THOMAS SOWELL, THE LEFT, AND THEIR DESTRUCTIVE POLICIES

Economist Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, believes that the Left hurts those it claims to want to help by depriving them of choice and self-determination:

·       For example, under current California law, Hispanic school children cannot be taught in Spanish if their parents want them taught in English. Like parents in other immigrant groups before them, Hispanic parents tend to want their children to learn English, so that those children will have more opportunities when they become adults in an English-speaking country. But the Left in general, and Hispanic activists in particular, have fought against leaving Hispanic parents with that choice.

In essence, the Left is convinced that it is they who know better:

·       At the heart of the Left’s vision of the world — and of themselves — is that they know better what is good for other people. This means that the Left sees itself as having both a right and a duty to take away other people’s options.

Even after the people of California voted against this initiative, the Left reintroduced it under Proposition 58.

Sowell has experienced this “I know what’s better for you” attitude in many ways:

·       Many years ago, in a debate on William F. Buckley’s program Firing Line, I was told by a left-wing lawyer that black parents without a good education themselves could not make wise choices for their children’s education. But hard evidence says otherwise. There are whole chains of charter schools, such as the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools and the Success Academy schools, where ghetto kids have academic achievements equal to those of children in affluent suburbs — and sometimes higher achievements…Black parents who enroll their children in charter schools have apparently made better choices than the know-it-alls on the left.

Sowell claims that the “I know best” Left has also hurt in marginalized by denigrating law-enforcement:

·       When it comes to crime and violence, the political Left, including much of the media, are having a great time demonizing the police. Blacks are the biggest victims of the sharp upturn in murders that has followed. But, yet again, hard evidence carries very little weight when the Left is feeling good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake. The absurdity to which this kind of media frenzy about the police can lead is shown by the fact that a black policeman in Charlotte, North Carolina, shooting a black suspect who had a gun, has been blown up into a racial issue across the nation. Have we become so gullible that we are so easily manipulated and stampeded? http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441176/california-ballot-proposition-58-shows-left-taking-school-choices-away-parents

The West has honed manipulation into a fine art among by promoting the victimization theme. Instead of helping the marginalized, the Left has inflamed them, making it harder for the marginalized to stand together along with their neighbors.

WERE THE FASCISTS LEFTISTS OR RIGHTISTS?

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Drawing from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, economist Thomas Sowell asks “Who is a ‘Fascist’?” Using Benito Mussolini as his example, Sowell writes:

·       The Fascists were completely against individualism in general and especially against individualism in a free-market economy. Their agenda included minimum-wage laws, government restrictions on profit-making, progressive taxation of capital, and “rigidly secular” schools. Unlike the Communists, the Fascists did not seek government ownership of the means of production. They just wanted the government to call the shots as to how businesses would be run.

According to Sowell Fascists were Leftists in contrast to the right wing dictators, as Western intellectuals describe them:

·       Indeed, the whole Fascist economic agenda bears a remarkable resemblance to what liberals would later advocate. Moreover, during the 1920s “progressives” in the United States and Britain recognized the kinship of their ideas with those of Mussolini, who was widely lionized by the Left. Famed British novelist and prominent Fabian socialist H. G. Wells called for “Liberal Fascism,” saying “the world is sick of parliamentary politics.” Another literary giant and Fabian socialist, George Bernard Shaw, also expressed his admiration for Mussolini — as well as for Hitler and Stalin, because they “did things,” instead of just talk.

Ironically, the National Socialists (Nazis) were also deceptively termed “Fascists.”

·       In Germany, the Nazis followed in the wake of the Italian Fascists, adding racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular, neither of which was part of Fascism in Italy or in Franco’s Spain. Even the Nazi variant of Fascism found favor on the Left when it was only a movement seeking power in the 1920s.

