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Title: Ted Cruz Makes Heather Cox Richardson's Panties all wet
Source: [None]
URL Source: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/05/ted ... use_to_push_america_rightward/
Published: Apr 5, 2015
Author: Heather Cox Richardson
Post Date: 2015-04-05 14:29:32 by A K A Stone
Keywords: None
Views: 2181
Comments: 18

Ted Cruz’s demented strategy: He doesn’t need to win the White House to push America rightward

Ted Cruz’s candidacy highlights a fundamental rift in the Republican Party, a rift that observers often misunderstand as simply a tug-of-war between different gradations of conservatism. It is a gulf far more profound than this. Most Republicans recognize that the government must regulate some aspects of American capitalism, providing Social Security, veterans benefits, workplace safety, and basic infrastructure at the very least. But Cruz belongs to a reactionary wing of the party that rejects the idea that the government has any role at all to play in the American economy. Since the 1950s, the leaders of Cruz’s wing have been fighting to take the American government back to the days before FDR’s New Deal.

After unregulated capitalism sparked the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing 10-year Depression, Democrats and most Republicans came to accept the idea that the federal government must protect workers, provide jobs and establish a social safety net to keep people from starving. But big business leaders in the Republican Party loathed these programs. New Deal labor laws required businessmen to obey basic rules about safety, wages and hours, cutting into profits. New laws gave workers the right to unionize, and the right to join in a political faction strong enough to counter organizations of businessmen. At the same time, the New Deal raised taxes to pay for the new social safety net. Republican businessmen howled that these laws prevented them from making and keeping as much money as possible. They were “soak the rich” programs that would “crack the timbers of the Constitution.” The New Deal was socialism, pure and simple, they insisted.

But most Americans saw an active government as the proper response to the conditions of modern industrialism, and reactionary businessmen cried in the wilderness.

In 1951, fresh out of Yale, the son of a wealthy oil man launched a radical movement to break the popular New Deal consensus and take the party back to the pro-business government policies of Herbert Hoover. Speaking for the nation’s wealthy businessmen, William F. Buckley Jr. insisted that government must never interfere with either Christianity or “freedom,” a word he turned inside out. In Buckley’s worldview, American freedom no longer meant personal liberty; it meant the right of the wealthy to accumulate as much money as possible. He excoriated regulation and taxes as “collectivism” that redistributed wealth, and warned that welfare legislation destroyed individualism. Bemoaning the extraordinary popularity of America’s new government activism, he maintained that it was leading the nation to full-blown communism. He called for right-minded Americans to reverse the tide and restore the economic freedom he insisted was America’s fundamental principle. But Buckley and his ilk made little headway at first, for a mere 11 years after the Depression, very few Americans still believed in wholly unfettered capitalism.

Buckley’s reactionary ideas began to gain traction in 1954, when court- ordered school desegregation gave Movement Conservatives the opportunity to break the New Deal consensus by appealing to white racists. Many white Americans who liked the idea of an active government that regulated business and kept old people from starving hated the idea of an active government that protected their black neighbors. Buckley harped on this racial wedge in his new magazine, National Review. Movement Conservatism—Buckley’s creation– picked up momentum after 1957, when President Eisenhower sent troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School. This was the first intrusion of federal troops into the South since Reconstruction, and Movement Conservatives deliberately revisited the racist arguments of the late nineteenth century. They explained that integration was simply a redistribution of wealth because tax dollars, paid by hardworking white men, funded the troops that were defending grasping African-Americans. In 1960, Movement Conservatives in Buckley’s mold backed Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for the presidency. They articulated their principles in “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published under Goldwater’s name but written by Buckley’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell. Those principles are Cruz’s playbook.

