The Bush administration spent billions in Afghanistan and Iraq in a Wilsonian effort to remake two backward societies into perfectible democracies, to enact the progressive notion that we were gods who could create the perfect world. Both Bushes also talked about some variation of a “new world order.”
Bush 43 signed into law a campaign-finance reform bill, a passion of Republican Senator John McCain, which was one of the most anti-free-speech laws passed by Congress since the Sedition Act under Wilson. As Senator Ted Cruz, among others, has pointed out, limiting the amount of contributions that an individual can make to a candidate of his or her choice is a racket designed to protect incumbents from being challenged by outsiders. Because incumbents already have good name recognition, they generally need far less money to win reelection than a challenger needs to get elected in the first place. (Not to mention that incumbents, because of their time in office, also usually have access to tons of money from lobbyists and special interests.)
Republicans are still at it. The Republican leadership in the House, led by men like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, pushed for amnesty for illegal immigrants. They were urged on and supported by corporate-welfare advocates, such as members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who are prepared to flout all respect for the rule of law, as long as they can get cheap labor for their own businesses.
They also pushed for funding of the Export-Import Bank, a government entity created by Franklin Roosevelt that gives taxpayer-backed loans to the “right” corporations and supposedly helps them sell American products overseas. While it sells itself as a tool to help small businesses, the truth is that nearly ninety percent of the Export-Import Bank’s funding goes to big corporations such as Boeing, General Electric, and Caterpillar. These companies do a fine job of creating their products and providing American jobs all on their own. According to the classical liberal, free-market way of thinking, they do not need any extra handouts from the state. But that’s not what progressives believe.
In case there’s still any doubt, let’s check in with Stuart Chase (discussed at more length in part III of this book), the key FDR adviser who coined the term New Deal. In his eighteen-point plan to move the United States from free enterprise to a new “Political System X”—which Chase also tentatively identified as “state capitalism”—he included this line at number nine: “The control of foreign trade by the government.”
The Export-Import Bank, a product of Roosevelt and Chase’s New Deal, is a major part of keeping the government’s hand in foreign trade, clearly a progressive notion. But what does this have to do with Republicans?
In 2015, the Export-Import Bank faced its first real existential threat, as conservative lawmakers refused to renew its charter, actually putting it out of action for a matter of months. The fight over the Export-Import Bank that year led to many strident debates in both houses of Congress as Republicans found themselves drawing battle lines. In the Senate, Ted Cruz took to the floor to call out Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for refusing to disclose a secret deal McConnell had made to keep the Export-Import Bank open.
In the end, sixty-two Republicans in the House joined most Democrats on a measure to save the Export-Import Bank. In December 2015, final legislation that would preserve the bank until 2019 was tucked into a larger highway bill and passed both Houses. The Washington media called it “a paragon of Capitol Hill humming along as it was designed to.”
Republicans voted for more government control of trade, a progressive principle straight out of the New Deal playbook. People like Cruz and Representative Jeb Hensarling tried to put a stop to it, but, as the media said, progressivism just kept “humming along” with bipartisan support. Why? Because too many politicians, including Republicans, were afraid of giving up even an inch of their own power and control. They feared the consequences if they failed to deliver for their corporate pals at the Chamber of Commerce and other big-money lobbyists. Given a chance to shut down a progressive New Deal program, Republicans instead decided to keep their heads down and keep their power, too afraid to give the real free market a chance.
LIE 6
* * *
PROGRESSIVES BELIEVE IN RACIAL EQUALITY (EUGENICS)
Hillary Clinton has spent her career fighting for equality for all Americans.
—PRIORITIES USA ACTION, PRO-CLINTON SUPER-PAC, 2016 CAMPAIGN
As president of the United States, nobody will fight harder to end institutional racism and to reform our broken criminal justice system.
—BERNIE SANDERS, 2016 CAMPAIGN
THE LIE
* * *
Progressives tell us over and over again how much they believe in equality for everyone. They spend a lot of time talking about racial equality—and definitely not because the African-American community is seen as a deep and critical reservoir for Democratic votes.
In the 2016 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders tripped over each other in their attempts to shine as the greater champion of black Americans. The Clinton campaign’s line was that “more than a half a century after Dr. King voiced his dream for a more equal America, and civil rights activists marched and died for the right to vote, America’s struggle with racism remains far from finished.”
Clinton herself has declared: “We can’t hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America. We have to name them, and own them, and then change them.”
Sanders has also invoked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., pandering desperately for votes during the South Carolina primary with an ad highlighting his attendance at King’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. “He was there when Dr. King marched on Washington,” the ad says of Sanders, “unafraid to challenge the status quo to end racial profiling, take on police misconduct, and take down a system that profits from mass imprisonment.” In the same spot, Sanders thunders, “There is no president who will fight harder to end institutional racism.”
