De Tocqueville on 'Soft' Despotism

In a New Criterion article discussion of a book by Professor Paul Rahe, Mark Steyn quotes de Tocqueville on 'soft' despotism:

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Sound familiar?

Prof. Rahe goes on to say, "Human dignity is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one's own affairs.
...
“We can be what once we were, or we can settle for a gradual, gentle descent into servitude."

What can one add but "Bravo, Dr. Rahe." Well, perhaps one could add this:

'Soft' despotism is perhaps the hardest kind because it's the hardest kind to stop and eradicate. When people are treated with extreme harshness, ala the Soviet Union, rebellion will constantly bubble beneath the surface because it's obvious that one could do no worse. When despotism comes with the smiling face of the gently scolding nanny, it's too easy to delude oneself into thinking that little is to be gained by rebellion.

The fear of loss of small comforts keeps many a man glued to his couch. But even apart from the fact that a lightly smothering slavery invariably evolves into the harsher kind before long, the fact is that the loss of liberty leads immediately to a loss of every other value, the material ones being only the first and least important to go.

The Great Pretender At His Lying Best

A quote in an LA Times story has the Great Pretender pretending stronger than ever.

"We've done more than ever, faster than ever, more responsibly than ever, to get the gears of the economy moving again," Obama said, and "we're in a position to really accelerate."

Whew... hold onto your wallets. You'll need them to escape to someplace better because your freedom is going down the tube if Obama has anything to say about it.

Still, there's hope, to use a word nearly destroyed by his Progressive Majesty's debauchery of language.

According to the header on the story:

His assertions -- that 150,000 jobs have been saved or created already, and that the summer goal is 600,000 more -- appear to be elastic and are hard to verify.

When even the left-wing LA Times is willing to consider that he's making it up as he goes along, you know the Pretender is losing his grip on the adoring media.

About Time: Supreme Court Stays Chrysler Deal

Finally! The Supreme Court has stepped in to (at least temporarily) halt the unConstitutional Chrysler deal. With luck, the GM deal won't be far behind.

The Supreme Court on Monday granted an emergency appeal asking it to halt the impending government-backed sale of Chrysler to Italian automaker Fiat.

The order stops for now Chrysler's sale, which the company claims could scuttle the deal.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg signed the order, but it may be only temporary.

A federal appeals court in New York had earlier approved the sale, but gave opponents until 4 p.m. ET Monday to try to get the Supreme Court to intervene. Ginsburg issued her order just before 4 p.m.

Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock said the ruling was a small victory for Indiana pensioners, who brought the request for an injunction for fear of losing their stake.

"The ... thing I hear is, 'Oh, if this doesn't happen, the sale won't take place.' Let's not forget Fiat is not paying one penny for 20 percent of this deal. If I am going to receive $400 million worth of assets on day one and I don't have to make an investment, I don't care so much if it happen Monday, Tuesday or next week, I am going to be there in the end."

As HotAir (hat tip) points out, if Ginsburg is unhappy with this deal, it has to be a real stinker. (Which is obvious anyway from this one line alone: "Fiat is not paying one penny for 20 percent".)

Going beyond any past Administration, Obama has chosen not only to rob the public Treasury but to give private citizens assets away for free to Fiat's investors for the purpose of social engineering. Not for nothing is the Pretender also known as the Anti-American. In my eyes, he's just an Anti, period, but that's a discussion of another day.

Today, I celebrate the best news I've read in over a year. Now if the Justices will just do their job, the one performed by their counterparts 75 years ago (ala FDR and the NRA, and again in 1952 against Truman's nationalization of the steel businesses), and start striking down one after the next of the long line of anti-Constitutional acts performed by the Feds over the past year, this country might return to some semblance of normalcy.

There are many reasons the auto manufacturers crisis has reached this stage, of course, not least because of the way the story has been (non)reported by the major news outlets. But the American people have to take a share of the blame as well, since they've been largely indifferent to the Bush and Obama administrations' thievery of the public Treasury (now over $50 billion) for the sake of the UAW and some politically connective executives.

