Save us from the people who want to save us. From James Bovard at fff.org:
How would people react if, on the third time their broken-down car was towed to the same repair shop for the same problem, the swaggering mechanic told them: “Sure — the engine doesn’t work today but — follow me on this — next year, you will drive from coast to coast, and get 90 miles to the gallon!”
Yet if a politician promises to fix the world, people applaud and follow him regardless of previous crashes.
Woodrow Wilson revolutionized the political exploitation of idealism. In his 1917 speech to Congress calling for war against Germany, Wilson proclaimed that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” He described the U.S. government as “one of the champions of the rights of mankind” and stated the goal of the war was to “bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”
Wilson endlessly invoked the ideal of liberty as he seized nearly absolute power over Americans, including the power to conscript millions of Americans to fight wherever he chose (including Siberia) and to commandeer entire industries.
While Wilson is today hailed as a visionary, in his own time, he became loathed as a demagogue. The more people embraced the ideals he proclaimed, the easier it became to defraud them. Americans’ idealism was fanned by ruthless censorship of any criticism of the government’s war effort.
The 1919 Paris peace talks shredded Wilson’s pretensions and made a mockery of the cause for which he sent more than a hundred thousand Americans to their death. One of Wilson’s top aides, Henry White, later commented: “We had such high hopes of this adventure; we believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest work.” Historian Thomas Fleming, the author of The Illusion of Victory, noted, “The British and French exploited the war to forcibly expand their empires and place millions more people under their thumbs.” Fleming concluded that one lesson of World War I is that “idealism is not synonymous with sainthood or virtue. It only sounds that way.”
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Sometimes I get close to 60mpg on interstate as a left lane cruiser.
The New Man workers utopia?
Commie fairytales.
Breaking from AI that I am growing to like:
Friedrich Merz’s maternal grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny, was a member of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) from 1938.