In contrast, Sowell and Goldberg describe conservatism as embodying “limited government” and “traditional morality.” Sowell explains:

·       Fascism was not only looked on favorably by the Left but recognized as having kindred ideas, agendas, and assumptions. Only after Hitler and Mussolini disgraced themselves, mainly by their brutal military aggressions in the 1930s, did the Left distance itself from these international pariahs. Fascism, initially recognized as a kindred ideology of the Left, has since come down to us defined as being on “the Right” — indeed, as representing the farthest Right, supposedly further extensions of conservatism. If by conservatism you mean belief in free markets, limited government, and traditional morality, including religious influences, then these are all things that the Fascists opposed just as much as the Left does today. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/223648/who-fascist-thomas-sowell

When we understand Fascism as just another Left Wing manifestation, we need to take a complete look at the collective horrors of the Left and also reevaluate the much maligned conservatism, along with its fruitage.

THOMAS SOWELL, FREDERICK DOUGLASS, THE LEFT AND THEIR POLITICS

A favorite strategy of the Left is the blame strategy. It contains these three steps:

1.    The ruling elite and their system to control wealth are corrupt and oppressive.

2.    These have caused tremendous suffering for their own benefit.

3.    They must be removed at any cost.

This has also become the strategy of the universities and the media. Divide and conquer. Divide the world into the good and the bad, the oppressed and the oppressors, which must be removed. However, black conservative and economist, Thomas Sowell, points to the fact that so many left-leaning interventions have actually damaged the “oppressed”:

·       None of the most popular political panaceas for helping black communities has a track record of making things better, and some have made things much worse.

This should raise the question, “Who really cares, who is truly our friends, and who is just using us are a pawn to support their political agenda?”

According to Sowell:

·       Many things that are supposed to help blacks actually have a track record of making things worse. Minimum wage laws have had a devastating effect in making black teenage unemployment several times higher than it once was.

·       In later years, as the minimum wage was repeatedly raised to keep up with inflation, black teenage unemployment from 1971 through 1994 was never less than 3 times what it was in 1948, and ranged as high as more than 5 times the 1948 level. It also became far higher than the unemployment rate of whites the same age.

Ironically, the Left continues to unfold their charges of “systemic racism” and the alleged undercover attempts to maintain “white privilege,” creating hatred, distrust, and polarization However, the Left’s attempts to control the legal and economic systems might have done more to un-privilege the black community than anything else:

Sowell charges:

·       The relations between the police and the black community are another issue that has gotten a lot of attention, and produced counterproductive results. After all the rhetoric and all the efforts towards more tightly restraining the police, the net result has been that murder rates have soared in cities where that policy has been followed — and most of the people killed have been black.

Our culture of blame and shame refuses to compare the status of blacks before and after the institution of their liberal policies. However, Sowell wants us to see the larger picture:

·       In my own life, I was very fortunate when I left home in 1948, at age 17 — a high school dropout with no skills or experience. At that time, the unemployment rate of black 16- and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent. For white males the same ages, it was 10.2 percent. http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell091316.php3#4KH2HlYyLYYSVZxU.99

Other black conservatives, including Frederick Douglass, have called upon white society to leave them alone:

·       “Everybody has asked the question. . .’What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”

Why did Douglass call upon the prevailing society to “Let him alone?” Today, it is easy to see why. The various entitlement programs have served to disempower the blacks and to destroy their families and their traditional values, banishing them to oblivion in favor of State aid.

SELF-ESTEEM, SELF-ACCEPTANCE, AND LONELINESS

It is both odd and tragic in this age of the internet, cell phones, text-messaging, and various forms of e-communications, that we should still be discussing the ills of isolation and loneliness. However, despite all the outlets at our disposal to “reach-out,” the problems seem to be escalating along with the resulting depression. Psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz cite two “major studies” in this regard. In the first:

·       “McPherson found that between 1985 and 2004, the number of people with whom the average American discussed ‘important matters’ dropped from three to two. Even more stunning, the number of people who said that there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled: in 2004, individuals without a single confidant now made up nearly a quarter of those surveyed” (The Lonely American, 2).

Many explanations are brought forward to explain our growing isolation. Some cite America’s legendary pioneering spirit and our emphasis on self-reliance. Others suggest that loneliness is a product of our frenetic pace. However, these explanations fail to explain the recent nose-dive in levels of intimacy, since we have always been self-reliant and frenetic! In addition to this, there is the finding of James Buie that “Depression…for those born after 1950 is as much as twenty times higher than the incidence rate for those born before 1910” (quoted from Edward Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, 113).