On the whole, most people don't see it as affecting them — since they don't see the impact of the precedent being set. They should remember the famous phrase coined after WWII "first they came for the Jews." Well, first the Feds came for the trains in the 19th century. The only surprise is that it's taken this long for them to come for the automakers. (Not that they haven't been busy hobbling them in the meantime, which has created the current crisis.)

In the defense of the average person, they might simply have become numb under the neverending fascist blows the Feds have been striking the past year. Fair enough. But, apart from the enormous injustice enacted in this case, such things are always used by the tyrants in Washington and their cheerleaders to justify other, usually larger, acts of malfeasance. Long past time to say enough is enough.

Fortunately, at least for now, the Supreme Court has drawn a line in the sand. One can only hope they'll get out the bulldozer and start pushing back the Progressive dune, preferably over a cliff.


Update:

[Also: here]

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for the deal after delaying the sale pending review of a case brought by Indiana state pension funds challenging Chrysler's bankruptcy. Those funds argued that they and other lenders deserved better treatment by the bankruptcy court.

Well, that was a brief Shangri-La. What do you want to bet Obama called a few Supreme Court Justices...

Obama Promises Jobs With Stolen Money

Repeating the mistakes of the FDR Administration verbatim, the completely-clueless-about-history Pretender continues merrily on his way to deepening the economic crisis.

From the LA Times

[Obama] will promise hundreds of thousands of new jobs with increased spending on maintenance projects at military bases, about 1,600 road and airport projects, the hiring of some 135,000 teachers and other school staffers and 125,000 summer jobs for youth under the supervision of the Department of Labor.

Apart from everything else that is wrong with this (the implicit lie about shovel-ready projects, the lack of short-term economic benefit from hiring teachers, the creation of a Hitler Jugend, etc), who in hell selected Mussolini Obama as the CEO of Amerika?

Where the 'Stimulus' Money Is Going

From the Las Vegas Journal

"Most of the roughly $300 billion coming directly to the states is being funneled through existing government programs for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps and other social services," The Associated Press reported this week.

Two-thirds of recovery money that flows directly to states will go toward health care. Not hiring new doctors or nurses, mind you. Just paying medical bills for poor people -- and the salaries of those who handle this redistribution of your hard-earned cash.

By comparison, about 15 percent of the stimulus money will end up going for transportation -- including airports, highways and rail projects -- according to Federal Funds Information for States, a service of the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Overall, two-thirds of the stimulus funds will go to subsidize state budgets and unemployment compensation -- paying people not to work. Much smaller pieces of the pie will be allocated for weatherization, affordable housing and other projects designed to create jobs, The AP reports.

No one has a right to be surprised at any of this. It goes without saying that this will all go without being said by Obama and his Congressional cronies. Thieving "more equal than some" pigs.

FDR, Obama, and Congress - Fascism Then and Now

Despite the continual calls from Progressives for fundamentally changing American culture, there's nothing new about the type of Fascism they're trying to bring to America.

If you watch enough WWII-era films on DVD you'll soon become exposed to a great many film shorts that played in the theaters at the time. Many of them are inspiring. Hollywood could considerably raise its dreadful reputation by emulating a few with regard to America's current military efforts. But some of them are instructional in another way.

A percentage of those documentaries and mini-dramas are decidedly Fascist in nature, showing how the FDR administration tried mightily to urge citizens to "sacrifice for the nation." It sounds scarier in the original German ("Du bist nicht! Dein Volk ist alles!") but the meaning is the same in any language. ("You are nothing. Your people is all!")

Shorts on the WWII: Homefront DVD and others like them did much more than ask Americans to work hard and support the war effort morally and materially. They tried, with obtuse economic explanations and blatant collectivist propaganda, to get individuals to surrender their own well being for the sake of the group.

