Mencken, Socialism, and Right-Wing Totalitarians

H.L. Mencken said that saving the world is a front for wanting to rule it. In fact, most of the people who have wielded power in recent memory are not, nor have they ever been, interested in saving the world. From Rupert Murdoch and Ed Koch to Texas Oil, these people are not interested in saving the world. They are interested in ruling it, period.

The libertarian constantly sees oppression as something that comes from the government and only from the government. In America, most of the oppression does not come from the government. Far rather it comes from private entities and individuals, from the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Ed Koch to old-boy networks to churches to gangs to communities to families to social groups. If anything, the government in America works as a check and balance on the abuses by these entities, as it is entrusted to protect life and liberty of everyone, including the people that such entities and individuals see unworthy of liberty or life. And that means the following. Not only is the government in America (and certainly not the Clinton or Obama government) not the main source of tyranny and corruption, but rather it is one of the few entities in America that has ever done anything effective in fighting the same.

The rightist anti-government sentiment is simply ridiculous. If Obama was a totalitarian, as the actually totalitarian-minded entities in America insist on portraying him as being, then he would have annulled the results of the 2010 election that did not go his way. Whereas Jim Miller, the Tea Party candidate who lost the Senate race in Alaska to a more moderate Republican, would not concede his defeat until he was ordered to do so by the court. This disrespect for the will of the electorate by a Tea Party candidate shows the true character of the Tea Party. The Tea Party, like any other fascist entity, can be counted to cling on to power, public support or no public support, and to use any crooked tactics to do so. Whereas the Obama administration has full respect for the will of the electorate, including in an election that went drastically against it and that did so mostly as a result of a campaign of lies waged by American Right.

And while Obama, whatever the shouting, is a legitimately elected president who came into office with support of 53% of the electorate, there has been an unelected leader put into place in America in recent past. The right-wing activist Supreme Court, stacked with Reagan appointees, legislated from the bench to annul the results of the 2000 election and enthrone the loser of the election as US President. With Clinton as incumbent, Gore could have challenged this ruling, but he did not, choosing instead to spare the country what would have been a divisive experience of recounting the election - the election that he won. And under the unelected Bush presidency, the American government did in fact commit vastly unconstitutional and tyrannical abuses. But the libertarians and the anti-government crowd, noisy as a pack of babboons under both Clinton and Obama, were nowhere to be seen when one of their own ran the most blatantly un-Constitutional, most blatantly oppressive, and most overtly corrupt and despotic government in the history of the United States.

What does this show? That propaganda, far from being mainly the tool of the Communists, is something that in America is done mostly by the right-wing. That real abuses of power are done, not by "socialists" or by "the liberal government," but by the Republicans and by Republican-affiliated private power organs. And that the people who have acquired unearned power in recent decades have done the same in part by fronting for their agenda the claim that they are saving the world - from socialism or the Left. Which means that Mencken was right in a way, but not in quite the way in which he intended to be.

It is time that real dangers be seen for what they are rather than having people manipulated to see danger and scapegoats everywhere that they are not. And I say this with full clarity: That both the front (Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, Mike Huckabee) and the back-end (Murdoch, Koch, Texas Oil, and Tea Party and Christian Right organizers) of the Right constitute the true danger to life and liberty in America today. A person truly concerned for liberty will be confronting these entities and leave the Obama administration alone. Compared to its predecessor and those who want to be its successors, the Obama government is vastly more unobtrusive, vastly more democratic, vastly less power-grabbing, and vastly truer to Constitutional intent.