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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.
Published in General
Since you describe yourself as a Democrat and progressive, how in the world would you know what it takes to be a conservative?
That’s an interesting question.
It’s not complicated: “Atwater was responding to their grievance politics.”
Are you telling us that Atwater’s complaint against them is in itself grievance politics?
Or it’s a delaying tactic.
“India Gulf niner niner transmitting in the blind guard: Disengage, repeat Disengage!!”
— Helen Parr, aka Elastigirl, Incredibles
Do you mean the grievances on the left or the right?
I believe that he was responded to grievances on the right. Why should he care about grievances on the left?
I don’t think that the grievances that he was responded to on the right were legitimate ones.
I love your post, absolutely. But, here comes the “but”…
Your quote above is one that pushes my button every time, and I will always respond to it. Slapping the blame on the entire GOP is dishonest. Everyone celebrated that we had “won” the entire Congress in 2016. We didn’t. With Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John McCain, we had a Congress that wasn’t always Republican. Just like with Justice Kennedy, we have a Supreme Court that isn’t always Constitutional.
I will always step in and point this out whenever someone wants to blame the entire GOP for what those three closet Socialists did to America. You can’t blame Ryan, you can’t blame McConnell, you can’t blame Trump. The Congress and the President did everything they could to write a bill that would please those three scum. But in the end, Schumer took them into the back room, made them kiss his ring, and they went out and voted against the Constitution without a moment’s hesitation.
Point to the authoritative text on American conservatism and where it says that all conservatives must believe in God.
I can see how this would make sense from your perspective.
In 1981, what legitimate grievances did the right have that could be solved by latent racial division?
Perhaps people on the right may have legitimate grievances back then, but the grievances that Atwater was responding to were, by his own admission, racial.
So, getting back to your post, WC, what I like about it shows that LBJ, like almost all Leftist leaders, did not care a single bit about people of color. The vast majority of them do not have black friends or even black associates. They don’t live in black neighborhoods or socialize with them. They are simply a block of voters to be captured, by any means possible. They have the sycophant MSM to prop up their lies and bury the truths about the GOP. Everyone knows it is far better to have a job than a handout, but somehow the Democrat message – to let the government take care of you and raise your children – resonates as “caring” more with blacks than the Republican telling them that they will get full employment across the nation, as Trump is now doing.
I am not sure that there is anything we can do about it. Wishing the GOP would “push hard against these malicious, character destroying methods” – well, frankly, to WHOM? They assemble the MSM and speak to them about this issue and implore them to speak to America about it, and the MSM dutifully videotapes it and then throw the tapes in the trash on their way out the door, unless the politician says something which, twisted out of context, makes them sound anti-minority; THAT is broadcast over and over until the end of time.
@viruscop– A question for you- If the OP is wrong, and racism, white privilege, white supremacy, and subtle or institutional racism are the problem, please explain why the average Asian-American now earns more than the average white American. Also, people like the late African-American talk-show host on PBS, Tony Brown, was noting in the late eighties what is still true today: that African immigrants come to the US and like Asians, end up earning more on average than the average white American.
Has the ‘War on Poverty,’ or the various social programs of the last 52 years achieved a similar result for African-Americans?
This is not a post about race. It’s a post about exploitation of people (of all colors) for the purposes of acquiring and expanding power. Taxes to Welfare to Slaves. Get it?
They could tweet…
I hear you, and it’s true that a few bad actors can spoil the whole bunch. But, when do you ever hear Republicans talking this way about how the Left bamboozles and exploits people to gain power?
That’s a rhetorical question. The only people who do it are unelected (Star Parker uses the “plantation” language, for example). It’s supposedly too hot to touch. I want to free our politicians to boldly proclaim the truth. Democrats aren’t
interestinginterested [yeah, well, they’re not interesting, either] in helping improve lives — they’re interested in using your grievances and envy to secure their cozy sinecures.Off topic. Write your own damn post.
Great post WC! I propose a golden shower for the Progressive Golden Triangle!
And I agree with your comment. 45 . The “real” GOP legislators’ motto should be “Let’s all Tweet like the President Tweets”! I DKY transparency is getting such a bad rap these days.
@jctpatriot, I see your point too. But what more can we the voters do? We gave our party control, as much as it was in our power to do so. Don’t we need to call out the RINOS? And you’re right: the MSM just won’t report what the Right-minded members say: isn’t that why Trump tweets? Who needs ’em, he can talk to us directly! Of course the MSM only picks up and rebroadcasts the Trump Tweets they can bash–but all the others are out there too.
Ahahahaaha! First real smile I’ve had today :)
“Let’s All Tweet like the President Tweets.”
This has been a test of the Emergency (save the nation) Broadcast System.
You have passed, Ricochet. My hat’s off to you.
Leftists always project their schemes on republicans.
Now that’s just insane. How can the OP be irrelevant to the OP? There is no possible way to justify such a ridiculous statement
This is just terribly uncivil behavior. Quit derailing the thread.
That’s not what the thread is about. Try responding to the OP instead of making random attacks.
Point to the documentation that establishes Atwater as the leader of conservative republicans. This is totally irrelevant.
@mattwhite, it’s totally not worth it to follow viruscop down the rabbit hole. The cognitive dissonance is strong on the Left. He knows he’s a good person and he doesn’t intend to destroy black lives, therefore, it simply can’t be true that progressivism is probably the most destructive force in America in the last century. He will continue to throw up every distraction (Lee Atwater?? Seriously???) he can find, rather than deal with that fact. He can’t refute it.
Your responses to him will not be productive.
I don’t think institutional racism is the problem.
It’s difficult to say whether the War on Poverty has helped black families. Poverty rates are lower today than they were when the War on poverty started, but that doesn’t mean anything. They could have fallen at a faster rate without the War on Poverty. I also don’t know what causes African-American poverty. Some say it is high incarceration rates. Others say that it is geography. Maybe the two are related.
As a side note to this, let me add that I don’t know where Thomas Sowell is getting his data on black families before the War on poverty. The Census Bureau only tracks poverty rates since 1959. Maybe he created a new data set or he has a dataset that is not widely available.
It’s not about material poverty (America’s “poor” aren’t very poor, for the most part); it’s about virtue poverty: self-reliance, personal responsibility, service to others, prudence, sexual continence…
Of course you can’t locate the cause of the degeneration of American civil society. If you did, you’d have to place responsibility for it on the Left, and then all hell will break loose with your ideology. You might end up having a Mamet moment…
Public policy isn’t about virtue. That isn’t something that can be measured.
There are several links. This information is easy to find; it’s not obscure, just ignored: