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The Regressive Party: The Worst and the Dimmest

Junius was the pseudonym of a commentator in Great Britain during the 1770s. Junius wrote a series of letters to the press advising British subjects of their rights and attacking politicians who would deprive the British people of those rights. Specifically, Junius employed satire to attack George III’s ministers for corruption, calling them “the best and brightest.” George III and his ministers were under heavy attack from different quarters during this time, including France and the American colonies, with conflict in Ireland. Junius’s attacks were effective then, but you do not see many such satirical attacks in the mainstream media now, regardless of how corrupt the politicians are. Indeed, much of the MSM is a full participant in the corruption.

The best and brightest theme was revived by David Halberstam during the Vietnam War in a book with a similar title, but the book was notably lacking in satire. In fact it was a deadly serious description of how the Democratic Party got us into a land war in Asia, a geopolitical no-no, based on fraudulent information from the executive branch of government. Having gotten us into this ill-conceived war, the Democratic Party was unwilling to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion, left the South Vietnamese with a military capability to defend themselves and with a faithful promise for logistical support for that defense, and then reneged on the promise of support. The South Vietnamese people were betrayed by the government of the United States and fell to a malevolent North Vietnamese regime supported by the Soviet Union and Red China. The cost in lives and treasure was huge and American honor was lost.

This was a shocking betrayal of democratic principles by the Democratic Party. In a major political transition, the betrayal of democratic principles and values came to mark a new era in the evolution of the American Republic, on a par with the collapses of the Federalist Party and of the Whig Party, the rise of the Republican Party, and the rise and fall of the Dixiecrats.

Now Democrats are apt to call themselves “Progressives,” though “Regressive” would be more suitable and more descriptive. The current Regressives favor governance by elitists, exactly what Junius was ridiculing; elitists in the 1770s were as corrupt, ineffective, and destructive as Regressives are now. The Regressive Party favors a system of governance similar to George III or any punk dictator — Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin — wherein the elitists make the decisions and their subjects are there to pay for the elitists $4 million vacations. Great Britain has subjects, the United States has citizens, and the best and brightest elitists want us to become subjects again — subjects of the worst and dimmest Regressives, not of the British monarchy.

In a similar vein, in the Soviet Union the elitists were known as the nomenklatura, and they had access to dachas, elitist vacation sites, foreign travel, and western goods from special stores just for themselves. Meanwhile, the American citizens get increasing poverty and food stamps. I’m sure that is better than getting starved or shot, like the Kulaks.

If the emergence of the best and brightest occurred during the Vietnam War, the phenomenon was a long time in development. FDR had his “Brain Trust” who served the same purpose and achieved the same results. Under the tender ministrations of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, the Great Depression extended into the longest and most severe economic downturn in history. During FDR’s Administration, unconstitutional and extra-constitutional programs were advocated and sometimes passed, free trade was restricted, and investment capital was systematically destroyed, as when Roosevelt raised taxes after the 1936 election (not before the election, he was not that stupid), and thus created a major recession within the Great Depression.

The current elitists represent an attempt to impose a corrupt and inefficient oligarchy on our republican form of government. The elitists have created repeated disasters within the economy: Social Security is doomed to bankruptcy, Medicare is doomed to bankruptcy even more rapidly, the misbegotten and corrupt War on Poverty cost $6.6 trillion and left us with a total national debt of $6 trillion (poverty is now greater than at any time since we lost the War on Poverty), Clinton’s Dot.com Bubble collapsed, as all economic bubbles collapse, and the collapse added $3 trillion to the national debt, the Democrats’ Housing Bubble collapse has added another $7 trillion to the national debt and counting, aided by the fear created when a Leftist was nominated and elected to the presidency. The elitists have created serial and growing economic disasters, producing a total national debt of $16 trillion and counting just within the last thirty years, and we have absolutely nothing to show for the wasted money but a pile of IOUs. At the same time, the elitists claim a higher and higher share of the national wealth, while the middle class loses ground and poverty increases. One might get the impression that elitist economists from elitist schools really do not know what they are doing, except they take care of themselves quite well within the economic chaos they create.

