This comes to us from the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson (VDH), one of Conservatisim’s deep thinkers and observers of what Society is doing – and where it is heading.
Drawing on his vast historical knowledge and the ability to compare and contrast our situation against those of other cultures and times, he’s always a necessary read. Lawrence Person’s Battleswarm Blog has a video of VDH doing exactly that, and he pulled out a lot of quotes – this post’s title is one of them – so go over and read them.
His post is about how California has gone from hero to zero in a few short decades and made easy by just using pull quotes from VDH.
It’s the epitome of when Progressive/Socialists take over Government – the end results in a type of governance that has never succeeded EVAH, and we can see that in real-time. In the meantime:
“…The consequences of their own ideology”.
I used to fight that battle over at TreeHugger – that our “betters,” that MUST know so much more than we do concerning what is best for us just too casually toss off the downsides (especially the financial ones) of any of their ideas. However, they demand that we embrace those ideas totally and without reservation.
They want themselves to be our gods.
The proper response should always be “Up Yours!”.
The decline of California under one-party Democrat rule has been one of the long-running themes of this blog. Today Victor Davis Hanson discusses how California’s wealthy destroyed the middle class with policies whose baleful effects they knew wouldn’t fall on them.
And because of their wealth, they can weather whatever their policies do to them – but don’t care about what happens to anyone else because of them. I used to, semi-jokingly, ask those that wanted expansive and expensive that intruded upon my financial and liberty freedoms when they’d be sending me a check, like when they wanted to eliminate my propane furnace and wood stove and put in rather expensive heat pumps (that yet are unable to work well in the -20 F temps that are certainly not unknown here in central NH). While they all yammered that I HAD TO BECAUSE WE’RE SAVING THE PLANET, not a single one sent me a check.
Why was I not surprised? That’s how they roll and do exactly the same thing as in California (but with more zeros to the left of the decimal point). And that’s what those that have achieved much financial and/or political success seem to believe – having done so; they have the right to boss other people around.
Actually, they don’t, and the middle class that has borne the brunt of their policies is voting with their feet as California is the largest state in terms of legal outflow (as opposed to the illegal alien inflows, which is going to be another problem for them soon). Already, Gov Newsom is starting to have a bad hair day, and that smirk is getting to get wiped off his face as the billions of surplus last year (of which he boasted broadly) has now gone into the dumper bigley.
The State has been riding its reputation and financial success for decades, where it went from being the best to now cratering (and if you look at their roads and highways, literally cratering). The analogy is like when vulture venture capitalists take over a company simply to siphon its money out of it (instead of the normal VCs that want to BOLSTER the value of a takeover) where the Democrats became the “political culture vultures”.
It’s the same problem that I see in our general culture. Religion, especially the Judeo-Christian tradition, gave us a shared morality and outlook (plus or minus). With the advent of religious animosity starting in the late 1950s, that shared attribute began to disappear and now is, IMHO, now in a death spiral.
For instance, it ISN’T the gun that is committing the crime that the Left blames on guns; it’s the heart/soul/morality (or lack thereof) of those using the guns. The Left can’t stand to admit that their constant pulling out the bricks of our wall that is our norms and mores has brought it to a teetering point – can it stand, or is it inevitable that it will just collapse? When I see that the killing of babies has been normalized, that sexuality has gone wide and into the gutter, and that stealing has been legalized (with California being the prime example, again), what other conclusion can I rationalize?
The Left has now said that we no longer have shared values (Obama wanting to restrict us only to HIS designated media and values!) – that we must yield to them. WHY would I do that, given their results (again, look at California)? An Elite again trying to tell us what to do?
Yeah, screw that. Shut up, Obama, and leave us to our own designs for our own lives. Ditto the rest of them, too.
