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Progressivism Has Always Been Authoritarian, Anti-Democratic, and Reactionary

Former President Donald Trump has survived yet another assassination attempt less than two weeks after a judge postponed his sentencing on thirty-four felony convictions related to hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. For the moment, all obstacles to Trump standing for the November presidential election seemed to be cleared away.

Trump’s supporters are reeling from what they perceive as the unprecedented assault on America’s republican norms. That’s understandable given the relative stability of electoral politics in the decades before Trump came on the scene. However, those of us who grew up in the 1970s remember the assassination attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan just a few years after the successful assassinations of both President John Kennedy and his brother.

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People of my generation considered being shot at a normal part of the job for U.S. presidents and presidential candidates.

Nor are deep state machinations to remove a sitting president anything unprecedented. President Nixon was removed from office by a Naval intelligence officer posing as a reporter working with the number two man at the FBI. As with Trump, the media dutifully swayed the public against the popular president for reprisals that would be considered minor today, post-Snowden.

But many Americans believe something is fundamentally different about today’s Democratic Party establishment. Even some prominent Democrats see the party as breaking from its core values by repressing speech and undermining the democratic primaries to install Kamala Harris as its nominee.

Ironically, the truth is stranger than this fiction. The progressive movement has always been authoritarian, anti-democratic, and reactionary.

Since “save our democracy” is the call to arms (literally, for some of its deranged supporters) of today’s progressives, let us begin with progressivism being anti-democratic. Since the beginning of the movement, when it was led by Republicans, progressives have attempted to transfer power away from elected assemblies and to unelected bureaucrats or judges.

This began with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Although passed by Congress, it empowered an unelected board of commissioners to both set rates and conduct quasi-judicial proceedings to settle disputes. It set the precedent for Congress to unconstitutionally transfer both its own exclusive power to legislate and the judicial power to the executive.

The New Deal massively expanded on that precedent in creating myriad executive branch regulatory agencies that effectively usurped most legislative power from the elected Congress. This trend has metastasized ever since. Thus, when President Biden wanted to mandate Covid vaccines, he didn’t even bother to approach Congress. He went straight to a regulatory agency of unelected bureaucrats and directed it to write a new rule. No democracy needed.

Throughout the 20th century, progressives were fervent supporters of Supreme Court decisions that similarly usurped legislative power from the elected Congress. Where the Constitution clearly required an amendment for the federal government to exercise a new power, the unelected Supreme Court dutifully found that power hiding between the lines. This was just another way to avoid putting progressive ideas to a popular vote.

None of this is to say democracy is any guarantee of individual liberty. But it is preferable to the autocratic rule of an unelected oligarchy.

As far as being authoritarian, all political movements suffer from that defect, but the progressive movement particularly so. Apart from the obvious enormities of jailing journalists and political opponents during WWI and imprisoning Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII, progressivism is more fundamentally authoritarian in its modus operandi for achieving all its societal goals. Without exception, progressives seek to forcibly override the personal choices of individuals and replace them with regulations imposed by the state.

Where Thomas Jefferson famously defined liberty as “unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others,” Woodrow Wilson took a perverse turn on the “unobstructed” idea. In The New Freedom, he answers the question, “What is liberty?” as follows:

“You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat skimming the water with light foot, “How free she runs,” when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is “in irons,” in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.

Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.”

Where Jefferson saw government as the obstructor of liberty, Wilson saw it as the “adjuster” of human activity. This “adjustment,” of course, is regardless of the individual’s will or rights. Only by allowing the government to adjust your activities can you truly be free.

Monstrous.

That progressivism is reactionary would probably surprise Americans the most. But it is nonetheless true. Calling the movement “progressive” follows the proud American tradition of giving your party or movement a name opposite to its nature. The Federalists weren’t in favor of federalism; they were nationalists. The Anti-Federalists were in favor of federalism. The Whig Party were quite the opposite of the British party after which they were named. And progressivism isn’t about progress; it’s about returning to an earlier, illiberal past.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Why Democrats Weren’t Punished in the Midterms for Covid Tyranny

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The biggest news coming out of the midterm elections is the failure of the Republican Party to win a more decisive victory. They had predicted a “red wave” since well back into 2021 (an immediate reason to be skeptical) but will at best have a modest advantage in the House and a razor thin majority in the Senate.