In their slim 1960 volume, Buckley and Bozell laid out the tenets of Movement Conservatism. They explained that the laws of God and nature were as fixed and unchanging as the Ten Commandments. Those laws dictated America’s fundamental principle: freedom. The Founding Fathers had deliberately kept the government from “the tyranny of the masses” to guarantee that American freedom could not be compromised by popular demands for government activism. No matter how popular government programs might be, the government could do nothing the Founding Fathers had not expressly enumerated in the Constitution, or it would destroy American freedom. “My aim is not to pass laws,” Bozell had Goldwater say, “but to repeal them.” Movement Conservatives planned “not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution… or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden.” Movement Conservatism’s goal was to destroy the New Deal government.

According to “The Conscience of a Conservative,” American freedom depends on states’ rights. There must be no civil rights legislation, no federal oversight of education, no unions, no taxation for domestic spending. Any government intervention in any of these areas was a collectivism that destroyed freedom. Bozell defended this principle according to his understanding of the Tenth Amendment, which, he insisted, reserved most rights to the states. Explicitly, he took on three issues roiling America in his day. On civil rights, he insisted that all legislation was unconstitutional. Even Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous Supreme Court decision under Republican Chief Justice Earl Warren, was wrong. “The Constitution is what its authors intended it to be and said it was,” he wrote, “not what the Supreme Court says it is.” Under the same argument, he attacked any federal intervention in education policy. And it was, he said, imperative to reduce taxes. The only way to do that was to cut all domestic programs that used tax funds: “social welfare programs, education, public power, agriculture, public housing, urban renewal,” and so on. Finally, the only way to protect domestic freedom was by attacking totalitarian foreign governments.

It did not matter if the majority of Americans disagreed with this worldview. According to Bozell, American progress depended not on regular people applying their “average intelligence” to the day’s problems. What moved society forward was “the brilliance and dedication of wise individuals” who apply “their wisdom to advance the freedom and well-being of all of our people.”

Goldwater missed the nomination in 1960, but his supporters got him the 1964 Republican nomination after mainstream Republican Nelson Rockefeller spectacularly self-destructed. For all the Movement Conservatives’ elitism, its stalwarts insisted that they represented a majority of the American people. Apparently, they did not. The Goldwater candidacy went down in flames. More than 60 percent of the American electorate opposed Goldwater and gave Democrat Lyndon Johnson a supermajority to pass the Great Society legislation that expanded the New Deal. Movement Conservatives could not gain significant national power until they convinced social conservatives and evangelicals, as well as white racists, that an active government gave their hard-earned tax dollars to women and minorities. Even then, leaders like President Ronald Reagan, who repeatedly raised taxes and actually was willing to compromise on some issues, could not take the hard line that true Movement Conservatives wanted.

Cruz, though, brings back the Movement Conservative principles of Goldwater’s day. Cruz is a firm adherent of state’s rights: He wrote his undergraduate thesis at Princeton on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and led the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Tenth Amendment Studies. The positions he takes reflect that stand. Cruz publicly supported North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, famous for his fervent opposition to civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Two years ago, Cruz told the Heritage Foundation that America needs “100 more” like Helms in the Senate.

Cruz’s position on the Common Core and the Department of Education also echoes “The Conscience of a Conservative.” Cruz has vowed to repeal “every word of the Common Core,” a vow that has perplexed observers who point out that Common Core is a set of standards voluntarily adopted by states rather than a law. He has also vowed to scrap the Department of Education, a promise that pundits dismiss as red-meat rhetoric for his conservative audiences. But these are not frivolous promises. Cruz’s stance reflects the original insistence of Movement Conservatives that the federal government must stay out of education policy.