Even fellow authoritarian Donald Trump made his own ham-handed attempts to woo black voters—or, rather, to declare that he didn’t have to: “I have a great relationship with African-Americans,” he told CNN. “I just have great respect for them, and you know they like me. I like them.” His outreach to Hispanic voters was best exemplified by his posting a picture of himself on Cinco de Mayo eating a taco salad. Flashing a grin and a thumbs-up, Trump declared in the photo’s caption: “I love Hispanics!”
Another prominent minority community, Americans with disabilities, is less aggressively courted around election season, but progressives nevertheless take prominent stances on rights for the disabled. Clinton told us, “We should acknowledge how the disabilities community has played such an important role in changing things for the better in our country,” and her campaign pointed out that “Hillary has spent her life fighting for the rights of Americans with disabilities.”
According to “champion for the rights of people with disabilities” Sanders, “We as a nation have a moral responsibility to ensure that all Americans have access to the programs and the support needed to contribute to society, live with dignity, and achieve a high quality of life.”
But what if all of this were a cruel lie? What if it were all a shallow and cynically rhetorical attempt to win votes and assume power? What if these minority communities were actually the object of progressive contempt rather than compassion?
THE TRUTH
* * *
Progressives actually do believe in equality for everyone—as long as everyone is equally strong, brilliant, and “Nordic.” Progressives may talk a lot about fighting for the rights of African-Americans, disabled Americans, and other minorities now, but the movement from which they continue to claim inspiration fought for exactly the opposite: their lynching, their sterilization and abortion, and their political neutralization. In perhaps less offensive and less overt ways than a century ago, that fight continues today.
Here is one of the “hard truths about race and justice in America” that Clinton will n
ever acknowledge: in traditional American progressivism, there is literally no place for those who don’t fit into progressives’ ideal society.
We learned about Margaret Sanger’s obsession with eugenics in part I and her many unsavory quotes about culling the “intake and output on morons, mental defectives, epileptics . . . illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends.” Sanger recognized that eugenics’ aim could be advanced by birth control, especially among the lower classes. Although there was some initial resistance to her methods—there were concerns that “desirable” people using birth control would be counterproductive—Thomas Leonard notes that Sanger “convinced skeptical eugenicists that birth control could be a valuable tool of eugenics.”
The other valuable tool was forced sterilization, the removal of testicles and ovaries. Progressives across America in the 1910s and ’20s championed “model laws” for sterilization. One early adopter was New Jersey, which passed an act “to authorize and provide for the sterilization of feeble-minded (including idiots, imbeciles and morons), epileptics, rapists and certain criminals and other defectives.” The man who signed that law was Governor Woodrow Wilson.
Virginia passed its eugenics legislation in 1924. Three years later, it was challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Buck v. Bell. The case involved Carrie Buck, a young woman who had given birth to an illegitimate child and who had been deemed “feeble-minded” and committed to a mental institution, which had then ordered her sterilized. Buck and her legal guardian protested, claiming that her right to due process as well as her rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated.
The Court ruled eight-to-one against Buck, and the majority opinion was written by progressive icon Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in especially chilling language: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” Agreeing with the “evidence” presented that Buck’s mother, Buck herself, and Buck’s daughter were all “feeble-minded,” Holmes declared: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The state of Virginia cut Buck’s Fallopian tubes. She was one of sixty thousand Americans forcibly sterilized under eugenics laws.
Decades later, when the world was sifting through the rubble of the World War II and the monstrosities of state-sponsored eugenics had been laid bare, Hitler’s surviving eugenicists were put on trial at Nuremberg. From the dock, these men—whose leader had been inspired by Wilson’s and Virginia’s model sterilization laws—tried to argue their case. The presiding Allied judges were treated to a grim defense: the Nazis quoted Justice Holmes’s opinion in Buck v. Bell.
State-sponsored eugenics has, by the grace of God, since been exposed for the horror show that it is. But one vestige of the progressive eugenicist heyday of the early 1900s remains: Planned Parenthood, Sanger’s organization, whose explicit mission is to help women exterminate hundreds of thousands of human beings every year, with a disproportionate effect on children of color.
In 2009, Planned Parenthood conferred the Margaret Sanger Award on Hillary Clinton. Did Clinton refuse this award? Did she decline to associate herself with a vicious racist and eugenicist, a woman who explicitly wrote in a letter that “we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population”?
On the contrary. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision,” Clinton said, later adding that “there are a lot of lessons that we can learn from her life and from the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so bravely.”
