The Flawed Liberal Mind

Liberals are liberals first
Posted: January 28, 20091:00 am Eastern© 2009
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.
~ Saul Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals," No. 13
We have all heard about how crazy liberals are. Conservative intellectual and radio host Michael Savage even wrote a book about this phenomenon, his 2005 New York Times best-seller, "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder." Likewise, in 2008, Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter Jr., M.D., wrote in his best-seller, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness," the following:
The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind.
Liberals are liberals first. Am I being polemical? Yes, to a degree, but I am not being personal. I'm not contending that all liberals are crazy, but I will say, along with Dr. Savage and Dr. Rossiter, that a logical, legal and medical case can be made that liberalism (i.e., socialism, progressivism, egalitarianism) is not a rational political belief system.
On this point, last Friday, President Obama chided Republican leaders for being stupid enough to listen to conservative stalwart Rush Limbaugh. Obama said, "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done." With a hushed silence over the room, the messiah went further saying, "If we don't get this done we (the Democrats) could lose seats and I could lose re-election. But we can't let people like Rush Limbaugh stall this. That's how things don't get done in this town."
Rush was clicking on all cylinders over the weekend when he remarked about Obama's criticism of him in this manner:
Obama's plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party in the same way FDR's New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule, and it would also simultaneously seriously damage any hope of future tax cuts. … Put simply, I believe [economic] stimulus is aimed at re-establishing "eternal" power for the Democrat Party rather than stimulating the economy, because anyone with a brain knows this is NOT how you stimulate the economy.

When President Obama promised America "FDR, part II," few of the political pundits took notice because ideologically they are elitists, liberals and socialists like Obama. The propaganda press, the professors of the academy, judges, the Democrats and most Republicans all have fallen prey to the siren song of socialism and leviathan government taking over more and more of private enterprise. Wall Street, the investment banks, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the home mortgage industry, the auto industry, states like California, Arizona and Michigan on the verge of bankruptcy, even the porn industry, is just the beginning. They all want "bailouts" i.e., "welfare," i.e., unearned, undeserved, unconstitutional confiscation of money belonging to "We the People" and given to others who didn't earn it and don't deserve it to secure Democrat Party votes in perpetuity. It's legalized thievery. It is Mafia tactics on a grand scale.
What the GOP seems oblivious to knowing and what I am trying to teach my students at Savannah State University is politics through a historical lens. That means we study politics (or any other subject for that matter) through the lens and judgment of history and through the non-partisan philosophy of Veritas – truth. All else is irrelevant propaganda.
That said, history has definitively demonstrated that since President Theodore Roosevelt, liberals (or "progressives," which was what socialists and liberals were called 100 years ago) made policy proposals not with the intent of solving real social, economic, education, legal, race, class, gender problems, but to solidify their power over the people forever. Just look at some of the political philosophy, policy and legislation passed by presidential executive order or by illegal collusion with Congress over the past 100 years:

~Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) – the first true "progressive" president, though a Republican, invented the "imperial presidency" and used the "bully pulpit" and his "Fair Deal" policies to concoct all sorts of policies and programs that had no correlation with free-market capitalism (i.e., "trust busting") or respect for private property. (Roosevelt set aside more land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined, 194 million acres.)
Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) – Jonah Goldberg, in his important book, "Liberal Fascism," quoted this president: "True leaders" uses the masses like "tools"; "All progressives ask or desire is permission – in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word – to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle."

~Franklin Delano Roosevelt [FDR] (1933-45) – Used the stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression as a pretext to enact his "New Deal" to grow the government in gargantuan proportions over the people and to use the socialist welfare state as the "power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe. …"

~Lyndon B. Johnson [LBJ] (1963-69) – "The Great Society" or "War against Poverty" programs including AFDC, Food Stamp Act, Medicare, Medicaid; greatly expanded FDR's welfare state to connect every conceivable aspect of the American citizen to the tentacles of leviathan government. (Remember LBJ was a protégé of FDR.)

~Richard Nixon (1969-74) – Although a "Republican," Nixon gave America socialist wage and price controls, the Environmental Protection Agency and affirmative action. He also gave us two unremarkable liberal justices on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun. Blackmun authored the Roe v. Wade decision in 1972, arguably (after Dred Scott v. Sanford [1854] upholding slavery) the most murderous, infamous decision in the history of American constitutional law.

~George W. Bush (2001-09) – singlehandedly deconstructed the Reagan Revolution by his bungling, incoherent, incompetent domestic policies (amnesty for illegal aliens, No Child Left Behind), foreign policy (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and reinstituting a Bob Michaelesque GOP irrelevance that will probably mimic the wilderness years of 1954-94.

~Barack Obama (2009- ) – His first call as president was to Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Arafat's protégé and the leader of the "former" Palestinian terrorist group Fatah. His first public interview as president was with the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya. Obama's first executive order was to limit lobbyist influence in Washington, D.C., while at the same time granting Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn an exemption because Lynn was a lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon. Other early policies that seem critical to Obama's legacy and the Democrat majority in Congress can be summarized in three words – abortion, abortion and abortion.

Rush Limbaugh was right – "liberals are liberals first." Liberal Democrats create policies not to solve problems, but to win elections and make more and more people dependent on the government welfare programs they provide. Since FDR, liberals have used every Machiavellian tactic to create a Leninist groupthink mentality; a slavish and addictive dependence on government that Democrats hope will keep them in power in perpetuity. This is what Rush meant he said, "Obama's plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party in the same way FDR's New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule."
When I see the GOP sitting politely with President Obama before the cameras – neutered, compliant and irrelevant – I start shouting at my TV set: "WHERE ARE THE REAL MEN IN THE GOP!?" Then Rush helped me to remember: Don't think Obama, think Saul Alinsky, Obama's community organizer mentor, who said in Rule 13 of Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" – "Pick the target [Rush Limbaugh, the conservative base], freeze it, personalize it and polarize it." This is what President Obama masterfully executed at last Friday's press conference with the GOP.
Why don't the Republicans understand that they are playing checkers while Obama and the Democrats are playing chess? The GOP is trying to win an election in the next two years, and the Democrats are using Machiavellian tactics to win elections for the next 40 years. Perhaps that's why the GOP doesn't stand for the "Grand Old Party" anymore. The more appropriate acronym is "GIP" … the "Grand Irrelevant Party."