Finally, Cruz’s repeated obstruction of the government is not political posturing. He showed his hand in 2013, almost as soon as he took office, when he led an insurgency to shut down the government. This was a suicidal strategy for a party trying to prove that it can govern, but a necessity if the goal was to end the domestic activism that America has relied on since the 1930s. Similarly, Cruz’s insistence that he wants to repeal every word of Obamacare is consistent with the Movement Conservative worldview. Such a broad federal program is a prime illustration of the sort of New Deal government policy Movement Conservatives loathe. Pundits have dismissed Cruz’s promise to abolish the IRS as a silly feint, but it is not. Taxes fund domestic legislation. Get rid of taxes and you can kill domestic spending. As Cruz explained to Fox’s Megyn Kelly when she challenged him to explain what he had accomplished: “What we’ve accomplished over and over again, in many instances,” he said, “is stopping bad things from happening.”

It is an error to dismiss the Cruz candidacy as quixotic. Political observers make the mistake of thinking that he and his ilk are simply at the far right of the same political spectrum that the rest of the country reflects. They are not. Most Americans, Republicans as well as Democrats, accept some version of the New Deal. They believe the government must regulate modern capitalism so that hard-working individuals can rise. Republicans and Democrats often disagree on how to accomplish that goal, but members of the two parties share a basic view that the government has a role to play in society. Many Republicans believe they can work together with Democrats to hash out legislation. These are the people Cruz disdains as “the mushy middle.” In contrast, Movement Conservatives like Cruz believe that rich businessmen are society’s proper leaders and that any government activism to level the economic playing field destroys freedom. They believe their view is absolutely right; to compromise on anything would lose everything.

Cruz does not have to win the White House to win the war. So long as he can grab headlines and whip up voters, Movement Conservatives can continue to hold enough congressional seats to continue to block legislation and defund the government. Then they can do as Buckley hoped: stand athwart history and make it stop. (1 image)

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#1. To: A K A Stone (#0)

After unregulated capitalism sparked the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing 10-year Depression,

Un regulated capitalism didn't cause the depression. It was unregulated stupidity and fantasy. Millions of people were investing in stocks on credit in the absurd belief that the stock market would go up forever. Shoeshine boys and dishwashers were "investing" in the stock market. People who got in it at the start of the climb made millions buying stocks on margin with no underlying industrial support. When the stock market collapsed, Millions of people were stuck holding worthless stock certificates that they suddenly couldn't sell to cover the debt they had incurred to buy them. Former millionaires were suddenly bankrupt jumping out of windows in droves to commit suicide in hopelessness.

The same thing is happening today. The worse the underlying economic and political news becomes, the more the stock market reaches new highs.

Roosevelt's supposed economic policies didn't save the country. In was the placement of millions of people in jobs during WW2 that did it.

rlk  posted on  2015-04-05   15:39:52 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: rlk (#1)

Former millionaires were suddenly bankrupt jumping out of windows in droves to commit suicide in hopelessness.

Urban myth. This was researched some years back and they couldn't find any banker, broker or investor who jumped out of a window on Black Tuesday that started the Great Depression or in the weeks that followed.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-04-05   23:56:49 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#3. To: TooConservative (#2)

Former millionaires were suddenly bankrupt jumping out of windows in droves to commit suicide in hopelessness.

Urban myth. This was researched some years back and they couldn't find any banker, broker or investor who jumped out of a window on Black Tuesday that started the Great Depression or in the weeks that followed.

Who researched it, the same clown who wrote this article?

rlk  posted on  2015-04-06   0:14:52 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#4. To: rlk (#3)

Who researched it, the same clown who wrote this article?

The economist, John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1955 book on the Great Depression.

The suicides were all hopped up by a few big newspapers in New York and London.

October 1929 Stock Market Crash Suicides

No less an authority than economist John Kenneth Galbraith addressed the subject in his book The Great Crash, 1929, first published in 1955. Studying U.S. death statistics, Galbraith found that while the U.S. suicide rate increased steadily between 1925 and 1932, during October and November of 1929 the number of suicides was disappointingly low.

That’s not to say that a few failed investors, executives, etc., didn’t kill themselves in the wake of the crash. But the “Suicides” happened all around the country, didn’t necessarily involve jumping out the window, and for the most part didn’t take place immediately following the crash.