Not only were the Republicans denied a resounding victory, but the Democrats did better in a first term midterm election than either party has while holding the White House in decades. There is no denying this was a good night for the Democrats.

This has many scratching their heads. This election was supposed to be, at least in large part, a referendum on the massive damage done to the American economy and society in general by Covid tyranny imposed by Democrats. “Never forget what they did to you” said many a meme on social media in the days before the election, especially after Emily Oster’s infamous plea for amnesty.

There is only one problem with that narrative. Covid lockdowns and other mandates were, with a few notable exceptions, largely bipartisan.

Where resistance won

Where it was possible for Covid lockdowns to be put on the ballot, they were. Governor Kristi Noem, who never locked down her state a single day in 2020, improved upon her three-point victory in 2018 with a thirty-point trouncing of her Democratic rival on Tuesday.

During her victory speech, she said, “Here in South Dakota, we protected your constitutional rights. I trusted in you to use personal responsibility and take care of each other.” The vote totals speak for themselves.

The less libertarian but more well-known Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida also won in a landslide in traditionally purple Florida. Desantis was elected by a razor thin margin in 2018. As governor, he famously convened a panel of non-government epidemiologists in September 2020 and dropped all Covid restrictions based on their televised recommendations.

Governors Gregg Abbot of Texas and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, both of whom dropped Covid restrictions in early 2021, were re-elected by comfortable margins. Senator Rand Paul, who grilled Fauci during multiple congressional appearances, also won easily.

By contrast, Republican Lee Zeldin, whom some polling indicated had a real chance to defeat incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul in deep blue New York, didn’t really compete on Tuesday. He was forced to campaign mostly on traditional Republican tough-on-crime talking points because that’s all he could do. He certainly couldn’t run a strident anti-lockdown campaign after failing to question lockdowns at all during 2020.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Which Presidents Increased Spending the Fastest?

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“Can you believe this spending with a REPUBLICAN in the White House????”

I’ve heard it my entire adult life, starting during the Reagan years. I’m not sure how many times Republicans have to increase spending twice as fast as their Democratic predecessors before people get used to the idea that this is what Republican presidents do, regardless of which party controls Congress.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. The Republican Party was born out of the ashes of the Whigs, whose stated goal was to expand the range of things the federal government spent money on. Before the Civil War, most roads were privately owned. Not just privately built; privately owned. Taxpayers didn’t contribute a cent towards them.

Not only did the Republican Party Sovietize the road system, they did the same with railroads and all sorts of other areas of life. Before FDR, it was Republicans who established most new federal departments.

Today, the government has Sovietized the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and other treatments, a precedent established under the last Republican president.

When you consider the actual records of Republican presidents from Lincoln through Trump, it turns out that Harding and Coolidge were the real “RINOs.”

In the post-WWII era, spending almost always goes up (not counting the obvious decrease right after the war – which led to an economic boom, btw). But I decided to take a look at how fast it went up during the various presidential administrations starting with JFK/LBJ. I used the following methodology:

Measure the increase in yearly federal spending for each president as a percentage of the spending in the last year of his predecessor. For example, spending was $590 billion in the last year of the Carter Administration. It was $1.06 trillion in the last year of the Reagan administration, an increase of $473.4 billion or 80.1%. That comes in at just over 10% per year on average.

You’ll never guess who grew spending at the slowest rate since 1951. Certainly not the Gipper. Nor was it either Bush. No, as a percentage of spending during his predecessor’s last year in office, the president who grew the budget at the slowest rate was Barack Obama.

I broke it all down on Episode 85 of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom. I provide documentation of the outlays and receipts on the show notes page. A summary table is provide below.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/

A few notes:

All spending increases are aggregated for the full term of the presidency and then averaged. Example: to calculate President Obama’s spending increases, 2008 spending is subtracted from the spending during the last year of his presidency (2016) to arrive at an increase of $870 billion over eight years. That total is divided by 2008 spending of $2.9 trillion to arrive at the 29.2% aggregate spending increase. Spending increases for each presidency is calculated in similar fashion.

