Welcome To The American Autumn
October 11, 2011 by Robert Ringer
The dreams-from-my-father moment appears to be nearing as riots, sit-ins and protests grow throughout the country. “Social-justice” miscreants — a whole new generation of hippies — have escaped their cages and are running wild in New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago and other U.S. cities. And make no mistake about it: They’re looking for red meat.
This weird mixture of commies and cuckoos are ecstatic over what BHO’s policies have done to the U.S. economy in less than three years, and they must surely be drooling over the thought of five more years of economic destruction. They believe, or at least they believe they believe, in the greatest of all contradictions — that by destroying wealth, there will be more wealth to share with “the masses”… you know, like in Mao Zedong’s China, Vladimir Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
As you would expect, high-profile radicals — led by the Radical-in-Chief in the White House — are now crawling out of the woodwork and cheerleading the rabble-rousers. Some examples:
- Frances Fox Piven, of Cloward-Piven fame, has waited four decades for a far-left savior to finish the job of destroying the U.S. economy and getting a majority of Americans dependent on the government for survival. Piven and her late husband, Richard Cloward, wrote an infamous article in 1966 titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” In it they advocated pushing more people into social-welfare programs, which they believed would collapse the system and force reforms that would lead to a guaranteed annual income. This ugly little slice of Marxist cunning is commonly referred to as the “Cloward–Piven strategy.” In an interview at one of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, Piven said, “I teach at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. I am here because I am so enthusiastic about the possibilities of this sit-in, over the marches that are occurring over postal-worker issues, the sister demonstrations that are starting in Chicago and Los Angeles, and maybe in Boston. I think we desperately need a popular uprising in the United States.” I agree. We do need a popular uprising in the United States, but the Tea Party is already addressing that need. Tea Partiers just have to become more aggressive in pushing back against big government.
- Van Jones, the first known self-avowed communist appointed to a major position (Green Jobs Czar) by an American President, praised the Wall Street hippie occupiers as the start of an “American Autumn.” Jones has instituted something called the “American Dream Movement” that, as far as I can tell, seeks to destroy the American dream and replace it with an equality-of-results society. Jones says he wants to “build a progressive counterbalance to the tea party” and take back the American dream. Sounds a bit strange — take the American dream? I wonder how you do that. After all, the American dream is about freedom. Does Jones mean that he wants to take freedom away from those he deems to be too successful?
- Even Rosanne Barr, a one-time comedienne who was not very funny even in her prime, recently came back from the dead to offer up this Mao-like solution to the grievances of the social-justice crowd: “I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the ability to pay back anything over $100 million [of] personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they are unable to live on that amount… of that amount… then they should, you know, go to the reeducation camps. And if that doesn’t help, then being beheaded.”
Sounds like fun to me. Maybe the government will start subsidizing guillotine manufacturers and refer to them as creators of “red jobs.”
Of course, no one comes close to stirring up hatred like the great uniter in the Oval Office. While the others vie for attention, Barack Obama just keeps cruising along at the front of the revolutionary pack with his redistribution-of-wealth rhetoric, sounding more and more like a hysterical kid whose angry roots are exploding into the open for all to see.
It goes without saying that none of this is new. Those of us who are halfway informed and clearheaded have seen and read about this down-with-the-rich gibberish many times before. It’s the same old tired mantra of the left, going all the way back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Today, the anti-capitalists in Congress are preaching the mantra louder than ever.
These Constitutional usurpers carry the misleading banner of compassion, while chuckling at an opposition that doesn’t have strong enough convictions to challenge them. Clearly, they view these conviction-lacking capitalists as useful idiots who can be manipulated into helping them achieve their goals.
If I were asked to give one piece of advice to students majoring in political science, I would tell them to beware of the individual who preaches endlessly about compassion, “shared prosperity,” “collective salvation” and other such abstract tripe. Such preaching has led to the deaths of at least a couple of hundred million people over the past two centuries, and the atrocities continue to this day.
Henry Grady Weaver put it well in The Mainspring of Human Progress when he wrote:
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. …
The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional “do-gooders,” who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others — with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.
Nobel Prize novelist and poet Anatole France put it more simply when he said, “Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.”
But perhaps the best and simplest of all is to be found in the aphorism, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Of course, this statement assumes that an individual has good intentions to begin with, but that’s another article for another time.
With that, let’s all sit back and enjoy Van Jones’ American Autumn — now in progress. I have to believe Maximilien Robespierre would have loved it.
–Robert Ringer
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