Will the Left Allow Voters to Take Back Power?The Left’s power of intimidation begins with a great big bluff against the far more powerful American citizenry.
By Adam Mill
October 20, 2022
Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, contains a message of hope for all who look to the invincible juggernaut of state power. She writes, “The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson . . . for hundreds of years . . . it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten . . . One night, lightning struck the oak tree . . . The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside-just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind.”
She set the novel in a dystopian United States with characteristics we can recognize today as we look around. An expert class reorganizing the American economy to fit social justice objectives blames unknowable causes for the steady economic decline that attends their utopian programs. Only by seizing more power over the economy can these experts restore prosperity, they claim. But the cycle repeats as things increasingly fall apart.
In Rand’s conception, beneath the apparent power of the statist movement lies a hollow, rotten core. One crack of the hard exterior causes the whole thing to come tumbling down. More than 30 years before the fall of the Soviet Union, during the arguable apex of Soviet power under Stalin, Rand saw the inherent weakness of a system that survives by crushing freedom.
Social justice, climate change, criminal justice “reform,” gender-affirming “care,” critical race theory, ESG—all of these utopian ideals have made things worse. The great spasm of protests and violence in 2020 following the death of George Floyd aggravated race relations by normalizing “trainings” in workplaces and schools during which openly bigoted propaganda shamed Americans for the color of their skin. The trillions spent on climate change have not changed or reversed the trajectory of the climate. Woke corporate executives engage in soft embezzlement as they redirect scarce company resources to profit-destroying social justice objectives. And pushing “gender-affirming” sex surgeries results in more teen suicides not fewer, as the proponents promised. Homelessness, inflation, race relations, crime. It matters not which of the Left’s social programs you pick. They all burn money to make the problems they promise to solve worse. Looking into her crystal ball, Rand got things almost exactly right.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/20/will-the-left-allow-voters-to-take-back-power/
