By Guest Author David Robb, Blue State Conservative
It is getting harder to defend the positing of being a progressive Democrat these days. After taking power under questionable circumstances in the 2020 election, nearly everything ruling Democrats have done seems to be falling apart or is rife with unintended consequences.
Take the recent events of Uncle Joe’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan without even informing our allies, for example. I’m sure he expected the Afghan army to hold out for several months after pulling out our own troops. If they had, he could have bragged that he had managed to do what none of the Republicans before him had done – get us out of an endless Afghan war. Well, he did, but probably not in the way he or any of his leftist advisors intended.
It is obvious now that nearly everyone in the administration was clueless about the situation and the Taliban. Driven by a 7th-century vision of religious utopia, the Taliban forces managed a largely bloodless takeover by giving each town and village a choice of joining them or being eradicated. Many of the administration advisors, having no beliefs themselves, and no understanding of Islam, simply dismissed its motivating power and thought the Taliban was like them and could be bought off.
Even our armchair Pentagon generals seem to have no idea who they were fighting, why the Taliban were able to capture territory so quickly, or what was motivating the enemy. The net result of this total ignorance has been a huge black eye for the United States and a great reduction in its credibility – all laid at the feet of our progressive “leaders.”
Afghanistan, though, is only the latest, albeit most prominent, of progressive Democrats’ “seemed like a good idea at the time” failures. We need only look at the idea of trying to stop a relatively mild pandemic by locking down entire populations and shutting down whole economies, as though one could simply turn them off and restart them later as if using an automobile. Making matters worse, they continue lying about the severity of the disease, inflating body counts, suppressing open discussion, and gaslighting the populace about almost every aspect.
It all reminds me of the idea that was floated in California during one of the frequent droughts, when someone thought it would be a good and fair idea to give farmers water every other year for crops. Of course, trees like peach, apricot, apple, almond, olive and others don’t do well when they get water only every other year. They tend to die in between.
Now we have this marvelous idea of forcing everyone to take an experimental vaccine that doesn’t work very well, and even kills people, in order to treat a disease from which almost no one dies. Moreover, this virus can easily be treated by cheap and available pharmaceuticals that prevent virtually all deaths from the disease, except that they are forbidden from use by the progressive government agency that is supposed to promote public health.
Oh, and the Climate Crisis, aka Global Warming, is melting down before their eyes. The recently released IPCC report consists of cherry-picked results that show really and truly that doom is upon us unless we do exactly as the progressives say. For proof, they offer statements of selected scientists that consist largely of “We’re certain that the sky is falling, and you should trust us because we are government paid scientists – so back off!”
Then there is the attempt to wean us off fossil fuels by cutting off new supplies. We are supposed to rely instead on “green” solar and wind sources that largely don’t exist, and are both unreliable and expensive where they have been implemented. Never mind the “streamers” when birds fly into the concentrated sunlight of solar power plants. What are a few charred birds when our Progressive Green Dream is at stake?
Don’t worry that solar doesn’t produce anything at night or on cloudy days, and that windmills don’t work when the wind isn’t blowing, and that we have no good way to store the electricity produced in any case. We’ll solve all those problems soon now – trust us. Besides, we’ve determined that you use too much energy anyway – better you should bake or freeze naturally. After all, we are all in this together., they say.
Surely, we can also eliminate crime by declaring it illegal. We just need to get rid of those nasty police that create crime by arresting people. If they just wouldn’t arrest people there wouldn’t be any crime. We can get rid of racism, too, if we simply point out how racist white people are and how everything they do is motivated by racism, and how we could eliminate racism by calling attention to how racist we all are.
The government can truly save us all. The brilliant advance in economic understanding provided by Modern Monetary Theory will allow the government to spend as much as it likes to provide economic support to everyone who doesn’t want to work, can mandate that those who can’t or don’t want to pay rent don’t have to because the government has their backs. None of that will cause inflation because the government can take it all back in taxes at the end of the year. Besides, if you give anything to church or charity, you have too much and the government will be happy to help you with that problem.
