The Clone War
Indivisible clones are baaack. The electorate spoke loudly and clearly, however, the woke indivisibles didn’t get the memo. In their updated publication [see below] not a sentence was spared from misrepresentation, misunderstanding, propaganda, hyperbolic emotion, false context, and toxic empathy. The layers of their cult onion effectively shielded them from perceiving the 2024 election outcome that sane people witnessed. This is an f’d-up tribe, apparently quite intent on remaining so.
Trump Hatred – America’s National Shame
Adoration for a cackling chameleon is a poor substitute for a tested patriot with a proven record
RFK Jr. drops out of the 2024 race and endorses President Trump: Full Speech
The best response is no response
The best response to Leftist violence is to starve it of attention. Theater only works with an audience present. Don’t attend, only publish the conflicts on social media alongside critical analysis. Don’t give the barbarians meme space. Leave the angry Left alone to demonstrate and yell at itself.
What possible reason exists to confront it in the streets anyway? Few arguments, however reasonably delivered, could be sufficiently compelling to change a zealots mind during a mob event. Confrontation sustains the mob, and that’s exactly what the mob is there to generate.
Philosophical arguments aren’t settled in the streets. They require cool heads to even be heard.
The Left knows this. That’s why they keep their people in a constant state of agitation. Don’t help them.
smokey sunset
militancy without end
Leftists and political Muslims share a successful strategy of umbrage politics – “Agree with me or I’ll get upset.” Each day news reports come in about the riots, demonstrations, occupations, marches, boycotts, and class actions underway by upset beneficiaries. You’d think that’s all that ever happened in America.
Leftist reporters saturate the media with reports about the struggles. The struggles never end as the numbers of beneficiaries and Muslims continue to grow. No degree of social justice, religious obedience, or equality can satisfy them, as if these things could even be quantified. No fixed amount of entitlement benefits can sustain an enlarging population. The struggles are designed to be unsatisfiable, unsolvable, unwinnable, and unending.
Liberal politicians keep putting more money on the table and unscrupulous beneficiaries keep lining up to collect. You can’t legitimately call either the politicians or the beneficiaries citizens because citizenship implies duties that neither one cares much about. They are gamers – gaming the system for personal benefit, be it preferential law or public money – and gaming the system for votes.
Who even discusses economic and political theories, reasoning, science, education, or even metaphysical foundations anymore? Why bother with intellectual baggage when numbers in the streets will get favorable laws written, favorable court cases decided, entitlement money allocated, criminal prosecutions foregone, constitutional protections denied, the power of the Leftist state and Muslim Sharia increased, and votes?
Conservatives are chasing their tails with volumes of sound and persuasive analysis about these social pathologies, but the groups who trade in power demographics don’t care about what conquered people have to say, except to the extent it identifies more opportunities to exploit.
Pure democracy is literally devouring America. Leftists and Muslims are leading the short walk to the end of our constitutional society. The tyrannies of the minorities are on the march while liberal vote-buying politicians eagerly fund and enable them.
The overwhelming majority of Americans who provide the real value to America that predatory Leftists and political Muslims feed on, are apparently too busy to stop it.
. . .it’s Mitt’s fault now
To deflect from the Obama train wreck, the Aspen Daily News resurrects the fear of Romney. Surely the threat Romney presented to the mountain Left’s way of life was mitt-i-gated at the polls over a year ago? But so long as Romneycare keeps chunking along up in Massachusetts, and the promised magic of Obamacare keeps failing to materialize out of the One’s hat, the Aspen Left will have to keep reaching.
Sturm und Drang
HELP WANTED [Read more…]
hyperbolic times
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
Polite debate is no longer the accepted norm in our society. The liberal left is not tolerating divergent opinions, they want them eliminated. Outrageous labels, personal threats, and even violence have escalated during what used to be polite discourse and disagreements of opinion. [Read more…]
certitude
The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ. . . .To rely on evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs. The fanatical Japanese in Brazil refused to believe for years the evidence of Japan’s defeat. The fanatical Communist refuses to believe any unfavorable report or evidence about Russia, nor will he be disillusioned by seeing with his own eyes the cruel misery inside the Soviet promised land.
It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence. Strength of faith . . . manifests itself not in moving mountains but in not seeing mountains to move. And it is the certitude of his infallible doctrine that renders the true believer impervious to the uncertainties, surprises and the unpleasant realities of the world around him.
