsuits and regulatory actions. No need to be responsible for the means of production, when you could advance Marx’s anti-capitalist agenda from the sidelines by indicting individual corporations and the system of capitalism itself.
By the early to mid-1980s a third of the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives supported the budgetary priorities and the foreign policy advocated by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the leading revolutionary Marxist think tank in the United States, located Washington, D.C.  Robert Borosage, the director of IPS, was succeeding in one of his stated goals to “move the Democratic Party’s debate internally to the left by creating an invisible presence in the party.” The particular genius of Borosage and IPS was their strategy to spawn a myriad of spinoffs and coalitions, a force multiplier that took propaganda and the Leninist popular front strategy to a level never seen before in America.
Fast forward to 2008, and we find the long march through the institutions resulting in the New Left being embedded in constituencies that provided a base of support and policy positions for the Obama presidential campaign. And while Barack Obama had a very unconventional background of lengthy associations with Marxists and anti-American radicals throughout his formative years and early adulthood, a nearly twenty-year membership in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “hate America” church, and an extreme left-wing voting record, the major media–now enveloped with the blinders of political correctness–made little effort to report on his background or examine his substantive qualifications. Barack Obama was both the culturally cool and articulate black candidate who provided a means for national redemption for a racist past, while also being the one candidate who provided a blank slate upon which people could project their own desires for hope and change.
Upon assuming office, President Obama had no problem bypassing the Constitutional advise-and-consent role of Congress in his appointment of a record number of czars, many of whom were so radical they would have failed to pass Senate confirmation. One of the offshoots of former IPS director Robert Borosage was the Apollo Alliance, an organization that he co-founded in 2001. Apollo saw its political clout increase dramatically with the election of Barack Obama. Van Jones, a self-described communist and an Apollo Alliance activist, was appointed Green Jobs czar by President Obama. A month after inauguration, a centerpiece of Apollo’s policy agenda was packaged right into the $787 billion stimulus bill, which directed $110 billion to green jobs programs. At the time of the passage of that bill -- what came to be known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute the strategy…”
In a free society, extreme and derivative ideologies from the destructive legacy of Marx, Lenin, and the Frankfurt School can find some appeal to the alienated and disaffected. A constitutional republic like the United States should have sufficient strength to withstand most contradictions and absurdities held by a relatively small minority.
The problem today is threefold: the Left’s wholesale domination of much of the knowledge industry, a growing uninformed and disengaged electorate, and a failing two-party system. The normal process of checks and balances, which is made possible when compromise can be accomplished between the parties, simply no longer works. With the long march through the institutions having resulted in one of those parties no longer sharing much in the way of common ground -- in terms of a philosophical heritage and values of liberty, private property, and limited government -- compromise has become nearly impossible. The radicalization of the Democratic Party has so affected Congress and the current president as to render bipartisan solutions and reconciliation all but impossible.
In the end, what is important for Americans to realize is that the experiment with a left-wing president, like Barack Obama, is less an aberration than the logical outcome of the transformation of both the Democratic Party and the American culture. And the election of Hillary Clinton, a student of Alinsky and well-schooled and practiced in his teachings of deceit and camouflage would take the United States further along its trajectory of decline. Hillary’s election would effectively constitute an Obama third term.    
The big question is whether the nation can survive and prosper if the culture remains fractured with a majority adrift from the heritage, morality and values of liberty and personal responsibility that are at the heart of the Declaration and the Constitution.
Edward Gibbon, the renowned historian, published his first of six-volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in 1776, the year Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. Gibbon described six attributes that Rome embodied at its end: first, an overwhelming love of show and luxury; second, a widening gap between the rich and the poor; third, an obsession with sports and a freakishness in the arts, masquerading as creativity and originality; fourth, a decline in morals, increase in divorce and decline in the institution of the family; fifth, economic deterioration resulting from debasement of the currency, inflation, excessive taxation, and overregulation; and sixth, an increased desire by the citizenry to live off the state. 
One might hope that awareness of factors associated with Rome’s fall would prompt an awakening in America. But so many are now disengaged and relatively few people read books, let alone possess the capacity to reflect deeply about causality and historical parallels. Many feel atomized and helpless.  
Turning around America’s decline will require more than just political change. It’s vital to reestablish a positive and solid framework and foundation, around which a majority consensus could emerge and grow.  Such a foundation was well understood and articulated by George Washington -- revered by many as the greatest of all U.S. presidents. His timeless wisdom was conveyed in both his speech consecrating the nation at its birth and also in his Farewell Address delivered eight years later upon leaving office.  He said:    

 “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports… Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

Unelected and unaccountable judges and regulatory bureaucrats that are part of today’s ever-expanding federal government are only part of the problem. Clearly, American citizenry need to understand the roots and causality of the current national decline, and the need to embark on a new course with the capacity and energy to go deep and broad and transcend party politics. 
Life, liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and even the Constitution itself are now threatened by a secular progressive minority at war with God. Americans need a second Paul Revere moment to wake up and get serious about choosing and electing leaders with the courage to make hard choices and the conviction to correct the nation’s compass. 
Reestablishing the ascendency and authority of first principles that are at the heart of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is a monumental task. Accomplishing it would no doubt unleash an enormous amount of energy, leading to a more vibrant and bountiful economy that would in turn go a long way in securing other vital national needs, from restoring fiscal solvency to rebuilding the military and securing lasting peace.
Scott Powell is senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and author of Covert Cadre, a comprehensive book on the New Left in America published in 1988.  Reach the author at scottp@discovery.org.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/08/the_quiet_revolution_how_the_new_left_took_over_the_democratic_party_.html#ixzz3pbWoQ4Eb
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