Illinois Nazis and Lincoln’s Democrats
He really did. He just had a different name for them.
I’ve quoted Thomas Sowell many times on this blog about the anointed, and how they believe that saying something is true is more important than whether it is true—that, in fact, saying it makes it true.
A few years ago in Illinois there was a Nazi running for office in a Democrat-dominated district. The district was pretty much one hundred percent Democrat, to the point where Republicans don’t even bother to run an opponent. So this guy told the State of Illinois that he was a Republican, in order to get on the ballot unopposed; Republicans pointed out that he was not, in fact, a Republican, but under Illinois election rules the Republican Party had no say in who ran as a Republican.
Illinois is also an open-primary state. This means that none of the people voting for this guy in his nearly 100% Democrat district were Republicans either.
In other words: this was not a Republican primary. This was not a Republican candidate. These were not Republican voters. And the candidate was not going to win in the general election against the official Democrat nominee anyway.
But the left wanted the Republican Party to take money from actual Republicans in Illinois to fight this guy. In order to fight an extreme Democrat in an extreme Democrat district, Democrats tried to force Republicans to spend money donated by Republicans to support the official Democrat against the unofficial Nazi, also supported by Democrats.
This is part of why we have such a dysfunctional political system, and why third parties have such a hard time taking hold. They have to defend themselves in venues they aren’t part of and have neither candidates nor voters in.
The Democrat’s plan was a win for hate. Either the Republicans raise a Nazi’s profile by competing against him, or the Democrats raise a Nazi’s profile by promoting him as a Republican.
When it was pointed out that raising his profile at all was a waste of money, because the guy wasn’t going to win, the Left claimed that there was money “earmarked for the Republican party’s race in that district”—a district and a contest that Republicans had never competed in before and hadn’t planned to compete in now—and that money would go to waste if it wasn’t used.
That’s a purely leftist notion: there is money in the air and we need to spend it now! Or it’s gone! There’s no reason to save it for a contest where it matters, or move it to a contest that matters. Effectiveness doesn’t matter, spending money is what matters. Money that isn’t spent doesn’t exist. Money that’s saved doesn’t exist.
Conservatives often point out that when a Republican does something wrong, it’s the fault of conservatives, but when a Democrat does something wrong, it’s the fault of America. But in fact that’s not true: there’s also a middle ground where, when a Democrat does something wrong, it’s still the fault of Republicans.
You can see that right now where just about every crime by Democrat constituents in Democrat-run cities is blamed not on the policies of the Democrats who govern those cities, but on… Donald Trump.
- If it’s not a Democrat, blame it on Republicans.
- If it is a Democrat, but not obviously, blame it on Repbulicans.
- If it is obviously a Democrat, blame it on America.
None of that is, or was at the time, out of the ordinary, but I decided to engage them to see why? Why should someone waste their money and their time on an endeavor when that money and effort could be saved for more fruitful endeavors?
The answer was that money which isn’t theirs isn’t anybody’s. They refused to think about it as someone’s actual money that must be taken, or someone’s actual time that must be used—wasted, in fact—in a pointless contest. Rather they referred only to funds floating around that must be used or it disappears. Instead of it being wasted if it’s used on a pointless campaign, it is wasted if it isn’t used on a pointless campaign.
They specifically refused to consider donating their own time or money to fight Nazis.
Spend other people’s money, force other people’s effort, all to make the world a worse place. From slavery to the Unaffordable Care Act, sometimes it seems like that’s the only thing Democrats know how to do since the beginning of their party: control other people’s labor and confiscate the fruit of other people’s labor.
Whether they call it slavery or liberty doesn’t matter. As Lincoln would have said, quoting wisdom far older than himself, you can call a tail a leg—it doesn’t make the animal walk.
In response to The new barbarism: A return to feudalism: The progressive left seems to have no concept of what civilization is, and of what undergirds civilization.
Abraham Lincoln
- Abraham Lincoln’s conservative principles
- Reading Lincoln, it seems that both conservative thought and anti-conservative thought really hasn’t changed much in a century and a half. Though less racist for his time, he was still racist. But his adherence to conservative principles enabled him to overcome his prejudices while his contemporaries who were not conservative sank deeper into racism.
- Suppose You Call a Sheep’s Tail a Leg, How Many Legs Will the Sheep Have? at Quote Investigator
- “There is substantive evidence that Abraham Lincoln did employ this comical riddle by 1862, and detailed citations are given further below. But Lincoln was referring to a conundrum that was already in circulation.”
Thomas Sowell
- Better for being ridden: the eternal lie of the anointed
- Whenever there’s a crisis, politicians and the media always tell us that if we do what they say, we’ll be all right. This is always a lie. And however often they fail and however many die from their ministrations, their wabbling fingers always return to the mire.
- The Vision of the Anointed
- Would you believe that good intentions can defy the law of gravity? If not, you wouldn’t make a good politician in today’s America.
More Democrats
- The Life of Stephen A. Douglas
- Where Abraham Lincoln’s conservative principles made a flawed man better, Stephen A. Douglas’s belief in the responsibility of government elites for managing lesser men made him far worse.
- Slavery is barbarism
- Of course progressives believe slavery is a net economic positive. When the left talks rights, they’re talking about the power of government to force people to both provide something and to deny it.
- The left’s vicious racial shaming
- The left is waging a war against struggling mothers—all in service of creating racial discord and shoring up their identity politics.
- Senator Kamala Harris calls for slavery reparations
- California Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Kamala Harris calls on Democrats to support reparations to descendants of former slaves, and to descendants of Union soldiers who died freeing them.
- Failure theater in the Syrian war
- Just when I think I’m starting to understand the Democrats’ new policies post-2016, they come out of left field and support war in Syria. Are they flip-flopping because of failure theater or because they hate Trump?
- 16 more pages with the topic Democrats, and other related pages
More institutional Left
- Why does the Institutional Left hate Israel so much?
- The institutional Left doesn’t hate only Israel. They hate any ethnic group that rebels against enslavement by the Left.
- On education, the left is mired in the fifties
- Why don’t schools have locked doors? Because when it comes to education, especially K-12, the left, as in so many things, is mired in the distant industrialized assembly-line past.
- White privilege is not the nail
- Attributing George Floyd’s death to white privilege when it was caused by left-run city policy means that we will continue to have more George Floyds.
- What the f*** is wrong with Americans?
- Do you disagree with the left? Then there’s something the f*** wrong with you.
- The left’s vicious racial shaming
- The left is waging a war against struggling mothers—all in service of creating racial discord and shoring up their identity politics.
- 15 more pages with the topic institutional Left, and other related pages