One particularly egregious example, Skirmish on the Home Front, has Alan Ladd and Susan Hayward arguing over whether they should buy a better house. Ladd puts his foot down and refuses, arguing that the war effort will be better served by them continuing to live in what the man and wife agree is a dump.

His argument is too silly to bother repeating, a complete line of non-sequiturs, ending with a post-war fantasy of the couple living in a 1950s version of a high-tech dream house because they held their war bonds to maturity.

Another, almost as bad, is Letter From Bataan, in which the ghost of a recently dead soldier writes home to his wife and family, unaware at that point of his demise. He declares "no other young soldier should die because the folks at home don't want to do without."

He then goes on to demonstrate how not screeching the family auto's tires (a sin performed in the opening by the teen son) saves rubber that can be used to build a battleship, along with other, equally myopic assertions. He makes no mention, no surprise, of how it was coercive war-time rationing (not to mention a decade of prior Progressive-inspired economic controls) that led to the need to make such trade-offs in the first place.

Both these moral and logical absurdities are closely paralleled in the arguments of today's Green fascists. They assert that if we all collectively sacrifice — use less gasoline, pay over-free-market prices for solar panels and hybrid cars, destroy dams for the sake of salmon, hobble coal-consuming power plants, convert useful agricultural land to producing material for ethanol, etc., etc. (the list of hectoring is endless) — we will in the future all be better off.

All this should sound very familiar, and depressingly so. Good people are as individual as there are individuals. Evil people are all the same. That is, after all, why the villain in romanticized dramas always has to be given a few heroic virtues, like extreme cleverness and flair. Otherwise, he would be as dull as dishwater, like all real-life villains. Not for nothing have several journalists, even those in love with Obama, candidly reported, "He's very boring." Henry Waxman is worse.

It could hardly be otherwise. A dictator is hardly the sort of man who develops his creativity. It he did, he would run from being a dictator as fast as the bullet trains we might actually have if we lived in a free country. That's a lesson it's worthwhile to keep in mind as Congress debates the Waxman-Malarky Cap and Trade (otherwise known as Hobble and Dictate) legislation, along with the panoply of fascist regulation Obama and his fellow thugs are pushing.

Auto Deal Shows True Nature of Obama Administration

Investors Business Daily has penned another spot on editorial exposing — though they don't use the word — the Fascism of the Obama administration.

First, they outline some of the unjust financial aspects:

GM's bankruptcy pushes bondholders aside in favor of the U.S. government and the UAW. Though bondholders hold $27 billion in debt, they'll get just 10% of stock.

How's that compare with the other "stakeholders?" For spending $50 billion to bail out GM, the government will get 60% of the equity in the new GM; the UAW, which along with other unions gave millions to Democrats, will be repaid for its loyalty with 17.5% of the stock for $10 billion of unsecured debts.

So the government, with roughly two times what private bondholders have on the table, gets a stake five times bigger. And the union, with about a third as much "invested," gets a 70% bigger stake. Even the Canadian government, with its $9.5 billion "invested," ends up with 12%.

They call it "restructuring." We call it theft. Never in our memory has there been a more thorough, systematic effort to disenfranchise the shareholders and bondholders of a major American firm.

Then they move to the more important issue:

But our real issue with this isn't that people will lose money. It's that we don't believe the government's actions are even legal.

The White House has basically been manipulating GM into bankruptcy since early this year, putting 31-year-old Brian Deese, a Yale law student, in charge of GM's restructuring. "It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism," the New York Times said with tongue in cheek (we think).

It used to be that the "rules of American capitalism" came from 200 years of U.S. case law, the Constitution and legitimate federal regulation. But no more. Instead, the job's been given to someone not yet out of law school. This shows shocking contempt for GM, once the world's pre-eminent industrial company, for American capitalism and the rule of law. [emphasis added]

Exactly so. Obama and his administration are well down the road of moving from a nicer version of the Mussolini government of Fascist Italy of the 1920s to being an exact duplicate.