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LBJ’s New Golden Triangle: Taxes to Welfare to Slaves
We Chauvinists have welcomed a foreign exchange student for the school year who is attending our daughters’ charter high school — classical curriculum provided by Hillsdale. All exchange students are required to take US History and American Literature. To help our exchange student warm up to the topic of US History, we showed her the movie musical, 1776, so this scene (from which the title of this post) is fresh in my mind:
It isn’t completely fair to lay the blame for what’s happened in America on LBJ. A triangle, by its nature, means multiple parties are complicit. But, I call him out because of his infamous quote, which I leave here un-redacted in the hope that we can finally have the ugly truth out:
I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for 200 years.
Democrats haven’t changed their racist stripes — they’ve changed their strategy (h/t Bill Whittle). And it’s been working, hasn’t it?
What with Charlottesville and the cultural revolution in the process of tearing down our history, I’ve had occasion to engage with some apparently sincere liberals on Ricochet who are trying to understand what we conservatives mean when we say black Americans are living on the Democrat plantation. Consider this post a response.
Thomas Sowell can cite the numbers from memory, and, by almost every metric, blacks are worse off in the modern progressive era than they were even in FDR’s Great Depression: intact families, employment rates, income levels:
The anger and irrationality (but, I repeat myself) we’re seeing at the foot of Confederate monuments across the country is carefully cultivated by progressive “community agitators organizers” from kindergarten through graduate “studies” programs. It’s an insidious lie told to the aggrieved that they are not the masters of their lives, but must instead submit to the tender ministrations of some government master, who will stick it to the (typically white) Man and thereby improve their lives. They don’t even have to pick cotton. They just have to show up in the voting booth.
Dennis Prager recently did an Ultimate Issues Hour on Security Over Liberty. He likens government entitlements to heroin — just as addictive and life-destroying. I agree. It is human nature to take the path of least resistance — to fall for the empty promise of a comfortable, easy life at someone else’s expense, even if your own life is tragically diminished by the lack of struggle and overcoming. Democrats have been using this all too human weakness to farm votes for decades. They’ve been the authors of the worst ideas — the 16th Amendment, giving power to the government to take our property (Taxes); the Great Society, cultivating the natural inclination toward dependency to grow their voter base (Welfare); and, by breaking the Constitutional chains on government power, enslaving us all — both the taxpayers and the recipients of entitlement funds (Slaves). It’s very effective and “successful” if what you hope to achieve is centralized, unlimited power. One might even call it “diabolical.” I know I would.
Who makes up a second side of the triangle? Well, clearly the voters. It’s a false compassion that consigns others to this life of dependency just so one can feel good about “helping others” (by confiscating other people’s money and redistributing it through a ginormous bureaucracy). And, it’s foolish to think one can receive what one has not earned and lead a happy, fulfilling life. It just doesn’t work that way. There’s no free lunch.
But, I’m not finished yet. The Republicans have some culpability in this, forming the third leg. Knowing what they know about the Progressive Golden Triangle, their inability (or unwillingness) to push hard against these malicious, character destroying methods is shameful and cowardly. The stakes are certainly high enough (just look at the human wreckage in Democrat-controlled cities), that good men would be willing to wager their Lives, their Fortunes, and their Sacred Honor. That they’re not even willing to risk their next election to repeal Obamacare and reform the tax code I’m finding more and more unforgivable. It’s no longer a matter of politics. It’s a matter of justice.
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Thanks for a great post. It is frustrating to hear the left accuse the right of being racist. Which group wants to get low income minorities out of deplorable government schools and give them a choice so they can go to better schools? Which group wants to lower the minimum wage so that young minorities can get that first job and start working their way up the ladder? Which group wants to remove the thugs from neighborhoods so that the people can live safely and without fear (as opposed to treating the police as the enemy)? Which group wants to give people in crime infested intercity neighborhoods the ability to defend themselves, as opposed to waiting for the police to show up? Which group wants to treat all people equally regardless of race, or gender? Which group understands that the odds are much better for a child from a 2 parent family than a single parent family? I could go on, but you get the picture.
Great post. Thanks.
The Democratic Party should be ashamed and they should change the name of that party.
Great essay. Looking forward to the response of those dems you refer to in your post.
Well done.
Your brother and I were discussing this cowardice earlier this morning.
His take: The selfish gene. When people open their eyes in the morning – the default state of consciousness is “what do I want”. Civilization generally manages to corral and contain this “self” centeredness. Looks like this horse increasingly has left the barn.
Here’s the Whittle clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_I3IHgJT-M
I’ve heard the LBJ quote he used the word, nigras, a term people accustomed to using the other word came up with when they tried to say negro.
It’s the first time in my 55 years of life I’ve ever typed the word. It’s so repulsive to me, I’m fairly sure it’s never crossed my lips. But, such is the state of our nation, I think we’re all nigras now… or soon will be if Congress doesn’t get off it’s you-know-what.
It is uncertain that LBJ said this, but GOP mastermind and chair Lee Atwater did say this:
Not gonna play whataboutism. Go away, or address the point. Your side has destroyed the character of generations of Americans by offering them a “free” lunch with a bus ride to the polls. Refute that.
