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Trying to Understand the Way Leftist’s Think

[T]he results of our experimentations in expanding government were not generous. There were … unexpected tragedies of the Great Society endeavour, which looked upon the private sector as little more than a “milk cow.” Worse, the “1960s experiment and its 1970s aftermath suggest” that the “social democratic compromise” of the Great Society came “close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy.”  [Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick] Moynihan came to acknowledge the misbegotten character of his plans for a guaranteed annual income. But his was rare intellectual honesty. By and large, Great Society programs burrowed their way into government and the Democratic party.  Fifty years later, … LBJ’s promise of “opportunity for all” slipped through America’s fingers, leaving us the remains of a welfare state that has entrapped African Americans in the tender grasp of the leviathan.

The Forgotten Failures of [LBJ’s] Great Society Program, Manhattan Institute, 1/10/20

Remember the [Obamacare] promise that the average family would save $2,500 a year on health insurance?  [But] average health insurance premiums doubled since 2013.  Instead of “bending the cost curve down,” national expenditures on health care [rose].  The year before Obamacare was fully implemented, health care [was] 17.2 percent of GDP. Last year that grew to 18.3 percent, an increase of almost $200 billion.  The average deductible for people with employer-provided health coverage [in 2017] was $1,221 compared to $303 in 2006.  More than 50 percent of our nation’s counties have only one insurer in 2018. … Tens of millions of Americans often can’t choose the doctor, hospital, or treatment of their choice.  Obama claimed that the Affordable Care Act meant “everybody” would have health insurance. Today, some 30 million Americans remain uninsured.

Obamacare, The Heritage Foundation, 6/5/19

“If you like your health careplan, you can keep it,” Obama said many times of his new law.  But the promise was impossible to keep.

Politico on Obama’s 2013 “Lie of the Year”

It is not easy to understand the way leftists (“liberals” and Democrats) think.  When one tries to reason with a leftist, one often feels one has gone “through the looking glass.”

Leftists like to think they have the corner on compassion unlike callous conservatives who only care about money, guns and religion. When Trump was the president, the media was filled with photos of a little girl who drowned trying to swim across the Rio Grande into the US.   One would have thought Trump killed her himself.  In fact, Trump was trying to end that sort of tragedy by stopping illegal immigration. 

By contrast, during the Biden-Harris administration a record of at least 853 people died at the southern border in 2022, reports are that 320,000 “migrant” children have been “lost” and there are 13,000 murderers living in the US “outside ICE detention”, not counting 32,000 that failed to show up in court.  One shudders to think what the lost children must endure. Despite the facts that no new wars were started under Trump and that Putin did not invade any of his neighbors, we were assured that “Biden is better on the world stage than any president since George H.W. Bush”.  But under Biden, Russia invaded Ukraine (1 million dead by Sept. 2024), Hamas invaded Israel, resulting in Israel invading Gaza and now the West Bank (perhaps 40,000 Palestinians and 2,000 Israelis dead).  Under Biden-Harris Russia and China are talking about nuclear WWIII.  Inflation under Biden-Harris rose to a 40 year high of 9% crushing the poor most of all.  If one talks to the Left this is all Trump’s fault (even though he was out of office when it all happened).

In 1964 Democrat President Johnson announced his “Great Society” program, with massive new entitlement programs, to end poverty forever.  But 60 years later poverty in the US is just as bad.  Where did all that money, that could have been spent profitably, go? 

After being elected in 2008, Obama announced that since health care is too expensive and since there are 30,000 people in the US with no health care coverage, we must enact universal health care legislation (his “Affordable Care Act” or “Obamacare).  But health care is now much more expensive now than it was then.  There are still 30,000 people in the US with no health care and there now exists a huge government health care bureaucracy that must be fed with taxpayer dollars.

Comically, Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris just said she is going to make more affordable health care a main campaign issue.  Wait!  Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to solve all that?  It was called the “Affordable Care Act,” wasn’t it?

Why do people never learn?

Part of the answer is that there are genuine problems in US society, e.g., the fact that the black community continues to lag far behind white, Asian and Hispanic communities, leading to severe societal problems, poverty, crime and mass incarceration of blacks.  Many leftists feel compelled to solve these problems the only way they know how: by new government programs.   When challenged that Johnson’s “ Great Society” and “Obamacare” did not work as expected, and that the Biden-Harris administration has led to crushing inflation, rising crime and wars all over the globe, leftists conclude that this only means that one must keep going.  Someday, they think, if one doesn’t give up, we will reach utopia.

Unfortunately, one will never solve societal problems in these ways.  For “liberal” solutions are not designed to solve the problems but to make them worse.  These problems are caused by a government-led breakdown in basic institutions, especially the family, education and religion, that cannot be repaired by buying votes with government checks.  The entire leftist argument for their big government programs is a “false cause” fallacy (a fallacious way of reasoning about the causes and therefore the cures for societal ills).

Although Democrats claim that they are the pro-family Party because they cut taxpayer checks to “marginalized” people, the real problem is that, following their patron saint Karl Marx’s call to “abolish the family,” Democrat policies undermine the life-giving family.  Whereas only about 15% of Asian Americans, 24.5% of White Americans and 31% of Hispanic Americans grow up without a father, the fatherless rate is 66% for black Americans.  Not surprisingly, Asian students outperform white students, who outperform Hispanic students, who outperform black students.  A 2023 PARCC study in D.C. shows that only 23% of Black students showed proficiency in reading, compared to 82% of their white classmates and 11% of Black students demonstrated proficiency in math compared with 75% of white peers.  Despite this, the unimpressed Teacher’s unions, which are massively committed to the “liberal” policies of the Democrat Party, have replaced the idea that education is about the students with the idea that it is about the teacher’s welfare.

A single mother’s problems will not be solved by sending her government checks because the real problem, as the great Thomas Sowell teaches, is a problem of moral decay deliberately created by the Left.  Government checks will never replace a father … or a mother. Similarly, the problems with our schools will not be solved by sending them money.  

The bitter truth is that Democrats cannot solve these deep societal problems because they are political committed to the cause of the problems.  The utopia cannot be created by wishful thinking, virtue-signaling and cutting checks. 

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Richard McDonough

Richard Michael McDonough, American philosophy educator. Achievements include production of original interpretation of Wittgenstein’s logical-metaphysical system, original application Kantian Copernican Revolution to philosophy of language; significant interdisciplinary work logic, linguistics, psychology & philosophy. Member Australasian Debating Federation (honorary life, adjudicator since 1991), Phi Kappa Phi.

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One Comment

  1. Excellent article. I especially appreciated the author’s comments about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Medical care has clearly taken a turn for the worse since that law passed.

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