Why, in spite of Trump, I am still a Republican, or why I fear the Left.

 

This is going to be a rant about politics. It is intended to be a response to Fantasyland, in which the author of that book feared to thread. The area of philosophy I am most interested in is political theory. In fact, I signed up for the political theory class this fall. I will try to wrap up this rant with reference to Locke and Rousseau.

First, I will tell you why I despise Trump. I think he is a buffoon. From Fantasyland, dealing with the runup to the 2016 election, Trump made bizarre claims, Mexico will pay for the wall, Obama was born in Kenya, Global warming a fraud, Ted Cruz’s father connect to the JFK assignation, Vince Forster was murdered. After the election it continued. He claimed millions of illegal votes were cast as the reason he lost the popular vote. Trump stated, “I will give you everything”, every dream you ever dreamed for your country. We will have so much winning that you will be bored with winning.”  After the 2020 election, he screamed election fraud and that was the main cause of the January 6 insurrection at the capital. As the book stated, he was P.T. Barnum of politics. He was the worst person to become President in our history.

As for why I fear the Left, let’s start off with our country’s housing policies. The voters of Saint Paul, Minnesota in their last election voted for rent control. This has had unintended but not unforeseeable consequences. The number of permits to build rental units has dropped 40% since that vote. Nation-wide we are short about 6.5 million housing units. This is entirely due to regulations (land use, open spaces, zoning rules) passed by local governments, especially in the big cities which are controlled by the Left. With this shortage of housing, costs (especially rents) have been going up. This has led many on the Left to say that “there is a right to housing.” They do not realize that it is their policies that is the reason that housing costs are going up. It is fantasyland to think that housing costs will go down while we are short of 6.5 million housing units.

I believe that global warming is real and caused by human activity. But it is the Left’s fantasyland solutions (wind and solar) to the problem that is causing resistance to real solutions. I am neither a scientist nor an engineer, but I do not believe the technology will be available to power the world with wind or solar for the next 50 years and even that may be optimistic. We will probably have nuclear fusion before we have wind or solar. The only short-term solution to the problem, to me, is nuclear power (fission).  Yet the Left is as opposed to nuclear power as it is to coal and oil. If France can get 75% of the electricity from fission, then so can we. Most of the resistance to global warming as an ideal will fade away if practical solutions are put forward.

Much has been made by several groups on the Right about removing books from school libraries. This has been called censorship. Several sources on the web have stated that a typical school library should have 30 books for every student. How these books are chosen is what is at issue here.  Just because my choice differs from your choices does not make me a censor. And we have the right to question our school officials (even our librarians) over their choice of books. I am not saying I agree with every choice the Right has made. I am saying their acts are not censorship. It is the Left that relies on actual censorship the most. Nearly 90% of colleges have speech codes for their students according to a survey conducted by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) in 2020.  This seems to be real censorship.

 

There was a recent controversy about an advanced placement course in African American history in Florida. I think DeSantis was mostly right about his objections. All the readings the course required were by people from the Far Left of the political spectrum. This is not education, it is indoctrination. DeSantis should have emphasized more on what was left out instead of what was put in. More perspectives across the political spectrum would have dampened down the controversy.

One thing that drives the polarization on the Right is the feeling that they are being systematically excluded from many institutions in American life, especially on the college campus. According to one survey, administrators on the Left outnumber administrators on the Right by a 12 to 1 ratio. That is higher than the 6 to 1 ratio for college faculty. This does not happen by chance. It seems since the 1980s the left had gotten control of hiring boards and will only hire from the Left. The Left wants diversity in skin color not in ideals. How many research topics not conducted and how many books not written because conservatives have not there to conduct them.

Much has been made of the two legislators that were expelled from the Tennessee State Legislative. This was indeed wrong. You have to pick your battles better than that. However, there are things worse than that going on in the country. Recently, a man had a job offer rescinded after he refer to two women on a school board as “ladies.” In 2020, according to FIRE, 136 colleges professors were fired or disciplined because of things they had said. Also, in 2020 a man was fired for his job for supposedly making a hate symbol by hanging his hand out of the window of his truck. These things are much for disturbing than two legislators being expelled because they have a better means of fighting back.

Everything that I have mentioned to now is only a warm-up to why I really fear the Left. The Left believes of themselves promotors of human rights aboard. They claim credit for fighting apartheid and dictators like Pinochet. However, the Left as a whole had either been silent or cheered on some of the biggest mass murders in history. Below is an article by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe concerning the Left’s reaction of the Khmer Rouge coming to power in Cambodia.

American leftists were Pol Pot's cheerleaders

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
April 30, 1998

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THE DEATH OF POL POT, 23 years to the week after he and the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia, occasioned long backward glances at one of the 20th century's most horrific genocides. It was noted everywhere that the communist reign of terror in Cambodia lasted nearly four years and that at least 1 million human beings -- by some estimates as many as 2½ million -- were murdered in an orgy of executions, torture, and starvation.

Khmer Rouge fighters celebrate as they enter Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. "For Most, A Better Life," was The New York Times's forecast. In reality, a horrific bloodbath followed.

"In the name of a radical utopia," The New York Times recalled in its obituary, "the Khmer Rouge regime had turned most of the people into slaves. . . . Dictatorial village leaders and soldiers told the people whom to marry and how to live, and those who disobeyed were killed. [Those] who did not bend to the political mania were buried alive, or tossed into the air and speared on bayonets. Some were fed to crocodiles." Nearby was a photograph of human skulls -- emblem of the dreadful "killing fields" in which the communists butchered a quarter of Cambodia's people.

