We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
The American left has learned never to interfere with an enemy intent upon destroying itself
You know how sometimes you get a song in your head for absolutely no apparent reason and you cannot get rid of it? They call it an earworm.
I have no idea why 2009’s “My Own Worst Enemy” by the band Lit, was inserted into my brain this morning, but it was. Maybe by writing about it, I can exorcise it from my consciousness.
Here goes:
Conservatives have made two glaring errors over the past 30 years or so (among others - these are the only two that suit my coffee-fueled purposes this morning), both of which have come back to bite us smack in the ass.
We trusted corporations to champion the free market, and
We wanted "character education" to be taught in our schools (remember the days when we were told George W. Bush was a "conservative"? Good times, good times...).
Both leave a bad taste and quite frankly, we should have known better. I cannot help but think about what Eric Stratton (Otter) told Kent Dorfman (Flounder) in Animal House:
"You fucked up, you trusted us!"
Robert Conquest's (American historian) Three Laws of Politics told us what was going to happen:
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
We know how the corporations, especially the mega-corps, have become an enforcement arm of the Democrat Party. The social media giants police society, scanning for any prohibited behaviors, the Tech Oligarchs control approved speech and what information we are allowed to see, and the rest of them enforce unwritten public law, deciding what entities should be able to advertise, use financial services or even buy their products.
American corporations imported Chinese state capitalism while we slept comfortably in our beds, dreaming we were doing the Lord's work in defending business from government - while those same businesses and government were carrying on sexy, torrid affairs behind our gullible backs.
In the end, corporations decided globalism works best for them if they ally with governments that will protect and assure their markets. First it was compliance with the Chinese government’s directives about restricting what their people could see, now it is about what the American citizens can say about the Chinese government.
Call it crony capitalism, corporatism or fascism, we got it by the bushel.
In the "be careful what you wish for" file is "character education" in schools. Remember how conservatives used to think, since parents failed in teaching children "values", we should get the schools involved in remedial character education? Remember how the left initially fought this idea and then more or less stopped fighting?
In our zeal to strike a blow for “family values”, we never asked whose “values” would be taught.
Big mistake.
This idea opened the door for school administrators, teachers' unions and school boards to become the moral arbiters of our society.
That was the precise moment when the left turned all Napoleon Bonaparte on us and thought "Hmmm. Never interfere when your enemy is destroying themselves. We can work with this."
Guess what folks? Unsurprisingly, you have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting, you racist.
Your children now must be taught just how horribly racist you are.
Schools are now taxpayer funded, government owned and operated social justice indoctrination centers that teach math, history, and science when they have spare time between classes in newspeak, rightthink, community organizing, systemic racism, gender fluidity, equity creation and how to fill out government benefit forms.
In short, the entire curriculum is now just Ingsoc, 24/7.
Often, we are our own worst enemies.