Manufactured Crises
“You tell lies thinking I can’t see.
You can’t cry ‘cause you’re laughing at me,
I’m down (I’m really down)
I’m down (down on the ground)
I’m down (I’m really down)
How can you laugh, when you know I’m down.
How can you laugh,
When you know I’m down.”
There are real problems out there. Not exactly a news flash, I understand. Yet somehow the Democratic Party ignores real problems and focuses on “problems” that they have manufactured out of thin air. This is not accidental. It is a strategy. They see it as a feature, not a bug.
I am now 70 years old. Let us look back at all of the problems the Democrats have tackled and solved in my lifetime…
…That is the sound of crickets that you hear…
OK, that may be slightly unfair. But not terribly so. President Lyndon Johnson started “The War on Poverty” in 1964. Trillions of dollars have been spent on many federal programs in the intervening decades. Today, the poverty rate is nearly identical to what it was in 1964. Trillions of dollars and hundreds of programs and no progress.
Is health care more accessible and affordable since the passage of ObamaCare in 2009? Clearly not, unless, I suppose if you are an illegal alien in California. Jimmy Carter created the Federal Department of Education in 1979. Today, K-12 education is worse on a national basis by almost every metric you can find. Democrats have been in complete charge of LA, NYC, Chicago, SF, Portland, Seattle and any number of other major cities around the country for the last 3 decades or so. Are any of those cities better today? Not a one. Same with one party states like California, Hawaii, Oregon and Illinois.
Democratic policies have failed every time and everywhere. Education, Health Care, caring for the poor and the environment were supposed to be their signature issues. The only place they can claim some success is in the environmental arena. Air and water quality as well as the status of our national parks has arguably improved over the last 70 years.
But that’s it. They used to run on these issues. But it’s hard to do that when it is so obvious that where they have been in charge, the condition of those issue areas has gotten worse. And I haven’t even mentioned immigration, crime or foreign policy. They have rarely run on those issues anyway because the public has never trusted them in those arenas.
So, what’s a political party to do?
Answer: If we can’t solve any of the real problems out there, let’s make some up. I know, we will say that America is racist and sexist and a bunch of other things, and we will vow to fix it. We will say that there are more than two genders and that anyone can be any gender they want and that these people are being discriminated against and we can fix it. We will say that the world is getting hotter because of carbon-based fuels and we’re all going to die soon and only we can fix it. We’ll say that the economy is only successful because of illegal aliens and if we remove them and don’t allow any more in there will be a depression but we will fix it.
In other words, manufacture crises that Republicans will never recognize as real and then use your friends in media, entertainment and education to talk about how much worse these “problems” are than the real problems people have.
It’s a fine plan, except that voters are seeing though it and it is only working with the Democratic core. Your basic NPR listening leftist does think that those things are the top of the list of problems to be solved. Well, that and maybe encountering soggy avocado toast with your chardonnay.
But most people see the bigger problems that affect their everyday lives and don’t see the Democrats offering any solutions.
The next stage has been interesting. In those two bastions of Neo-Marxism, California and New York, we see a new rallying cry amongst the elected Democrat cabal. Cost of Living. Democrats across the state of California and in New York City are now crowing that their number one issue is to lower the cost of living.
I’ll say this. They have finally identified a real problem instead of a manufactured one. Their challenge is that their policies caused, or at the very least exacerbated this problem. Taxes, regulation, lawsuit abuse, union work rules, minimum wage increases, environmental nonsensical restrictions and requirements have all increased the cost of everything largely in blue states. Everyone is concerned about the cost of living. The concern is greatest in blue states where the costs are highest. But since they never advertised “cost of living” as a principle of the party, they are hoping voters do not connect them with the problem. Just “blame it on Trump.”
The correct solution to this problem would be to roll back all the laws they put in place that raised these living costs in the first place. But Democrats never admit that they were wrong so that is out of the question. The solution, therefore is essentially socialism. Price controls and rent controls and government run stores and more restrictions on almost everything. These are not new ideas. They have been done before in many places and have caused a decline in the standard of living 100% of the time. But that’s not what these people were taught at Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley.
The other playbook they are running today is not to propose anything, knowing that their proposals won’t be popular, and to simply be “not Trump” without disclosing what would replace Trumpism.
You see the pattern. Once, the Democratic Party had a lot of ideas to solve real world problems. They were genuine in their zeal and desire to do right. But, most of those ideas failed to solve the problem. The next stage was to manufacture fake problems and then offer themselves as the only way to fix those fake problems. That is running its course. Now, they have arrived at the conclusion that the reason their solutions to real problems did not work is because they didn’t go far enough. Taxes, regulation and government oversight didn’t work. Therefore, we must need full government control and ownership and dictates. You can’t get to the utopia they envision by just regulating inside a free society. You must take away that freedom and have government dictate and force the equity and solutions of Marxist nirvana.
I wish it were not so. I remember not that long ago when you could work with Democrats. Both Rs and Ds wanted the same things, but disagreed on how to get there. Now it seems, they want something totally different.
There are still plenty of reasonable Democrats both in office and voting. Increasingly, their party has left them. They will either fight within the party to stop the leftward drift, or they will leave it.
The Democratic Party is, in the Beatles words, “really down.” That doesn’t mean they can’t win again. They can. They have rigged voting in many jurisdictions and they have their various media, entertainment and university outlets to lie to voters on their behalf. Or, as we have seen before in this country and in others, if the party in charge fails, voters will choose the alternative even if it may be worse.
Hopefully, the party currently in charge of the country and most states will not fail. In the meantime, I will crawl in a hole and worry about the end of the earth due to global warming which happened last year….
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free
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