Sunday, July 26, 2015

Evidence of an Administrative State


IM:  Gadfly, what are your thoughts about the recent Planned Parenthood revelations?

Old Gadfly:  You are referring to the harvesting of fetal tissue?

IM:  Yes.

Old Gadfly:  Interestingly, those who support abortion frame the issue in terms of the means by which this practice was revealed, and find that part immoral.  So they attack the messenger and not the message.  Many of these same people have no issue with Harry Reid accusing Romney of not paying taxes for 10 years and then recently publicly acknowledging it was a false statement from the outset.  His response to a reporter was “Romney lost didn’t he?”  Where is the outrage for blatant dishonesty?  But, I digress.  This current debate is really about unalienable rights—one party believes the unalienable right to life came from God.  The secular humanists, however, believe the administrative state has the superior authority to grant the unalienable right to abort a life— the Supreme Court institutionalized this unalienable right in the Roe versus Wade ruling in 1973 and now the administrative state funds the largest abortion producing institution, Planned Parenthood, with around $500 million annually.  

IM:  Joy Overbeck wrote an interesting column along these lines, singling out Hillary Clinton and her perspective on this subject.  What many good Americans do not comprehend is the very deliberate machinations taking place to secure political power.  By eliminating or diminishing God, the administrative state becomes the ultimate moral authority.  This is exactly what has happened in totalitarian nations that embraced fascism (Germany and Italy) and Communism (the former Soviet Union, China, and North Korea).

AM:  Yet, I must say Planned Parenthood does have an attractive leader at the helm.



Old Gadfly:  I offer two comments in response.  First, the leader is paid over $590,000 per year in salary and benefits for a 35 hour work week (according their most recent IRS Form 990 report).  Second, Hannah Arendt might have something to say about the “banality of evil” when associating apparent attractiveness with the insidious evil taking place under the leader’s command.[1] 

IM:  This conversation motivates me to reread Jonah Goldberg’s, Liberal Fascism.  And, as I recall, one of our discussions about deliberate engineering of public sentiment was based on clearly establishing indentured classes—women being one of them.

Old Gadfly:  Sadly, too many within these indentured classes believe the progressive rhetoric and acquiesce to being human instruments in the elite, central planner cause to achieve and to maintain political power.  As C.S. Lewis astutely observed in his book, The Abolition of Man, the conditioners are relatively successful in conditioning those who become the conditioned.  Even before Lewis, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book, Democracy in America, warned of the “soft tyranny” that would evolve when people vote for “government-provided entitlements.”  Politicians and government administrators would then abuse this dynamic.  Lacking this understanding, Americans will become, in Tocqueville’s prophecy, “a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

AM:  To accelerate a move toward a timid flock, progressives must attack those who seek the truth.

IM:  AM, that is a very sobering observation:  “progressives must attack those who seek the truth.”  We have discussed numerous times Hayek’s observations about the end of truth:  that it is not tolerable to disagree with elite, central planning values; that each individual must internalize those values to the point where he or she spontaneously reacts to any opposition.[2]

AM:  Exactly.  Four U.S. Representatives, all Democrat (Jan Schakowsky, Zoe Lofgren, Jerry Nadler, and Yvette Clarke) have thus reacted and asked the U.S. and California Attorneys General to open a criminal investigation against the Center for Medical Progress, which collected the Planned Parenthood video footage.

Old Gadfly:  We have previously discussed how controlling the narrative is critical for the progressive movement.  Manipulating language to conflate and obfuscate is an important tactic.   A university professor describes how this tactic was employed in 2006 by the State of Maryland to successfully pass legislation allowing state taxpayer funds for human embryonic stem cell research.[3]  She emphasized the role of “clear, non-controversial terminology in debate, discussion, and potential compromise. . . . For instance, what does the term ‘embryonic’ stem cell evoke in ordinary citizens, and how can policymakers avoid images of little fingers and toes, or abortion clinics, when discussing them?”[4]  After describing the chronological development of legislation, the professor highlighted the key changes in wording that led to successful passage:  “Throughout the bill, the words ‘human embryo’ were replaced by ‘certain material’ or ‘unused material.’”[5]  She continued with this observation: “Proponents of stem cell research funding had to learn to use less politically sensitive terms, substituting ‘unused material’ for ‘human embryos’ when discussing donations from infertility treatments.”[6] This is clearly an example of one ideological group—that is, the elite, central planners--manipulating language to achieve a desired outcome. Once enacted, settled law achieves momentum that makes it difficult to reverse or change course.  As my good friend, Dennis, and I discussed just yesterday, settled law, or legal precedents, are treated as unchallenged axioms, even though subsequent conditions and circumstances may be significantly different.

AM:  Are we destined, then, to be “a flock of timid and industrious animals” controlled by the administrative state?

Old Gadfly:  Not necessarily.   Americans have unwisely and unwittingly outsourced that political power to a growing administrative state.  For those Americans that possess the capacity to think for themselves, “we the people” still have inherent, political power and unalienable rights that are God-given.  I believe we still have time to restore the balance of political power.  The Article V Convention of States project (www.ConventionofStates.com) provides such a remedy, and I am fully on board with this peaceful, Constitutional solution. 

IM:  Count on me being part of the reawakening!

AM:  Count me in as well.    



[1] See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil, (New York, NY:  The Penguin Group, 2006 [1963]).
[2] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 2007 [1944]), p. 171.
[3] Patricia M. Alt, “The Political Linguistics of Maryland’s Stem Cell Research Bill,” Ethics Today, Volume 8, Number 4, Summer 2006, retrieved October 7, 2011 from http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/aspa/unpan024115.pdf 
[4] Ibid, p. 5.
[5] Ibid, p. 11.
[6] Ibid, p. 12.

No comments:

Post a Comment