Thus the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is.
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Over half of Americans practice to some degree belief structures in economics and politics built on certitude. These beliefs manifest in self-fulfilling prophecies, militancy, tyrannies of identity groups, mob actions, and one-party rule. Their immunity from non believers comes from upholding truths that are not observable through objective experience, and an absolute certainty that they are correct.
Meanwhile a shrinking minority of Americans connected to observation and experience go about trying to talk sense to the majority of true believers, perhaps unaware they’re dealing with people ensconced comfortably inside an impermeable cocoon built on certainty of their own subjective truth. If a true believer can somehow overcome his fear of uncertain reality and an uncertain future, he’ll still have hard work ahead to discover and comprehend the crushing detail of modern reality.
How daunting this must be for leftists and environmentalists who have only known the certainty of belief all their lives, who have only been friends with other people who share that same certainty and loyalty to the agenda.
Free market individualists, unburdened by an overhead of subjective belief, with only unvarnished history to guide them, come along to happily share simple proven principles with the true believers. In return they get shouted down, they get accused of horrible intentions, they get maligned and impugned for completely unreal things they have no connection to.
Set back on their heals, they shake their heads in wonder about what they could have possibly said to engender such viciousness. Most free marketers probably aren’t aware that the true believers never even heard, or comprehended, what was said.
Merely speaking to them, as a non-believer–an “other,” is enough to trigger their defense systems. Words coming in that might not uphold the certitude of their true belief must be put down ruthlessly before they can be absorbed. That is the discipline of true belief and it must be preserved. The alternative is an uncertain emptiness of reality without structure, beyond belief, difficult to understand, perhaps even pleasantly surprising, but too overwhelming to imagine.
Will reality-based people succeed in breaking through the hard shells maintained by the true believers? Will more true believers continue to turn violent against reality-based people? There seems to be no end in sight to this conflict.
Though they will never admit it, true believers are clearly caught up in ideation reinforcement mechanisms that manipulate and subjugate them. Conservative realists must find a way to set them free.
B_Imperial
winners and losers
When the Democrat-controlled Colorado Legislature gets through imposing restrictive gun laws upon law-abiding citizens, will we be any safer? No, we won’t, because none of the prescriptions contained in any of these new bills address any element of the crimes committed with guns that will have motivated the bills’ passage.
In the instant case, losers will be law-abiding citizens. Winners will be Democrat politicians, their adoring liberal media, their captive voters, and the criminals who will have an easier time of it going up against a less-armed law abiding citizenry. But that’s only in the instant case. There’s also winners and losers in the larger scheme of things.
The country’s Founders designed a system they hoped would protect minority rights under the governance of a majority. They contemplated that with all the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, the 4th estate of the press, and the people, that enough pauses to consider would exist in the public discourse over new law, that the best argument, the best philosophy, the best solution, the mostly soundly reasoned answer, would tend to carry the day.
They did not anticipate ruthless progressivism with its will to win at all costs, and notwithstanding the soundness of their argument. They did not expect that all of the checks and balances in our country would fail in their primary function and become the captive organs of a single cult mythology.
Wherever progressives get a political majority, they ram through their agenda. Sound arguments to the contrary are not rebutted, nor debated. Opposed parties are procedurally silenced, crowded out, shouted down, ridiculed, overwhelmed, and ignored.
Sure, we have instant winners and losers as each issue comes up under the progressive agenda. But the bigger loser is our system, the one that brought us to this point of social evolution, the one responsible for our success.
And perhaps the biggest losers of all are the progressives themselves. The ones who have no idea what they’ve lost by damaging their fellow American minorities, whom they take such joy in suppressing. The ones dancing in the streets after each victory, the ones shouting in the streets when they’re not dancing.
They’ve lost their minds.
B_Imperial
absolute power absolutely corrupt
GOP accusation confirmed: Obama out to break it
By Jennifer Rubin ,
The [Washington] Post reported: “[President] Obama, fresh off his November reelection, began almost at once executing plans to win back the House in 2014, which he and his advisers believe will be crucial to the outcome of his second term and to his legacy as president. He is doing so by trying to articulate for the American electorate his own feelings — an exasperation with an opposition party that blocks even the most politically popular elements of his agenda.”
This confirms what Republicans have been saying (despite liberal pundits’ scoffing): The president is interested in breaking the back of the opposition not accommodating or passing centrist legislation. A senior GOP House aide was mattter-of-fact: “It’s been clear since December that President Obama is more interested in leading his Organizing for Action campaign than leading this nation.”