I combined the presidencies of Kennedy/Johnson and Nixon/Ford as Kennedy and Nixon both served partial terms which were completed by members of their own parties.

Calculations are made for the Trump years 2017-2020 and 2017-2019.

Spending is not adjusted for inflation. All spending is in billions

Of course, regardless of how quickly or slowly it increases, federal spending is always destructive. It’s important to remember the government has failed at every major spending initiative it has undertaken in my lifetime, whether it is military or domestic policy. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Department of Education, the War on Drugs, Covid – it’s always all pain and no gain when it comes to the government. And the price just keeps going up.

Still, it is remarkable that spending goes up so much faster when a Republican is in the White House. The excuse is often made for Reagan that he had a Democratic Congress. But the Republicans controlled the Senate for 6 of Reagan’s 8 years in office, so that claim isn’t even true. The Democrats did have both houses of Congress during George H.W. Bush’s 4 years, but spending didn’t go up as fast during those years. Oops.

The other excuse often brought up in defense of profligate Republican presidents is that Congress “has the purse strings.” This is technically true, but when one looks at the spending proposed by the presidents in question and compares it to what Congress eventually appropriated, there is never much difference.

When an opposition party controls Congress, there is always some demagoguing over financially inconsequential components of the president’s proposal. See “funding Big Bird.” But in general, the executive branch proposes the spending and Congress rubber stamps it. And let’s not forget, no spending can occur without the president’s signature.

There is also some evidence that the combination of a Democratic president and Republican Congress may slow spending increases the most, but comparing spending increases during the first two years Presidents Clinton and Obama were in office (with Democratic Congresses) to spending increases over the remainder of their terms hardly provides conclusive proof.

The record does show that spending seems to grow relatively slowly with a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. And since gridlock in Washington is always good, to the extent we get it, for all sorts of non-fiscal reasons, let’s hope for a Republican landslide in this year’s midterms.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

A Free Thinker’s Guide to Voteball 2020

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2020 election It’s fitting the disastrous but highly entertaining Iowa Caucuses were scheduled one day after the Super Bowl. With the football season over and hockey and basketball far from their own playoff seasons, a large portion of the inhabitants of this continent need something to fill the gap. What could be better than the presidential primaries to take the place of quarterback sacks, slam dunks and breakaways for an entertainment-dependent public?

That was a rhetorical question.

Not all Americans are as fanatical about sports. There is a contingent so uninterested that they playfully chide those who are by referring to all organized athletics, whether amateur or professional, merely as “sportsball.” But that group isn’t nearly as large as the one completely uninterested in politics, regardless of how interested politics is in them.

Almost half the population doesn’t bother to vote in presidential elections. More than half skip Congressional, state and local elections. This august coalition needs its own dismissive, snooty-hip term for all things political. I humbly offer “Voteball.” As the great Nigel Tufnel would say, “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it.”

Interested or not, Voteball 2020 is upon us and it won’t go away until November 4, when with any luck an 11^th season of the Walking Dead will be there to provide amusement a little more connected to reality. In the meantime, politicians, their surrogates, the media and even many of our neighbors will wage a full-frontal assault on our psyches.

Football, baseball and hockey players all wear helmets for safety. In Voteball, even the spectators need to protect themselves. In lieu of hard plastic headgear, I humbly offer the following safety tips:

First and foremost, remember Horton’s Law: Politicians can be counted on to keep all their bad promises, and abandon all their good ones. And don’t forget Mullen’s Corollary: Any minor good done by the current administration will be undone by the next. This will help prevent irrational exuberance over those occasional good promises made amidst all the bad ones.

Mark Twain once wrote, “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe when the legislature is in session.” Most of the candidates running for president or Congress are already legislators. In President Trump’s case, he signs the bills legislators write, making them laws. So, as bad as the campaigns might be, don’t forget that every minute they spend campaigning is a minute they aren’t doing something worse.