What then has happened to us in recent decades? I’d like to suggest that one of the greatest culprits for these phenomena has ironically been the quest for self-esteem. Welch appropriately asks: “What happens when people are raised on a steady diet of ‘You are great, you can do anything, you deserve it, you are the best’…Depression and denial are the only two options left.”

I would add loneliness and isolation to this equation. What happens when we are intent on building self-esteem? We accentuate the positive and deny the negative, since the negative contradicts everything we want to think about ourselves. However, this quest puts us out-of-touch with reality.

Besides, it also becomes increasingly difficult to accept criticism, which tears apart everything that we are trying to achieve, the face that we have constructed for ourselves. In this quest, we have become estranged from our true self and also from others.

From others? Yes! Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how the quest for self-esteem alienates is to compare it to its opposite – self-acceptance – which is the quest to accept reality, which includes the self, the way it is and not the way we want it to be.

When we are self-accepting, we are not defensive. We are not trying to put an image of self out there and, in a sense, require that others accept this image as the price-tag of entry. In The Significant Life, George Weaver cites President Lyndon B. Johnson as an example of the self-aggrandizement of self-esteem:

·       According to one commentator, “It is a curious footnote to history that long before he ran into trouble, Johnson had turned central Texas into a living monument to his heritage and his journey to the summit (the L.B.J birthplace, the L.B.J. boyhood home, the L.B.J. state park, the L.B.J. ranch and more).” (22)

Johnson had presented to the world the face of “heightened significance.” Who else would set up props which essentially say, “Look at me!” In order to affiliate with such a person, we are required to accept this face. If instead, we regard Johnson as just another human being or even criticize one aspect of his façade, any further affiliation, let alone friendship, would be doomed. It is package that we have to buy as is.

I want to make the point that the vast majority of us have a face we are trying to sell, both to ourselves and to the world. Any attempt at friendship must accept this face. When we don’t accept this façade, there will be some degree of underlying conflict. Why? Because our face or has become utterly needful to us, like a drug! Therefore, any criticism or failure to acknowledge this face deprives us of our significance, our necessary sense of self.

This is problematic, because we are not asking the other person to accept us as they see us. We are asking them to accept our inflated concept of self. If this self-concept is too greatly at variance to what we see, there will be disharmony. Just try befriending someone who believes that he is Napoleon. There will be conflict unless you indulge him by accepting his self-concept. However, there will be no basis for true friendship.

The quest for self-esteem is truth-aversive and undercuts the possibility of standing together with others. True human friendship requires some commonality – some common ground where two people can meet, even if it only entails enjoyment of the same food. However, the pursuit of self-esteem and its plume places a demand upon the other person to agree and appreciate it.

In contrast, self-acceptance (SA) has no such demands. SA has a different posture. It says, “I am willing to accept the truth about myself.” Although such a person still enjoys being admired and appreciated, it makes no demand upon the other to provide such commodities.

SA is at peace with itself. It doesn’t have to obsessively defend its image against reality and anything that might threaten it. SA already accepts the fact that it has many undesirable characteristics and is willing to make the necessary adjustments.

I am very sensitive and don’t like criticism, but I know that I need it. This is because I know that I too have my blind spots. I don’t have the most winsome personality – far from it – but people feel that they can be themselves around me, because I can be myself around them. Because I can accept myself as I truly am – and I still have a long way to go – I can also accept others, even if they too have their glaring weaknesses.

Why loneliness? I think that one of the reasons for loneliness is our failure to connect. The quest for self-esteem does not come forth with a bouquet of roses but a list of requirements. It is a walled city that requires the exact shibboleth to gain entry. Besides, it is a shibboleth that few care to learn.

Of course, there are other factors. Our main preoccupation is not to give that bouquet of roses but to receive them. But when both parties are expecting roses, both will be disappointed.

Instead, we need to return to the adage: “It is better to give than to receive.” But how? It is hard to want to give when our needs are so glaring and demanding. I therefore must confess that I was never able to attain any measure of SA on my own. Each one of my five highly-recommended psychologists had left me worse off than I had been before, despite their many positive affirmations. Instead, I needed the confidence in the definitive affirmations that can only come from Christ Himself. Only this was able to interrupt my quest to feel good about myself.