Thaddeus G. McCotter writes that “Big Government is Chaos” and thank goodness for the new Trump budget that cuts $163 billion and returns discretionary spending other than defense to 2017 levels.
Savings come from eliminating radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory (CRT) programs, Green New Scam funding,
And so on. Did you know how mandatory vs. discretionary spending line up? Usgsovernmentspending.com has a page on it. Mandatory is blue, and keeps getting bigger. Of course, you know that defense spending is discretionary.
Irving Kristol rule, that if you want to help the poor, as in Social Security or Medicare, you need to deal in the middle class. Today everything Democrats do infuriates the middle class.
It’s not that the Democrats have changed their game. Ever since Marx, the Left has operated what experts call “Allyship.” The Left is always the Ally of the Oppressed Peoples in their fight against the Oppressors. First it was the workers fighting the capitalists, then all good people fighting for black civil rights, then women fighting the patriarchy. But now it’s fighting for transgenders in the women’s bathroom and fighting for undocumented migrants against… Yes — who, exactly?
Do you see the point? Our liberal friends have been playing the game of fighting for the oppressed for over a century. They could deal the middle class in when they were fighting for pensions in the 1930s and healthcare in the 1960s. But how do you deal the middle class into the migrant scam? Everything about migrants harms the middle class, just as everything about transgenders in sports and bathrooms harms women. And everything about Climate Change harms everyone except the fly-private set.
See, liberals told us they were fighting for justice. Maybe they were. Maybe they thought they were. But in the end, all government spending amounts to buying votes with other peoples’ money. It works fine when you are taxing oligarchs to give to the poor and the middle class: the electoral math works out. But when it comes to spending money on the NGO Industrial Complex, or the Migrant Industrial Complex, or the Climate Industrial Complex, or the Bathroom Industrial Complex then the ordinary middle class need not apply.
You see, I believe that all the window dressing about “human rights” and “liberal democracy” and “justice” is dancing around the brutal fact of politics, that it is always about fighting the enemy and gifting your friends.
But what are the Democrats to do, if they don’t care about the ordinary middle class, and never did? Liberal Ruy Teixeira proposes two alternative strategies: restoration or change.
By restoration, Teixeira means simply fighting Trump to restore Democrats to power.
[I]t’s all fight, fight, fight with the implication that putting Democrats back in power will make everything dandy.
And Democrats like JB Pritzker are calling for “mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption.” But the voters don’t want that. They want “change.”
To be the party of change in our current populist era, when the party’s brand is in wretched shape and views of Democratic governance are so negative, you have to actually change the party.
But change the party to what? Well, Bill Clinton already tried to pretend to change, running as a New Democrat in 1992. But then he went full tax-increase and HillaryCare and lost Congress for the first time in 40 years in the 1994 midterms to Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America.
Bill Clinton was smart. But JB Pritzker? Bernie Sanders? Jasmine Crockett?
Seriously, the Democrats have a gigantic problem. They are the party of the educated class, giving jobs and status and meaning to NGO worthies and sweetie pies like NPR boss Katherine Maher. They have nothing to say to the ordinary middle class and the working class, not any more.
You can see that the educated class really doesn’t know what to do, as they lawfare the opposition, trying to destroy Donald Trump and disqualify “Far Right” political candidates in Europe.
Never mind our liberal friends. Let’s talk about us. When Irving Kristol died in 2009, I wrote at AT about his “man-centered” conservatism and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “woman-centered” conservatism.
The great truth of man-centered conservatism over socialism is that men can best thrive on this earth if you surrender yourself and serve your fellow humans in the market. The great truth of woman-centered conservatism over feminism is that women thrive better connecting and caring in a web of relationship than in posing as independent women or repining as government dependents.
I think my view expresses the instinctive yearnings of the vast majority of the middle class. But imagine our Democratic friends running on a platform like that! Who’s your oppressor? Who’s your victim? Answer yes or no!
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: C. Chantrill
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