English is not the primary language during Voteball season. From now until November, you’ll have to learn to translate a foreign language I call “Dronespeak.” It is important to avoid inadvertently adopting this language yourself as it can permanently warp your thinking. Here are a few examples of Dronespeak expressions to avoid:

“The Trump economy.” The economy is an incredibly complex combination of billions of individual decisions, partially overridden by thousands of government interventions. How well or poorly it might be doing at any given moment has very little to do with anything the president has done, no matter how much credit he or she tries to take. This isn’t directed at Trump. There was no Obama economy, Bush economy, or Clinton economy either. America prospers despite presidents and governments, not because of them.

“The commander in chief.” Yes, the president is commander in chief of the military and it’s perfectly appropriate to use this term when speaking of a strictly military issue. But it’s becoming more and more common to simply refer to the president this way in any context, as if he were commander in chief of the citizens. What an awful concept.

“Run the country.” Voteball doesn’t determine who will “run the country.” This is closely related to the “commander in chief” meme. The president doesn’t run the country. He or she runs the government, which causes enough problems on its own. Let’s not encourage any ambitions beyond that.

“My president.” “The president” is best; “our president” is questionable. “My president” is terrifying. It sounds a lot like those who say they have a personal relationship with God. Theological debate on that concept is fine, but can we agree applying it to a politician is blasphemy in a supposedly free country?

“We.” If Voteball in general is a war on your soul, presumptive use of the first-person plural pronoun is the enemy machine gun fire. It will be flying at you nonstop from every direction and it only takes one hit to take you out. Anytime anyone begins a sentence with, “We need,” “We must,” “We believe,” or “We all agree,” the proper response is, “Who is we?” Or, you could just refer them to Wemus.

This is by no means exhaustive but hopefully this short guide will not only help keep you safe from the dangers identified above but will give you the tools to identify and mitigate many others. Taking just a few precautions can make all the difference in enjoying a safe and entertaining Voteball season.

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Republicans as wrong as Democrats on Sandy Relief

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TAMPA, January 5, 2013 – There is yet another faux debate raging in Congress. According to Fox News, the House and Senate have passed a $9.7 billion aid package for Sandy victims. Most Democrats and Republicans are calling for an additional $51 billion.

Some Republicans are dragging their feet.

It would be encouraging if even a single Republican articulated the principle at issue here, but none have. Republicans in Congress couldn’t find a principle if it were slid under their doors with envelopes full of lobbyist cash.

For the record, the principle is this: Citizens in Wyoming shouldn’t be taxed to rebuild the houses of other people in Wyoming, much less New York or New Jersey. This is another bedrock American principle that has completely vanished from the minds of most Americans.

Instead, Republicans object on the grounds that not all of the proposed funding is necessary for immediate relief. In fact, there is some considerable pork built into both the House and Senate versions of the bill, including “$150 million for fishery disasters in a range of states — including Alaska and Mississippi” and “nearly $45 million was included for work on NOAA’s hurricane reconnaissance aircraft.”

Rep. Tim Huelskamp voted against it, saying, “We have to talk seriously about offsets,” he said. “We can’t take $60 billion off budget, that’s my problem with it.”

The common sense and acknowledgement of reality are refreshing, but Huelskamp still avoids the main issue.

Property is a right, just like free speech. It was recognition of the right of each individual to keep the fruits of his own labor and dispose of them as he saw fit that made the United States the richest nation in the world, relatively overnight.

While the immediate cause for the outbreak of hostilities during the American Revolution was the British attempt to disarm the colonists, the long term cause was the British threat against property rights.

American schoolchildren are taught that the colonists’ only grievance was “taxation without representation.” That’s convenient for big government progressives on both sides of the aisle, because they can then say, “You are represented, so we can tax you however we please.”

Those schoolchildren are not taught that the colonists also did not want representation in the British Parliament. Jefferson said so in his Summary View of the Rights of British America. Benjamin Franklin was strictly instructed not to accept any deal with the British that involved colonial representation in Parliament.