But nowhere in the Times story was there a reminder that the Khmer Rouge was able to seize power only after the US Congress in 1975 cut off all aid to the embattled pro-American government of Lon Nol -- and that it did so despite frantic warnings of the bloodbath that would ensue. President Ford warned of "horror and tragedy" if Cambodia was abandoned to the Khmer Rouge and pleaded with Congress to supply Lon Nol's army with the tools it needed to defend itself.

Ford's warning was to no avail. Though US troops had come home two years earlier, American antiwar activists were still intent on effecting the "liberation" of Southeast Asia. Radicals like Jane Fonda, David Dellinger, and Tom Hayden stormed the country, denouncing anyone who opposed communist victory in Cambodia and Vietnam. On the campuses, in the media, and in Congress, it was taken on faith that a Khmer Rouge victory would bring peace and enlightened leadership to Cambodia.

"The growing hysteria of the administration's posture on Cambodia," declared Senator George McGovern, "seems to me to reflect a determined refusal to consider what the fall of the existing government in Phnom Penh would actually mean. . . . We should be able to see that the kind of government which would succeed Lon Nol's forces would most likely be a government . . . run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia."

Stanley Karnow, hailed nowadays as an authoritative Indochina historian, was quite sure that "the 'loss' of Cambodia would . . . be the salvation of the Cambodians." There was no point helping the noncommunist government survive, he wrote, "since the rebels are unlikely to kill more innocent civilians than are being slaughtered by the rockets promiscuously hitting Phnom Penh."

The New Republic told its readers that the ouster of Lon Nol should be of minor concern to them, since "the Cambodian people will finally be rescued from the horrors of a war that never really had any meaning."

In Washington, then-Representative Christopher Dodd of Connecticut averred: "The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now."

Was this willful blindness or mere stupidity? To believe that the Khmer Rouge would be good for Cambodia, one had to ignore everything the world had learned about communist brutality since 1917. How could intelligent Americans have said such things?

But they did, repeatedly.

In the news columns of The New York Times, the celebrated Sydney Schanberg wrote of Cambodians that "it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." He dismissed predictions of mass executions in the wake of a Khmer Rouge victory: "It would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as national policy under a Communist government once the war is over." On April 13, 1975, Schanberg's dispatch from Phnom Penh was headlined, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, A Better Life."

Pol Pot

On the op-ed page, Anthony Lewis was calling "the whole bloodbath debate unreal. What future could possibly be more terrible," he demanded, "than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now?"

Even after the death marches out of Phnom Penh began, Lewis went on making excuses for the Khmer Rouge. He mused that the mass expulsions were "the only way to start on their vision of a new society." Americans who objected were guilty of "cultural arrogance, an imperial assumption, that ... our way of life" would be better.

Amazing, the lies that were told as Cambodia's holocaust roared on. The "scholars" were the worst. Gareth Porter and G.C. Hildebrand of the Indochina Resource Center insisted that Pol Pot's horrendous cruelties "saved the lives of tens of thousands of people." Ben Kiernan, who would eventually head the Cambodian Genocide Program, asserted that "the Khmer Rouge movement is not the monster that the press have recently made it out to be." Tell that to a million murdered Cambodians.

Twenty-three years ago, American leftists cheered, justified, and denied as the communists plunged Cambodia into a nightmare of atrocity. In the end, they failed to whitewash Pol Pot's record. They will not succeed in whitewashing their own.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).

As Jeff Jacoby said in the article, this is willful blindness. It is also one of the best examples of groupthink I have ever witnessed. I do not know of any instance of a Leftist stating before April 17, 1975, that the Khmer Rouge would be a problem. If you can document for me an example, I would appreciate it.

The Khmer Rouge is not the only time Leftist has come out in support of mass tyranny. Many people on the Left, especially in its earlier years, were supporters of the Soviet Union. LincolnSteffens visited the Soviet Union in 1919 and stated, “I have seen the future; and it works.” Walter Duranty was the Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times from 1922 to 1936. He covered up most of Stalin’s crimes, especially the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. Roger Nash Baldwin was the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1920 to 1950. He was up until August 23, 1939 (Hitler-Stalin pact) a supporter of the Soviet Union. He visited the Soviet Union in 1926 and wrote a book, Liberty Under the Soviets, describing his observation. While he recognized the Soviet Union as a dictatorship, he thought it really was trying to do good things for the people. My last example is that of Vice-President Henry Wallace. FDR sent Wallace on a goodwill tour of the Soviet Union in May 1944. One of the places he visited was the labor camp Kolyma. Somewhere between 250,000 and 1,000,000 were worked to death at Kolyma between 1932 and 1952. Wallace wrote in a book that it was “a combination TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] and Hudson’s Bay Company.”

Practically every Left-wing dictator of the Cold War period has its supporters among the America Left. Marty Peretz, when he owed the New Republic magazine, once wrote “The American Left and even the mainstream of American liberalism (which includes TNR) has never gotten over its dalliance with Stalinism and its guileful romance with revolution. This is one of the costs of McCarthyism. But it is sadly true that some of the thing Joe McCarthy believed and said were not false.”

I could document many other areas where the left achieves exactly the opposite of what it intends Most of the Left today seems, if not in words but in actions, to believe in Rousseau’s dictum of being “forced to be free.” Much of today’s Left-wing thought increases the coercive power of the State. I divide regulations into two main types, health and safety and those that are purely economic. While there are legitimate health and safety regulations that the State should impose, we should be wary of economic regulations. I believe in Locke vision of the social contract.