How could she admire a woman like this? Because at the very heart of the progressive movement is the belief that some people are better than others, that some people are more worthy, that some deserve to live, and others—so-called drains on society—deserve to die. They belittle conservatives for their “fetish” for life. What are they afflicted with, then, but a “fetish” for death?
Planned Parenthood carries out more than three hundred thousand abortions every year. And it continues to target minorities by disproportionately locating Planned Parenthood clinics in black and Hispanic neighborhoods (nearly eighty percent of its facilities are located in or near these areas). Black women, while making up only about 6.6 percent of the population, accounted for 35.7 percent of all abortions in 2010.
Could Sanger, a woman who once stood before an audience dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes in 1926, ever have imagined how her grand scheme would turn out?
If fear drives the progressives’ quest for more power and more control, why do they fear those they seek to weed out through eugenics? What threat could possibly be posed by the “morons” and “mental defectives” Sanger railed against? It’s simple: these people stood in the way of the progressive utopia. These “undesirables” could not overthrow a progressive state, but they could erode it from within with their imperfections. In order to create the perfect progressive society, mankind had to “progress” beyond mental illness and other impurities—by any means necessary.
Is it any wonder that progressive eugenicists made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan? Is it any wonder that American progressives’ pioneering work in eugenics inspired Hitler? So many progressives threw themselves into the “scientific” work of figuring out whose genes deserved to live on and whose should be made to die out. But what drove them? What drove the zeal behind the eugenics movement and the creation of Planned Parenthood, which continues its work today?
Fear, of course. The same fear we’ve met on nearly every other page of this book. Yes, some eugenicists may have pitied the “undesirables” they sought to remove from the human gene pool, some certainly hated them, and some may have thought they were simply building a better society through science. But the common thread was fear, whether they knew it or not. They feared their world would be undermined by every “unfit” person allowed to continue to live in it. They looked at the population with mental, behavioral, or other issues, and they did not see their fellow men and women in need of help, they saw a menace to be feared. That, of course, was the ultimate irony: progressive eugenicists dismissed their targets as merely the “feeble-minded,” yet they were apparently strong enough to constitute a threat to the whole progressive agenda.
This may all seem hard to take considering modern progressives’ vow to fight for equality for all Americans. But the truth is, their ideological forebears fought for the exact opposite. And, like Clinton’s continued veneration of eugenicist Sanger, modern progressives remain ignorant—most likely willfully ignorant—of the sordid history of their movement. Until they fully repudiate their past, however, their supposed commitment to “equality” for less fortunate Americans will continue to ring hollow.
LIE 7
* * *
PROGRESSIVES OPPOSE NAZISM, FASCISM, AND COMMUNISM
The Nazis had destroyed the Left, but the Right remained. . . . For [Hitler], the Nazi socialist slogans had been merely propaganda, means of winning over the masses on his way to power.
—WILLIAM SHIRER, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH
THE LIE
* * *
You recognize one of the Left’s favorite parlor tricks, yes? They like to label any conservative they don’t like (which is pretty much all of them) as the “next Hitler” and terrify the rest of us about a new Reich determined to strip away basic human rights.
Case in point: George W. Bush. (Although Bush was, as we’ve seen, hardly true to foundational conservative principles, he was nonetheless a favorite target of the leftist entertainment industry.)
Comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo was a constant critic of the former president, once referring to the Bush administration as the “forty-third Reich.”
Following the 2004 elections, si
nger Linda Ronstadt attacked not only Bush but all newly elected Republicans, saying, “Now we’ve got a new bunch of Hitlers.”
The left-wing hate group MoveOn.org celebrated a video submitted as part of a contest in which Bush was compared to Hitler and proclaimed “what were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003.”
In 2008, Madonna used the song “Get Stupid” to display images of Senator John McCain alongside Hitler.
In 2012, there were a number of comparisons made by those on the left between Mitt Romney and the architect of the Holocaust. Liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias suggested that Hitler and Romney were somehow comparable because they both used Swiss bank accounts, and Obama adviser David Axelrod referred to Romney’s campaign efforts in Illinois as a “Mittzkrieg,” an obvious reference to the Nazis’ Blitzkrieg military strategy in World War II.
And in 2016, TV’s The View’s resident nutbar leftist, Joy Behar, called support for Ted Cruz akin to “Jews for Hitler.”
There’s a method to all of this madness. Progressives constantly terrify their followers by preaching that conservatives are would-be authoritarians who would return us to the years of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, a world of racists and political purges and economic punishment to those who don’t rank among the privileged few. There’s a reason the media loves to refer to supporters of Stalin, for example, as “conservatives.” In 2014, the Washington Post published an article about neo-Stalinist Vladimir Putin entitled “Why U.S. Conservatives Love Russia’s Vladimir Putin.” (Spoiler alert: They don’t.)