The acknowledgment of the permanent campaign is quite an admission, casting most of what the president does in a more realistic light. He is engaged in bare-knuckle campaigning, not governing, when he engages in faux negotiations and goes around the country to hammer Republicans.
Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), took the high ground. “Our country faces real challenges: cutting spending, fixing our debt and deficit, getting our economy moving and creating jobs. Hopefully, those challenges — not partisan politics — will be the focus for the White House. The American people gave us a divided government, and we all have to make it work.”
Indeed it is an odd approach only two months after the last election. Aside from dropping the mask and conceding the high ground, the revelation about the president’s 2014 strategy appears just at the time that he has been revealed to be untruthful with regard to the sequester. Now he wants the country to give him virtually unlimited power with a Democratic House? Moreover, in a midterm election the electorate is generally whiter, older and more conservative.
Is this the electorate (without Obama on the ballot) to hand him the House? Don Stewart, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) answers, “Let’s not forget, we’ve already seen what happens when he has an unchecked agenda: Stimulus, Obamacare and trillions in debt.”
America divided
- African Americans
- Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders
- Catholics
- Educators
- Environmentalists
- Jewish Americans
- Latinos
- LGBT Americans
- Native Americans
- Nurses
- Parents
- People of Faith
- People With Disabilities
- Rural Americans
- Seniors
- Small Business Owners
- Veterans & Military Families
- Women
- Young Americans
These are groups Obama has targeted to re-elect him. Maybe this is just the list his campaign thinks can be reached on-line. There are other groups in play that don’t present so well on the internet such as government employee unions and government contractors.
Obama’s job is really pretty simple: Identify groups and pay them off. Authorize an entitlement, a benefit, a public expenditure for a group, expend the debt-financed federal money, move on to the next group.
Republicans have to sell an ideology, a basket of ideals that capture the imagination of their constituents – a much tougher proposition because it involves education, persuasion, historical context, ethics, morality … good grief, the list is endless.
To contrast, Democrats just write checks out of the treasury to their voters. Democrat constituents must possess the skill to cash a check, and then get to a polling place from time to time to pull a democrat voting lever — a pretty short resume’.
It doesn’t look good for taxpayers. They’re not on Obama’s list.
B_Imperial
ELCO’s CP
Not Communist Party, Cloward and Piven, though some might say that’s a distinction without a difference.
The ersatz Republicans at New-Plains continue their manipulation of ELCO Republican voters, causing confusion, corruption and chaos in their Cloward and Piven strategy to replace our system with theirs.
The Summer of the Schlegel Recall
www.new-plains.com
Only a moron or dedicated liar could twist it into anything approaching “partisan.”
The Cloward and Piven strategy: overwhelm the system, force it to collapse, replace it with a socialist alternative.
Cloward and Piven applied to Elbert County: overwhelm commissioners with open records requests, constant misrepresentations of their policies, challenges to every decision they make, spurious litigious actions. Cause the commission to expend money and resources defending against phantom issues, then blame them for doing so while at the same time ignoring any culpability or responsibility for generating the phantom crisis. Install socialist commissioners with plans to use zoning to take control of private natural resource properties.
B_Imperial
We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now!
“Table 2
Members of victimhood groups as a percentage of total population,
% adjusted for multiple discrimination
Female gender 51
Ethnic minority 8
Disabled 22
Non-Christian 5
Elderly 18
Gay or lesbian 5
Grand Total 109
How was the estimate of 109 per cent reached? 51 per cent of the population are women and ethnic minorities make up another eight per cent, according to the 2001 Census, and some 22 per cent of the population of Great Britain are said to be disabled. Eighteen per cent of the population are pensioners. And at the time of the 2001 Census about five per cent belonged to non-Christian faiths. A similar proportion were gays and lesbians.”
We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now! by David G. Green [Read more…]
The Desire for Substitutes
“The Desire for Substitutes
There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.
People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has it roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both. If they join the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose by identifying themselves with the efforts, achievements and prospects of the movement.
To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources.”
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
What irremediably spoiled past life is Obama substituting?
