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no to nuclear Iran, no to two-state solution, no to bi-national state
Levin Explains Nationalism, Populism, Progressivism And Why They’re Antithetical To Americanism
By Aaron Bandler November 22, 2016
7-8 minutes
Radio host and constitutional scholar Mark Levin explained on his Friday radio program the meaning of nationalism, populism and progressivism and why they run contrary to America’s founding of limited government and individual liberty.
Levin began by discussing the term “new nationalism,” which is actually anything but new–it originates from Theodore Roosevelt, who used the term in a speech decrying “the limitations placed on the federal government.” Roosevelt advocated for a massive centralized government that was capable of taking care of the citizenry–thus ushering in the “Progressive Era.”
Prior to the Progressive Era, populism had taken shape through the People’s Party, which eventually became “a branch of the progressive movement and it was eventually devoured by that movement.”
Levin pointed to two disastrous constitutional amendments that passed during the Progressive Era:
But back to the Progressive Era. These words — nationalism, populism, progressive — they’ve been around a very long time. They gave us, in 1909, the 16th Amendment — the income tax amendment, the federal income tax amendment. The vehicle for government to “let’s get the rich,” to get American companies to “pay their fair share.”
These words gave us the 17th Amendment in 1912. In the name of populism, we get to elect our senators directly. It’s very appealing, but we’re not supposed to be a pure democracy. We’re not supposed to be a populist society. We’re supposed to be a republic. Two of the worst ideas during the Progressive Era: the 16th and 17th Amendments — pushed by Republicans. Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Both parties strongly supported it.
The nationalist, populist, progressive movement’s economic policies eventually culminated in the Great Depression, starting with Congress passing the Fordney-McCumber Tariff in 1922 to the passage of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in 1930 to Herbert Hoover implementing his own “small New Deal,” paving the way for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s massive New Deal.
“A bad recession was turned into a depression, which was turned into a horrendous depression that lasted a decade. Study after study has said that the government did the exact wrong thing,” Levin said. “They had a double-digit unemployment for years. No matter how much taxes were raised, no matter how many programs were put in place, no matter how much redistribution of wealth occurred, no matter how powerful the central government became, the people were miserable and suffering.”
Levin went on to point out that Richard Nixon also embraced the big government policies of nationalism, populism and progressivism, including “wage and price controls” that resulted in “terrible dislocation of markets.” The Great One then criticized Trump’s infrastructure proposal:
Now Donald Trump is proposing $1 trillion in infrastructure spending — twice as much as Hillary Clinton did. They insist this is going to create jobs for the middle class and union workers and so forth.
How many more times are we going to do this? How many more times are we going to take money out of the private sector to fund some mastermind’s idea about how to create jobs?The great power of the American economy was not created by government or tariffs or protectionism or progressivism or populism or nationalism. It was created by Americanism, by Americans.
Economies go through evolutions. There was the horse and buggy, now we have the car. We used whale blubber to light lanterns, now we have electricity. Are we supposed to kill economic progress and evolution that improves lifestyles for the vast majority of Americans? Any country would kill to have the standard of living that we have in this country. Of course, you’d never know that listening to our politicians.
Levin noted that “whether these ideas come from Theodore Roosevelt or William Howard Taft or Herbert Hoover or Franklin Roosevelt, whether these ideas come from Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or yes, Donald Trump, they’re the same warmed-over ideas that do not work.”
“This is why we believe in individualism, capitalism, and constitutionalism,” Levin said. “That’s Americanism.”
Levin wrapped up the segment by pointing out that tyranny is typically “wrapped in populist arguments.”
“Tyranny comes packaged as ‘for the people,’ or representing ‘the will of the people,'” Levin said. “That’s how Mao Zedong represented his genocidal tyranny, that’s how Vladimir Lenin represented his genocidal tyranny, that’s how Hugo Chavez, the Fidel and Raul Castro brothers, Robert Mugabe, and the like represented their reigns. But populism is not republicanism.”
The grand finale of Levin’s information segment came with this epic conclusion:
This is not about class warfare; it’s about liberty. You want to live free or don’t you? When you live free, that means at times, things get difficult. But let me tell you something: When you don’t live free, it means things are always difficult.
How many more experiments must humanity go through before it becomes obvious that our system, as set up by the framers, is and was the best? How many more human experiments must we have? How much more spending until it becomes clear that the government doesn’t create jobs? Nobody spent more to “create jobs” than Franklin Roosevelt. Obama spends a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure, what did that do? Now Trump wants to spend a trillion dollars. What will that do?
I don’t care if you’re blue collar or white collar; I don’t even like those terms. Those are terms that some egghead came up with — just like “working people.” Well you’re either working or you’re not. What does that mean? What is a working people? I work very long hours, am I not a working person? Whatever my income is, whatever your income is, this is the vernacular of the progressive leftist. Working people, blue collar, white collar: No, we’re Americans. We are Americans. The goal is to create and defend and improve upon a society that has created the greatest amount of wealth for the most people, the greatest amount of freedom for the most people, despite and in fact due to our diversity. Our diversity of thinking, our diversity of acting, our diversity of producing.
All of these populist movements, whether on the pseudo-right or the Left, always demand egalitarianism. They demand material equality, on different levels and to a different degree. Somebody’s “earning too much,” somebody has “too much wealth.” Why should they have that when you have nothing? These philosophies overlap. And you know what they have something in common? The iron fist.
The full segment, and the adaptation of the segment’s transcript, can be seen at Conservative Review.