Friday, June 18, 2010

Conservatives Undermining Conservatism

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan wrote a fun little thesis in college titled "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933" which examined how the socialist movement in the United States undermined its own interests. The article ends with a fun little twist on "Workers of the World Unite":

"Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope."

I was in school just a few years after Kagan. The professoriat asked me to write up essays on how to revive the socialist movement and on ways to undermining the free market and American Republic. The standard conclusion was that the best path to restoring socialism was to infiltrate and undermine.

The first goal was to infiltrate the schools with gatekeepers and ideological enforcers stationed throughout the university and public schools. The second step was to encourage the development of financial tools SUCH AS EMPLOYER BASED INSURANCE that centralized the market and created systemic risks.

If the progressives could just avoid undermining their own cause, the United States would be theirs for the taking in a few decades.

These last few decades have been a horrible thing to watch as conservatives blindly sat by as the traps were set.

It is great that the excesses of Obama, Pelosi and Reid have ignited a fire under the feet of conservatives, but unless conservatives realize the nature of the traps set for them, they are apt to become their own worse enemies.

We have reached a point in this country where defending freedom requires more than just hot air from Conservatives. We need people to sit down (in the same fashion as Elena Kagan and the professoriat) and ask the tough questions about the things we do that undermine our freedoms and how to rebuild our social institutions in ways that prevent them from being infilitated and turned against us.

We cannot regain our freedoms with the same underhanded techniques used by the left to oppress freedom. But, with strong attentiveness to the foundations of discourse and logic, those wishing to preserve a free society could reignite the discourse of liberty.

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