2012 YTD open records requests
—————————————— (click to enlarge) ——————————————
Look at all the fishing expeditions. Look at those making the requests. County employees who could be engaged in productive work on behalf of taxpayers instead must serve these partisans in this blatant abuse of process. It does Elbert County no good. The sole beneficiaries are the selfish few who think government exists to satisfy their personal entertainment desires.
public policy
Supreme Court of Colorado, En Banc.
BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS, COSTILLA COUNTY, Colorado,
Petitioner, v. COSTILLA COUNTY CONSERVANCY DISTRICT and Michael McGowan, Respondents.
No. 02SC743.
April 19, 2004To resolve this dispute, we now turn to the language of the [Open Meetings Law] OML and our case law construing it.
D. The OML Applies to Meetings that are Part of the Policy-Making Process
Based on our reading of the statute as a whole and our case law construing it, we hold that a meeting must be part of the policy-making process to be subject to the requirements of the OML. A meeting is part of the policy-making process if it concerns a matter related to the policy-making function of the local public body holding or attending the meeting. If, as a threshold matter, a meeting is part of the policy-making process, then the requirements of the OML must be met. If not, nothing in the OML prevents some or all members of a local governing body from attending a meeting, even if public notice has not been given.
public policy:
Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th Ed.
1. Broadly, principles and standards regarded by the legislature or by the courts as being of fundamental concern to the state and the whole of society. 2. More narrowly, the principle that a person should not be allowed to do anything that would tend to injure the public at large.
Notwithstanding the heroic image promulgated by the band of New-Plains brothers and sisters currently harassing the Board of County Commissioners, this tribe in no way represents the interests of the whole of society or of the public at large in Elbert County. They claim to, but they’ve never been elected, never achieved a plurality of votes in Elbert County. Most of them don’t have the substance to admit their true political philosophy by presenting themselves to the public at large in a political party that accords their agenda. These self-anointed inquisitors occupy their meeting seats at the BOCC with intent to find any grounds whatsoever — factual, legal, interpretive, procedural — to excuse speaking their truth to power to bring down the ruling conservative candidates.
Theirs is a non-stop political campaign that shoehorns reality by any means possible into their ongoing narrative.
left is going it alone
Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin
The New Authoritarianism
A firm hand for a “nation of dodos”
6 January 2012
“I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer,” said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn’t legally in recess. The chief executive’s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn’t the first example of the president’s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that “where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.” On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that’s just what he’s been doing—and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This “go it alone” philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.
The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.
Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.
The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.
The tension between self-government and “good” government has existed since the origins of modern liberalism. Thinkers such as Herbert Croly and Randolph Bourne staked a claim to a priestly wisdom far greater than that possessed by the ordinary mortal. As Croly explained, “any increase in centralized power and responsibility . . . is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy. But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition” and the fact that “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”
During the first two years of the Obama administration, the progressives persuaded themselves that favorable demographics and the consequences of the George W. Bush years would assure the consent of the electorate. They drew parallels with how growing urbanization and Herbert Hoover’s legacy worked for FDR in the 1930s. But FDR enhanced his majority in his first midterm election in 1934; the current progressive agenda, by contrast, was roundly thrashed in 2010. Obama may compare himself to Roosevelt and even to Lincoln, but the electorate does not appear to share this assessment.
After the 2010 thrashing, progressives seemed uninterested in moderating their agenda. Left-wing standard bearers Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Robert Borosage of the Institute for Policy Studies went so far as to argue that Obama should bypass Congress whenever necessary and govern using his executive authority over the government’s regulatory agencies. This autocratic agenda of enhanced executive authority has strong support with people close to White House, such as John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, a left-liberal think tank. “The U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy,” Podesta has written. “These authorities can be used to ensure positive progress on many of the key issues facing the country.”
Podesta has proposed what amounts to a national, more ideological variant of what in Obama’s home state is known as “The Chicago Way.” Under that system, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune explains, “citizens, even Republicans, are expected to take what big government gives them. If the political boss suggests that you purchase some expensive wrought-iron fence to decorate your corporate headquarters, and the guy selling insurance to the wrought-iron boys is the boss’ little brother, you write the check.” But the American clerisy isn’t merely a bunch of corrupt politicians and bureaucratic lifers, and the United States isn’t one-party Chicago. The clerisy are more like an ideological vanguard, one based largely in academe and the media as well as part of the high-tech community.