Thank you, WC. You are so right. All sides of the triangle are complicit: I think LBJ was especially disdainful of human nature, period. And the dependency that Democrats have nurtured is both arrogant and incredibly naïve. Finally, the Republicans–ah yes, the Republicans– you said it beautifully: Republicans have some culpability in this, forming the third leg. Knowing what they know about the Progressive Golden Triangle, their inability (or unwillingness) to push hard against these malicious, character destroying methods is shameful and cowardly.
If only people like the Koch brothers would buy TV and radio ad time running pieces like WC’s across the country.
Ever wonder why they don’t? Third leg maybe ?
We could turn this country around if we had a few uber wealthy conservative activists.
Let’s see, what was that about Human Nature? Self-centeredness? Those Republicans are just acting in their individual self-interest when they slow-walk reforms that those who elected them want. They have cushy jobs with little actual hard work (that is mostly done by their “staffers”), generous pensions and benefits, and access to the highest levels of society. We need a way of diminishing the rewards of seniority in all branches of government. Once any elected official gets to DC, they become part of the culture there, and no longer part of the citizenry. They turn into Masters of all us Peons. Just the idea that they can pass laws, and then exempt themselves from those laws is ridiculous!
Even unemployment compensation shows that the longer you pay it out, the longer people stay unemployed.
I like the late David Stove’s (au. philosopher) take on happiness, in that there are multiple reasons people are unhappy: one woman is unhappy because she doesn’t have children, the next because she does. And so on.
If government is trying to make people happy, they will never succeed.
What if each state’s conservative base ran a perpetual “go fund me ” divorced from the Republican party. Purpose would be to partner with local ad agencies to target low income communities for education. Ad’s could be run on local radio and tv. They would be tailored for the intended community and tweeked along the way.
Anyway to organize a venture such as this ?
I would add my local go fund me to my monthly budget.
I suspect the language is too controversial. Wouldn’t want to attract attention to a right-of-center website using such baldly honest language. Some might call us “racists”… Like that never happens.
You may be a little hard on VC.
Rather, I’d point out that the quote is somewhat irrelevant to the issue being discussed. The point of LBJ’s comment is not that he was a racist for saying “nigger,” and if that was what WC was attempting to convey, VC would have a good point – it wasn’t racism, it was just common speech. Even today, it is widely used by blacks, which makes it a pretty ridiculous double standard.
Of course, that wasn’t the point of the quote. If LBJ had said “We’ll have African-Americans voting democratic for 200 years,” the point would still remain that he sees that demographic primarily as a voting bloc. LBJ understood that he could sell blame-shifting and free stuff to a group of people, and he didn’t seem to either understand or care that this would make them substantially worse off. It may be that he felt it didn’t matter, because he didn’t foresee something like BLM, which is the inevitable outcome of race based blame-shifting.
I wouldn’t say that LBJ was a racist, so it doesn’t really matter if Lee Atwater used that same language-of-the-day. What I would say is that this whole grievance and entitlement politics has been designed from the outset as a means of attaining power, not as a means of making any group of people better off.
Yes, precisely.
Oh, and I think LBJ probably was a racist (given the Democrats’ history up to that point), but you’re right. That’s not the point of the quote.
Afaik, when Pres. Eisenhower responded to Dr. King’s 1957 Voting Rights March on Washington by introducing a voting rights bill in the House, then-Senator Lyndon Johnson responded by making a comment about “uppity nigrahs.” See the last paragraph: http://thecitysquare.blogspot.com/2008/01/lbj-vs-civil-rights-act-of-1957.html
In either case, I would say that the quote is relevant. It shows that the GOP, at least as far back as 1981, has been playing grievance politics.
Not really — Atwater was responding to their grievance politics. Are you calling that a grievance?
There is something absolutely central to all of this to add, white guilt. White guilt forces whites to not only vote liberal but to not judge the plague of illegitimacy that is destroying the poor black community. (I don’t know if upper class blacks are being destroyed by this plague.)
White guilt is never about improving the health, safety and wealth poor people or minorities. It’s about how white people feel about themselves.
Why 1981? Enlighten me.
The quote is from 1981.
Whose grievance politics?
Not gonna let you hijack this thread, viruscop. Either refute the assertions of the OP, or unfollow. Thanks in advance.
Nobody is highjacking the thread. The quote that I have provided is relevant.
It absolutely isn’t. In order to have a valid grievance, you must understand and explain the source of the injustice you suffer. You are refusing to do that by deflecting the conversation from my assertions. Blacks today do not suffer from the legacy of slavery; they suffer from the legacy of progressive politics.
Limited government, free trade, rule of law, accountability to God, sovereignty of the people, for which conservatism stands, does not explain what has happened to blacks and others in the underclass in our society. Democrat progressive policies (and the collaboration in education, the media, and the entertainment industry) do. Again, if you can’t refute that, please go away and think about it and come back when you have a better explanation for how we got here.
Actually, the quote that I’ve provided is the only relevant thing here. The only evidence that you have provided to make your point is an unverifiable quote from LBJ. Contrary to your point, my quote provides evidence that the GOP has actually played grievance politics. That was their intent. You have no evidence of the intent on the side of the Democrats. Everything else consists of your musings.
Also, you don’t have to believe in God to be a conservative.
This is not the thread you’re looking for.