The immediate battle over health care reform in the United States is now over, with an apparently decisive victory for progressive socialism. In defeat, however, freedom lovers may yet find a route from tragedy to ultimate triumph. To do so, it is important to understand what has occurred.
Let me liken recent events to the early stages of what would become known as the European Theatre of World War II. The forces of national socialism grew quietly and all but unnoticed in the United States during the years of The Great Moderation that were ushered in by President Ronald Reagan and Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Paul Volcker during the early 1980s and that lasted until the end of the Clinton Presidency in 2000. The ‘Brown Shirts’ of the progressive socialist movement gradually dominated the mass media, the public schools, the universities and the law schools, and linked arms with the public sector unions and the growing expanse of those making good livings in the non-market economy.
The US equivalent of Krystalnacht in Germany (November 10, 1938) was September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the stock market went into a free fall. Just as German Jews were on the run, and Hitler’s Third Reich began to flex its muscles throughout continental Europe after Krystalnacht, so laissez-faire economics was on the ropes in the United States, and the forces of progressive socialism were rampant after the stock market collapse.
The Battle for France (health care reform) is now lost and the British Expeditionary Forces are in full-scale retreat from Dunkirk. If tragedy is to be turned into triumph, a defensive war until 2012 must now be skillfully engaged, under new leadership, with the intent of turning the hinge of fate with an election victory in November 2012, just as the Allied desert victory at Alamein on November 6, 1942 turned almost uninterrupted disaster to almost unbroken success.
In order to achieve an Alamein victory, those who love liberty will have to regroup forces and rethink strategy during difficult times. The rethinking will have to reach out to the entire regulatory and entitlement program that is slowly strangling freedom and economic prosperity in the United States – Social Security, Health Care Subsidies, Housing Subsidies, Food Subsidies, Green Subsidies, and the like - and the implications of such burgeoning programs for the national debt, taxation and inflation. Such rethinking will have to combine intellectual ingenuity, media savvy, and financial support, with widespread ground support under entrepreneurial leadership. The War surely cannot now be won piecemeal – there are too many vested interests to overcome. It can only be won comprehensively by offering an attractive package of fiscal and deregulatory reforms, designed to roll back the state, to a decisive majority of an electorate that will be increasingly disenchanted by the stagflation of progressive socialism.
As on June 4, 1940, when the Retreat from Dunkirk was completed, so on March 25, 2010, when the Battle over Health Care Reform ended, the future for freedom looks bleak. At times like this, let us recall the immortal words of Winston Spenser Churchill delivered at the nadir of fortune for the British Empire:
“Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force: never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy” Speech to students at Harrow, 1941.
“In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Goodwill”
Tags: fiscal reform, pushing back against progressive socialism, reestablishing free markets, restoring liberty, rolling back the state
March 26, 2010 at 4:10 pm |
[...] http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/tragedy-to-triumph/ [...]
March 26, 2010 at 4:11 pm |
From my blog:
http://freedomfliesblackflag.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/gumitup/
The Web and the Internet is powerful. It delivers access to wisdom and knowledge at one’s finger tips.
And a whole lot of idiocy and lunacy too. You have to work hard to sift through it all.
Prof. Rowley’s latest post stirred my search for an answer to his question.
Here’s one idea:
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Saul Alinsky and his book, Rules For Radicals (1972), is so useful for an understanding of the principles of successful resistance.
His words are worth considering:
His conclusions concerning tactics:
Not bombs but protests and petitions.
Not guns but getting people involved in dragging their feet.
We need a positive program of changing people’s minds about man, and law; about family, community, economy and Freedom.
We also need a negative program of successful resistance techniques that will get the State off our backs long enough for us to go about the work of positive reformation.
Meanwhile, we can gum up the works.
That literally happened under Alinsky. Some college was foolish enough to allow students to invite him to speak on campus.
A group of disgruntled students met with him after his speech. “How can we change this place? We can’t do anything. We can’t smoke, dance, go to movies, or drink beer. About all we can do is chew gum.”
Alinsky told them, “Then gum is your answer.”
He told them to get 200 or 300 students to buy two packs of gum each.
Chew both packs simultaneously every day, and then spit out the wads on campus walks.
As he said, ‘Why, with five hundred wads of gum I could paralyze Chicago, stop all the traffic in the Loop.” He told them to keep it up until the rules were loosened or abolished.
The tactic worked. Two weeks later all the rules were lifted. One new rule was substituted: no gum on campus.
That college administration was weak. Expelling the students would have been its only action.
But this would have made them look ridiculous to people on the outside.
Bureaucrats never ever want to look ridiculous. They capitulated. They were, in short, fearful bureaucrats.
We must learn how to gum up the works. We must create a new, hypothetical society, “Gummit,” which sounds a lot like “Guvmint.”
Here are Alinsky’s thirteen tactical rules:
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Never go outside the experience of your people.
Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.
Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
A good tactic is one your people enjoy.
A tactic that drags on too long is a drag.
Keep the pressure on.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counter side.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize and polarize it.
March 26, 2010 at 4:55 pm |
Black Flag:
As so often, you bring excellent insights to the discussion. The ideas outlined above have the great merit that they may actually work!
March 26, 2010 at 5:32 pm |
I like the Churchillian language Hinge of fate and the like which brings me to two key points in the analogy: CHurchill became PM on May 10, 1940 and stood alone until December 7, 1941 (the first night he slept peacefully in 2 years he said). Who is the Churchill for us – who has been the voice in the wilderness castigated by all for years until desperate times brought the great man to the fore (even then the UK almost went with Lord whathisname as PM over Churchill) As the billboard said “What Price Churchill?” and if Health Care is the fall of France what will be Pearl Harbor and keep in mind victory was achieved only after total annihilation of the enemy. Progressiveness can not be just beat at the polls but its very foundation must be so destroyed as to be discredited for…a 1,000 years maybe.
March 26, 2010 at 6:55 pm |
Reminds me of Austria in the 1930s when socialists and capitalists used to battle in the streets.
March 27, 2010 at 11:03 am |
oops, I read that as Australia. Anyway we had battles especially the period from the 1960s onwards. Lots of demonstrations by university students. I was a student during that time but never participated in the demonstrations.
March 27, 2010 at 12:44 am |
How did Gandhi defeat the British Empire ??
How did MLK Jr. defeat segregation ??
NONE VIOLENT PASSIVE RESISTANCE!! Just by saying NO!!
Did both want political power, we shall never know as both were assassinated.
In being assassinated they both became larger than life!!
Was Gandhi, Ayn Rand’s inspiration for John Galt??
March 27, 2010 at 11:06 am |
In both cases the passive resistance was more than just “resisting”. It was non-violent and both men stand out because they advocated resistance by peaceful means.
I am old enough to at least remember the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was like a shot that was heard around the world. I have always respected the name of MLK.
March 27, 2010 at 11:01 am |
@jorod,
the battles did not just happen in the 1930s. They happened in the streets right up to the 1970s and beyond. You see the Communists in action on May Day. We also have those other occasions when the anarchists come out to play for such things as a World Trade Conference. Melbourne was hit pretty hard the last time there was a G-7 meeting in Australia.
What I remember most are the anti-Vietnam war years when the socialists were out in their thousands in the moratorium marches.
They did not all battle in the streets but there are names to be remembered like Albert Langer. Such people are remembered because of their “battles”.