Paving the Way for "Fundamental Transformation"
Incremental change, often invisible, builds a foundation for Dementia Joe to fulfill Obama's dream.
The real objective behind the Democrat mega-spending bills is not the amount of money - they can't even find ways to spend what has already been appropriated - it is about the changes in HOW whatever money they get is spent and WHO controls that spending.
Bills like this 2700 page monstrosity are never specific about how the money is doled out, this is always left the the various heads of the departments in the administrative state, and as the Trump era revealed, even when a president appoints someone, there is no guarantee that person is going to follow what the president wants - it is also true that a lot of this spending eventually gets defined as "mandatory" and keeps on going even when government is "shut down".
The obscenely large numbers are there to distract from the process chicanery that is going on in the text of these bills. You have to ask the question, "Who benefits?" and drive it down to the lowest common denominator to understand the true objectives.
The money is secondary.
This why the GOP sometimes wins by cutting the top spending number but they always lose because, once the bill is passed, the money doesn't matter because the die is cast. I do not mean to imply that they do not want the money, because they do - but they are more interested in the changes that get made in the processes of government that enable their agenda going forward.
An example of such systemic changes that impacted the world is Nazi Germany.
There is a perception that Adolph Hitler was the cause and result of the rise of Nazism in 1930's Germany, but that simply not true. Sure, ole Adolph is the poster boy for the Nazi movement, but he had a lot of help. What came long before him created the environment where someone like him could wreak the death and destruction that followed.
The American Left always likes to use Nazism to beat conservatives about the head and shoulders but it is a prime example of how political winds can change in a very short period of time.
Nazi Germany arose in the wake of the national shame, embarrassment, anger, and resentment resulting from the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Many voters, seeking an outlet for their frustrations, and an expression for their repudiation of parliamentary democracy, which appeared incapable of keeping a government in power for more than a few months, began supporting far right-wing and far left-wing political parties, opting for political extremists such as the Nazi Party, (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers’ Party).
The Nazis promised strong, authoritarian government in lieu of effete parliamentary republicanism, civil peace, radical economic policy (including full employment), restored national pride (principally by repudiating the Versailles Treaty), and racial cleansing, partly implemented via the active suppression of Jews and Marxists, all in name of national unity and solidarity, rather than the partisan divisions of democracy, and the social class divisiveness of Marxism.
The Nazi Party claimed that through the Treaty, the Weimar Republic’s liberal democracy, the traitorous “November criminals” had surrendered Germany’s national pride, by the inspiration and conniving of the Jews, whose goal was national subversion and the poisoning of the German blood.
From 1925 to the 1930s, the German government evolved from a democracy to a de facto conservative–nationalist authoritarian state under war hero-President Paul von Hindenburg, who disliked the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic and wanted to make Germany into an authoritarian state.
In the federal election of 1928, when the economy had improved after the hyperinflation of the 1922–23 periods, the Nazis won only 12 seats. Two years later, in the federal election of 1930, months after the US stock market crash, the Nazi Party won 107 seats, progressing from ninth-rated splinter group to second-largest parliamentary party in the Reichstag. After the federal election of 1932, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag, holding 230 seats.
In 4 short years, Germany transformed from a liberal (in the classical sense of liberalism) democracy to an autocratic Nazi abomination.
I’m sure that there were Jewish Germans who supported the themes of civil peace, full employment and restored national pride. Who wouldn't want that? But I’m equally sure they never imagined in their worst nightmares that only 4 years into the future, they would be stripped of their rights as citizens and sent to the gas chambers and ovens in the camps at Auschwitz and Dachau.
The incremental leftist lurch of the US government for the last 70 or 80 years has guaranteed that movement will tilt in favor of progressivism. The federal bureaucracy and the inception of unions in public/government employment guarantee this progressive slant. Unions vote and give to Democrats by overwhelming margins and the bureaucracy moves to secure its own growth and existence and by definition, will support the party that supports bigger government – the Democrats.
My point was entirely this: for nearly a century, the progressive movement has been setting America up for a fall.
Whether 2020 was the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning is entirely up to us.