One of the common traits of “progressive” social policy–especially since the radicals took over the Democratic Party in the 1960’s–has been the penchant for slapping a fresh coat of paint onto previously failed social policies and trotting them out again as revolutionary new ideas that haven’t been tried before.
Why is it that progressives can’t seem to learn from past failures, reexamine their failed policies and try something truly new or different?
For the self-styled anointed elite who view it as their destiny to gain massive amounts of power so they can ‘fix’ human nature and perfect society, it doesn’t matter whether their new social policies worked or not.
Their pure principles and motives that make them special demanded these courses of action, therefore they were the only right actions to take. What else were they supposed to do? Go back the ‘failed’ traditional, conservative way that wasn’t perfect? Of course not!
Commitment to ideology actually limits and narrows the options that elites will consider in designing new policy. Someone who learns from mistakes will adjust their views accordingly through trial and error and through experience. They’ll alter their thinking about how to approach and solve problems. Their consideration of possible alternative courses of action will grow with experience. For the elite progressive leadership, this isn’t possible.
There is nothing practical about what an ideologue does. Ideology trumps practicality. Having pure principles and motives in the service of a Utopian vision trumps experience and any nasty fixation on beknighted things like results or success & failure. So instead of a growing list of alternative ways to tackle problems as the years go by and failures mount, you get the spectacle of progressives stubbornly trying the Same Old Thing while either
1) lying & claiming this hasn’t been tried before or
2) admitting it was tried before and failed before but it wasn’t implemented by THEM and they are going to get it right THIS TIME.
As Professor Thomas Sowell explains in Chapter 5 of his book, The Vision of the Anointed, entitled ‘The Anointed vs The Beknighted’, a key trait of the leadership in the progressive movement is the ability to shield oneself from points of view based on something OTHER than ideology. Like say, for instance, years of experience and practicality.
French philosopher Jean Francois Revel puts it this way:
…Ideology….is an instrument of power; a defense mechanism against information; a pretext for eluding moral constraints in doing or approving evil with a clean conscience; and finally, a way of banning the criterion of experience, that is, of completely eliminating or indefinitely postponing the pragmatic criterion of success and failure.
Progressive elites consider themselves revolutionaries that are far smarter than anyone who has come before them. Therefore “old” ways of dealing with problems must be dismissed out of hand and their new methods implemented.
Reactionary philosophy of thought like this leads to the rejecting of even common sense traditions and customs. It’s old. They didn’t think it up. It didn’t lead to perfect or ‘good enough’ results. Therefore they can do better by tossing that out and doing what almost always is the exact opposite of the traditional way of dealing with the problem.
Nothing shows the ability of this present administration to shield itself off from practical experience quite like the ‘job creation’ fiasco that’s unfolded for the past 4 1/2 years. Arrogant elites from Washington, eggheads with theories they created from their pure motives and their utopian views actually think they know more about how to create jobs and grow the private sector than people who have been in that private sector for decades learning through trial and error what works and what doesn’t.
What have we ended up with? Disasters lik green energy ‘job programs’ that end up spending $10 billion dollars worth of taxpayer money to create a grand total of 355 permanent jobs.
Think I’m joking?
These elitists simply ignore all those decades of experience to charge ahead and enact policy based on their theories, many of which have already failed in the past–repeatedly.
The Anointed doesn’t want to hear that his vision is unworkable or false. People who keep trying to show him this become ‘the enemy’ and need to have their voices suppressed.
This is likely why Obama has refused to meet with his business council and hear criticism of the job-destroying policies he’s been pursuing. Why deal with the hassle of listening to criticism/input from people who don’t know as much as he does about how to create jobs? What would be the point?
Of course Obama’s media enablers and defenders do their utmost best to keep people from realizing the truth that these emperors don’t have any clothes on: These elites are not nearly as competent or smart as they and their media sycophants present themselves as being.
We’re going to spent the next several years discovering this yet again as ObamaCare crashes and burns.
Remember how President Obama reacted when confronted by Paul Ryan about the true costs and negative effects Obamacare would have if it was passed & implemented? Just about everything Ryan claimed has already come to pass, but Obama didn’t want to hear a word of it. ‘The Anointed’ was forced to listen to ‘The Beknighted’ and he clearly resented every second of it.
Since the mainstream media has gone ‘all in’ on helping these Progressives sell their agenda of unlimited power to transform American society from the top down via Washington DC, they do everything they can to give the illusion to the public that these people know exactly what they are doing.
The idea of granting these grasping egomaniacs more and more power is presented by these media mouthpieces as being perfectly reasonable. How can Washington solve all our problems for us if we don’t let them help us by granting them ever increasing powers over us?
So the media do two things:
1) They presents power grabs by ideologues who want to destroy our constitutional republic of divided, limited government as the actions of heroes fighting for all of us to fix our problems. They’re heroes! They’re our champions! Cheer them on!
2) Conversely, the media will attack anyone who questions these dangerous power grabs, trying to force a top-down transformation on the country as being evil extremists motivated by hate and racism, who’s views don’t deserve an equal hearing.
Progressives may boast about their supposed anointed vision and their vast knowledge, but in the end most Americans will learn to see through this and spot people bound by a narrow inflexible ideology that limits them to the point that all they offer is the Same Old Thing, which is always dependent on ever more power being handed over to them to enforce a top down transformation of the nation.
It’s time for all Americans to spot this fraud and reject it.