It is not as if the American economy is unmanageable. An American grade-B movie actor with grade-A political and economic understanding and a shop keeper’s daughter in London created the greatest economic boom in history, and provoked the self-destruction of the Soviet Union on the side. Reagan is the only American president to have ever earned a degree in economics, and Reagan’s degree was definitely not from Harvard. Neither Prime Minister Thatcher nor President Reagan were elitist, nor did they go to elitist schools. Elitists do not understand how Reagan and Thatcher could be so successful, and are in denial that their success could have any long-term meaning.

Imagine that, our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution of the United States of America intended and created a polity where men were not subject to corrupt and foolish bureaucrats. American citizens were encouraged to rely on their own resources and talents, and corrupt and foolish bureaucrats do not understand (or more likely, fear) the power that belongs to the individual, as acknowledged in the Constitution. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy the citizen’s powers, just as Junius reported.

So, how did the elitists get it so wrong?

About two hundred years ago, French Dr. Philippe Pinel made a major contribution to the study of modern psychology, helping to define the discipline. Among Dr. Pinel’s observations was a condition he identified as “insane without delirium.” This is still a good quick definition of what we now identify as psychopathy.

Within the last few decades, the understanding of modern psyschopathy has expanded exponentially, fleshing out Dr. Pinel’s observation. The increasing incidence and severity of psychopathic expression is a process that can only be described as evolutionary:

• In the 1930s and 1940s, Dr. Hervey Cleckley. author of The Mask of Insanity, defined the modern understanding of psychopathy primarily in terms of the small-town drunks and troublemakers who were his patients.

• In the 1970s, the mass-murdering psychopath (Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy) came to public attention, though Dr. Cleckley had barely acknowledged this possibility.

• In the 1990s, corporate psychopaths (“Chainsaw” Al Dunlap at Sunbeam Corporation, Bernie Ebbers at WorldCom, and Andy Fastow at Enron) created billions of dollars of losses and destroyed thousands of jobs and careers. Following from this, Dr. Robert Hare co-authored Snakes in Suits giving case histories of psychopaths in corporate positions, and offering individuals and corporations advice on how to avoid being ensnared in psychopathic games.

• More recently, Dr. Clive Boddy has created a persuasive argument that financial and political psychopaths were instrumental and prominent in the 2008 financial meltdown.

• There are historical psychopaths (Gilles de Rais. Hitler, Stalin), but in their times there were limited psychological tools for analysis of the phenomenon.

Regressives’ dishonesty and corruption are now approaching a scale similar to the Weimar Republic, never mind George III. The only virtue of psychopaths is that they always fail. Unfortunately, they are costing us trillions of dollars and much heartache while they fail.

How is it that the so-called best and brightest have come to be a bunch of psychopaths? Aye, there’s the rub.

The current definition of psychopathy (or the closely related term sociopathy) describes severe personality disorders wherein the psychopath, having little control of himself, demands control of others. It is amazing and disconcerting that so many are willing to concede control of their own lives to a nobody from nowhere, based on a cultivated, fake charisma.

“Too much, too little, or uneven” childhood discipline is often a factor in the creation of psychopathic personalities, and this is particularly true of corporate and political psychopaths. Too little childhood discipline produces spoiled brats. In my investigations of dysfunctional personalities, I uncovered psychopathic-type personalities both who had been abused as children and who had been spoiled brats. We have parents who fancy themselves elitists and who have children who grow up with the elitist message, who grow up with a sense of superiority and entitlement, who go to elitist schools and are told they are the best and brightest, all very distorting to tender young psyches.

If this closed elitist society is composed of the best and the brightest, then everyone else in flyover country must be less good and less bright. But that is not the egalitarian principle on which this Republic was established and on which this Republic thrived until the Regressives began to systematically destroy our Republic and loot our banks and financial institutions. The more damage Regressives do, the more “corrective” actions they find they must apply, and our freedoms are diminished.

And that is how we are regressing back to a more primitive political system. The Constitution of the United States of America produced the best and brightest political system the world has ever known, and we are actively turning away from Constitutional principles at the insistence of dishonest and corrupt psychopaths. The American people have been slow to understand this, but Junius would understand perfectly.