Their authoritarian progressivism—at odds with the democratic, pluralistic traditions within liberalism—tends to evoke science, however contested, to justify its authority. The progressives themselves are, in Daniel Bell’s telling phrase, “the priests of the machine.” Their views are fairly uniform and can be seen in “progressive legal theory,” which displaces the seeming plain meaning of the Constitution with constructions derived from the perceived needs of a changing political environment. Belief in affirmative action, environmental justice, health-care reform, and redistribution from the middle class to the poor all find foundation there. More important still is a radical environmental agenda fervently committed to the idea that climate change has a human origin—a kind of secular notion of original sin. But these ideas are not widely shared by most people. The clerisy may see in Obama “reason incarnate,” as George Packer of The New Yorker put it, but the majority of the population remains more concerned about long-term unemployment and a struggling economy than about rising sea levels or the need to maintain racial quotas.
Despite the president’s clear political weaknesses—his job-approval ratings remain below 50 percent—he retains a reasonable shot at reelection. In the coming months, he will likely avoid pushing too hard on such things as overregulating business, particularly on the environmental front, which would undermine the nascent recovery and stir too much opposition from corporate donors. American voters may also be less than enthusiastic about the Republican alternatives topping the ticket. And one should never underestimate the power of even a less-than-popular president. Obama can count on a strong chorus of support from the media and many of the top high-tech firms, which have enjoyed lavish subsidies and government loans for “green” projects.
If Obama does win, 2013 could possibly bring something approaching a constitutional crisis. With the House and perhaps the Senate in Republican hands, Obama’s clerisy may be tempted to use the full range of executive power. The logic for running the country from the executive has been laid out already. Republican control of just the House, argues Chicago congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., has made America ungovernable. Obama, he said during the fight over the debt limit, needed to bypass the Constitution because, as in 1861, the South (in this case, the Southern Republicans) was “in a state of rebellion” against lawful authority. Beverley Perdue, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, concurred: she wanted to have elections suspended for a stretch. (Perdue’s office later insisted this was a joke, but most jokes aren’t told deadpan or punctuated with “I really hope someone can agree with me on that.” Also: Nobody laughed.)
The Left’s growing support for a soft authoritarianism is reminiscent of the 1930s, when many on both right and left looked favorably at either Stalin’s Soviet experiment or its fascist and National Socialist rivals. Tom Friedman of the New York Times recently praised Chinese-style authoritarianism for advancing the green agenda. The “reasonably enlightened group” running China, he asserted, was superior to our messy democracy in such things as subsidizing green industry. Steven Rattner, the investment banker and former Obama car czar, dismisses the problems posed by China’s economic and environmental foibles and declares himself “staunchly optimistic” about the future of that country’s Communist Party dictatorship. And it’s not just the gentry liberals identifying China as their model: labor leader Andy Stern, formerly the president of the Service Employees International Union and a close ally of the White House, celebrates Chinese authoritarianism and says that our capitalistic pluralism is headed for “the trash heap of history.” The Chinese, Stern argues, get things done.
A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced. In the post-election environment, the president, using agencies like the EPA, could successfully strangle whole industries—notably the burgeoning oil and natural gas sector—and drag whole regions into recession. The newly announced EPA rules on extremely small levels of mercury and other toxins, for example, will sharply raise electricity rates in much of the country, particularly in the industrial heartland; greenhouse-gas policy, including, perhaps, an administratively imposed “cap and trade,” would greatly impact entrepreneurs and new investors forced to purchase credits from existing polluters. On a host of social issues, the new progressive regime could employ the Justice Department to impose national rulings well out of sync with local sentiments. Expansions of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion rights could become mandated from Washington even in areas, such as the South, where such views are anathema.
This future can already been seen in fiscally challenged California. The state should be leading a recovery, not lagging behind the rest of the country. But in a place where Obama-style progressives rule without effective opposition, the clerisy has already enacted a score of regulatory mandates that are chasing businesses, particularly in manufacturing, out of the state. It has also passed land-use policies designed to enforce density, in effect eliminating the dream of single-family homes for all but the very rich in much of the state.
A nightmare scenario would be a constitutional crisis pitting a relentless executive power against a disgruntled, alienated opposition lacking strong, intelligent leadership. Over time, the new authoritarians would elicit even more opposition from the “dodos” who make up the majority of Americans residing in the great landmass outside the coastal strips and Chicago. The legacy of the Obama years—once so breathlessly associated with hope and reconciliation—may instead be growing pessimism and polarization.
Fred Siegel, a contributing editor of City Journal, is scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Joel Kotkin is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University.