Does anyone get the sense that the progressive left, aka Democrats, are missing something? Does the expression “unintended consequences” mean anything? The political Left keeps telling us how brilliant they are and how superior their intellectual capabilities are, yet they consistently fail to think things through. The conservative right keeps pointing out the problems with progressive programs, and the left only keeps saying that no one can foresee consequences to that extent. The right can smell a half-baked idea when it encounters one and the left just keeps ignoring them and telling them how stupid they are for not seeing the beauty of whatever idea they are infatuated with at the moment. The progressives may be smart, but they don’t seem to be smart enough to realize they aren’t all that smart.
It goes deeper than that, though.
The mechanisms that gave them their current power and that allowed them to temporarily take over our government took the planning and actions of years, perhaps even decades. All of that planning and effort is being unraveled in a mere matter of weeks and months. A legion of supermoms is successfully attacking Critical Race Theory and mask mandates in schools across the country.
Resistance to mask mandates and vaccine passports is being organized and implemented as this is being written. Honest, courageous scientists and doctors are rapidly finding and publicizing holes in the Climate Crisis arguments, and in all the “science” that has been used to justify lockdowns, experimental vaccination requirements, and many other things.
Election audits are on the verge of revealing the fraudulent activities that operated to put an illegitimate administration in power. Court cases are being mobilized, grass roots organizations formed, and legislatures pressured to enact election integrity legislation and to limit government emergency powers. We were caught off guard at the start, but once ignited the fire of freedom is difficult to extinguish.
The Left realizes, at some level, that they depend on us. We provide the food they eat. We generate the electricity they use – the same electricity that charges their Teslas. We purify and distribute the water they drink. We create and operate the airplanes and trains and trucks that support every aspect of their lives. It is our ingenuity and labor that makes the computers and smartphones and entertainment systems that they use and take for granted. They go to schools to get advanced degrees in underwater basket weaving, and Eighth Century English literature (there is none, so that is an easy degree) while we learn engineering and science and difficult equations and practical trades and how stuff works.
Because they depend on us, they hate us and have to ridicule and denigrate us in order to preserve their fragile self esteem. They fear that we might one day turn on them and cast them off like parasites. They hope we never awaken to our power. What would they do if one day the lights went out and didn’t come back on? What would they do if food was no longer delivered to their grocery stores and restaurants? What if the water stopped flowing or there was no fuel for cars and trucks? How many of them would even know which end of a screwdriver to use to open a paint can?
In their fear of us, they try to control us so they can feel safe. They want to take away our guns so we cannot effectively resist, never realizing that those are only the least of the weapons at our disposal. They try to restrict our movements and our ability to gather and organize, without realizing that the more they try, the more creative we become in our efforts to frustrate their control. They try to use the powers of government to threaten us and to label us as domestic terrorists to be rounded up and punished for our defiance, not seeming to realize that it is not terrorism to resist the unlawful activities of an illegitimate administration in defense of our country.
Progressives seem not to realize the difference between trying to rule a divided and frequently uncooperative people by edict and force, and governing a people, most of whom disagree with them and who have their own interests to pursue, in a way that all can flourish. Yet they persist in believing that if everyone would just do as they say, they could create a heaven on earth, using as raw material this fractious, fiercely independent, and often uncooperative collection of real humans.
Good luck with that!
Like teenagers who have just discovered a measure of independent thought ability, they see simplistic solutions to complex issues, and lack the experience and depth to see the flaws in what seem to be such obvious solutions. It is time for the adults to come back into the room, while there is still a house left standing.
To be fair, there are two things that the progressive Left seems to be good at: conspiracy and prevarication. I might be wrong, but those don’t seem to be enough to make a civilization run. They might be enough, though, to make a civilization ruin.