* On Friday, November 8, J.J. Riordan, president of the County Trust Company, took a pistol from a teller’s cage at his bank, went to his home in downtown Manhattan, and shot himself. The news was suppressed until after the bank closed at noon Saturday, to avoid causing a run on the bank.

* A vice president of the Earl Radio Corporation jumped to his death from the window of a Manhattan hotel. His suicide note read, “We are broke. Last April I was worth $100,000. Today I am $24,000 in the red.” But this happened in early October, weeks before the crash.

* Jesse Livermore, perhaps the most famous of the Wall Street speculators, shot himself–but not until 1940.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-04-06   0:43:00 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#5. To: TooConservative, rlk (#4)

http://www.cherada.com/articulos/10-million-americans-disappeared-during-the-great-depression-time

10 Million Americans Disappeared during the Great Depression Time

Pericles  posted on  2015-04-06   0:52:45 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#6. To: Pericles (#5)

10 Million Americans Disappeared during the Great Depression Time

The first I've heard of it.

rlk  posted on  2015-04-06   1:09:51 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#7. To: rlk (#6)

The first I've heard of it.

Of course.

Pericles  posted on  2015-04-06   1:29:45 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#8. To: Pericles (#5)

10 Million Americans Disappeared during the Great Depression Time

I don't buy it. Not based on some lousy web page with a couple of mediocre thinkers spouting off about census statistics.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-04-06   3:10:35 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#9. To: TooConservative (#8)

if you ask yourself how many people died earlier than they would have if not fo rthe great depression? How many children were not born because of broken or delayed families? I think it is an easily reached number if you think about it that way.

Pericles  posted on  2015-04-06   9:23:00 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#10. To: A K A Stone (#0)

"but members of the two parties share a basic view that the government has a role to play in society."

Yes. And if you want to know the extent of that role, look no further than the U.S. Constitution.

misterwhite  posted on  2015-04-06   9:54:56 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#11. To: Pericles (#9)

How many children were not born because of broken or delayed families?

Or people dodging the 1930 and 1940 census. Or people who didn't get counted because they were transients. Lots of alternative explanations. Millions of people might have died and been buried without any record being made. People who are poor and hungry and couldn't pay a doctor would also have higher infant mortality. It once was rather common to bury a stillborn child in a garden by the house in an unmarked grave. Funerals and burials cost money a lot of people didn't have.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-04-06   10:30:56 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#12. To: TooConservative (#11)

Millions of people might have died and been buried without any record being made. People who are poor and hungry and couldn't pay a doctor would also have higher infant mortality. It once was rather common to bury a stillborn child in a garden by the house in an unmarked grave. Funerals and burials cost money a lot of people didn't have.

So you can see how that number can be so high. How many people died prematurely on the trip west from the Okies to California? An older person or a newborn that would have lived on in their homestead died on the journey and were buried by the side of the road.

Pericles  posted on  2015-04-06   12:12:40 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#13. To: Pericles (#12)

You have to keep in mind that these were projected births. They allege at least 2 million children were born that died of starvation or something else. That's just pulling some numbers out of the air. Birth control was fairly ineffective then but people living in very harsh circumstances may just not be as romantically inclined, especially living in temporary camps or very cramped quarters and worrying where their next meal is coming from and how to feed the mouths they already had.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-04-06   12:34:49 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#14. To: TooConservative (#13)

You have to keep in mind that these were projected births. They allege at least 2 million children were born that died of starvation or something else. That's just pulling some numbers out of the air. Birth control was fairly ineffective then but people living in very harsh circumstances may just not be as romantically inclined, especially living in temporary camps or very cramped quarters and worrying where their next meal is coming from and how to feed the mouths they already had.

That is what kind of bothers me about demographers - kind of a new academic discipline - whenever you hear these huge death tolls from China and the USSR and WW2 and so on a lot of it is based on how they count how many babies were not born as if they were victims to be counted. Math like that always bothers me but we kind of see how maybe the death tolls in China and the old USSR may have been inflated by such 'science'.