The colonists wanted no part of any political system whereby they could be taxed and the money spent for the benefit of other parts of the empire. Representation in a Parliament where they were hopelessly outnumbered would only add the veneer of legitimacy to this armed theft.

The colonists opposed it enough to secede from the British Empire.

The Federalist Party sought to reestablish this system during the early republic. Alexander Hamilton’s program of high protectionist tariffs, “bounties (corporate welfare),” a central bank and a large, interventionist military establishment amounted to a reconstruction of the British system within the new American Republic.

The system was rejected again in 1800, this time by an election. The Federalists were thrown out and Jefferson and the Republicans were brought in. The property rights of the individual were the centerpiece of Jeffersonian republicanism. He said so in his first inaugural address and again in his second, reminding Americans that it was the government’s job to protect “that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry, or that of his fathers.”

With the Jeffersonians in power, the federal government wasn’t even allowed to build roads.

If you’re wondering why modern Republicans don’t cite these foundational American principles, it’s because today’s Republicans did not emerge from the Jeffersonian tradition.

In fact, the party of Lincoln was born out of the remains of the Whigs, who advocated the exact same system as the Federalists. Lincoln said so himself while still a Whig.

“My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a National Bank. I am in favor of the Internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; and if not, it will be all the same.”

Lincoln’s policies as president were completely consistent with this statement. Lincoln and the Republicans never believed that the rights of the individual outweighed the needs of the collective. The Republican Party and the conservative philosophy that informs it have never been about limited government, individual liberty or property rights.

Throughout human history, conservatism has always been about big, all-powerful government and empire. That’s why no conservative ever takes a stand for the individual against law enforcement and never questions any act of the military, no matter how unnecessary or destructive.

Those few Republicans like Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater (sort of) and Ron Paul who championed the rights of individuals were the real “RINOs.” They were really disaffected classical liberals and libertarians with no other place to go once the Democratic Party went populist-socialist.

That’s where we are today. We are given a choice between empire and commune, fascism and socialism, right wing collectivism vs. left wing collectivism. Both sides believe that Americans can be taxed for anything that benefits the collective. Neither recognizes that individuals have a right not to be taxed for the benefit of other people.

That’s why we’re going down, just like the rest of the world.

Libertarianism, anyone?

The fiscal cliff: Another phony emergency to give the government more power

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TAMPA, November 27, 2012 – The 24-hour news cycle is dominated with frantic warnings about the “fiscal cliff.” If you merely listen to the sound bites, there is another “emergency” facing the United States of America and only some drastic action by Congress can avert it.

What nonsense. Don’t Americans ever learn anything from even the recent past?

Just four years ago, we were told that if we didn’t allow Congress to give Wall Street almost a trillion dollars of our money, the end of the world would occur. The “bold” legislation was necessary to “save the financial system.” Other than preventing a lot of billionaires who made bad investments from losing their money, I’m not sure what that was supposed to mean.

It didn’t prevent millions of borrowers from losing their homes. That happened anyway.

We were told after 911 that “the world changed” and the 4^th, 5^th and 6^th amendments to the Constitution would have to be trashed. Americans now subject themselves to unreasonable searches without warrant merely for the “privilege” of getting on a plane. They allow presidents to arrest American citizens without a warrant or charges and hold them indefinitely without recourse to a writ of habeas corpus.

The president can even kill American citizens without due process.

It was all supposedly necessary to protect us from…the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. Both defeated the new government security apparatus and were subdued by private citizens.

Both initiatives were accompanied by a non-stop barrage of media propaganda trumpeting impending doom if the government wasn’t given more power.

The fiscal cliff scam is playing out exactly the same way. Day and night, Americans are bombarded with the same message. If Congress doesn’t do something, the world will end.

There are two components to this supposed disaster. The first is the “draconian cuts” to government spending built into the Budget Control Act of 2011. Supposedly, they will “gut the military,” while plunging the economy back into recession.

There is only one problem. Even if Congress fails to make a deal, nothing is being cut from the federal budget.

Let me repeat that. Nothing is being cut.

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