I always wondered if so many did die under Stalin where did he get all those people to fight Hitler? Did 20 million really die during the invasion or is that also a massaged number?

Pericles  posted on  2015-04-06   12:40:41 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#15. To: Pericles (#14) (Edited)

That is what kind of bothers me about demographers - kind of a new academic discipline - whenever you hear these huge death tolls from China and the USSR and WW2 and so on a lot of it is based on how they count how many babies were not born as if they were victims to be counted. Math like that always bothers me but we kind of see how maybe the death tolls in China and the old USSR may have been inflated by such 'science'.

The communist massacres have some real numbers behind them. Much more so than this piece did.

I always wondered if so many did die under Stalin where did he get all those people to fight Hitler? Did 20 million really die during the invasion or is that also a massaged number?

Most were military deaths. If anything, I think the death count in the USSR is a little underestimated. To say nothing of the earlier genocides of targeted populations like peasants or the Holodomor.

And I do think the Japanese killed 20 million Chinese. And a lot of others in Korea and other occupied territories.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-04-06   12:43:23 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#16. To: TooConservative (#15)

http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm

This website lists all the figures by scholars - some match others are way different.

Pericles  posted on  2015-04-06   13:07:47 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#17. To: TooConservative (#15)

My favorite topic: Question: Who was the Bloodiest Tyrant of the 20th Century?

Answer: We don't know.

http://necrometrics.com/tyrants.htm

That's probably the saddest fact of the Twentieth Century. There are so many candidates for the award of top monster that we can't decide between them. Whether it's Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong or Joseph Stalin is, quite frankly, anybody's guess.

For now, let's just skip over the whole margin of error thing -- reasonable people have studied the evidence and come up with wildly differing numbers. You're free to check my sources, but for now, trust me. I've studied the matter at great length and decided that the most likely death toll for these three are:

TYRANT DEATHS Mao 40Million Hitler 34M Stalin 20M

Well, that certainly looks like Mao is our man, but wait. Mao's largest crime is the Great Leap Forward, a bungled attempt to restructure the economy of China which created a famine that killed some 30M. If we confine our indictment to deliberate killings, we get this:

TYRANT KILLINGS Hitler 34M Stalin 20M Mao 10M

So it's Hitler, right? Except that most of the deaths on his head were caused by the Second World War. Sure, he started it, but our society does not blanketly condemn the starting of wars (after all, we reserve the right to do it ourselves in a just cause), and we certainly don't consider killing armed enemy soldiers in a fair fight to be a crime against humanity. If we therefore confine ourselves to the cold-blooded murder of unarmed non-combatants, our table rearranges itself again:

TYRANT MURDERS Stalin 20M Hitler 15M Mao 10M

This brings Stalin floating to the top. So it look like once you reduce their crimes to the unjustifiably lowest common denominator, then Stalin is worst; however, you might want to argue that dead is dead so it really doesn't matter if you give your victims a chance to fight back. Fighting an unjust or reckless war is certainly a crime against humanity, so our numbers should go back to:

TYRANT KILLINGS Hitler 34M Stalin 20M Mao 10M

... and these are just the problems we'll encounter if we accept my numbers without debate. If we want to use the estimates of other scholars, we can pin up to 50 million murders on Stalin, enough to push him to the top of the list regardless of definition. Or we can whittle him down to 10 million murders if we use the low end of the margin of error, and scrounge several more tens of millions for Mao, or away from him.

So, the answer to the question of "Who is roasting on the hottest fires in Hell?" is "Well, that depends..."

Pericles  posted on  2015-04-06   13:11:11 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#18. To: Pericles (#17)

I think the numbers are higher for the USSR and China.

Tooconservative  posted on  2015-04-06   13:43:47 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


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