Why are Progressive politicians so short-sighted?

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The greatest chess players think many moves ahead.  Rather than focusing on the current move, they (likely intuitively) analyze what the impact of this move will be in four, or six, or ten moves in the future.  Computers have essentially replaced humans as the best chess players, because they've become powerful enough to plot all possible moves, for twenty or thirty moves in the future.  Then it's a simple sort routine to rank the most useful moves at the top.

Progressive politicians sure don't seem to be doing that.  Offered for your consideration, as Exhibit A for the case of the (Thinking) People v. Progressives, the fiscal disaster that is ObamaCare:

Speaking of ill-considered financial decisions made by politicians intent on their policy priorities, new emails revealed by the AP show that the administration was warned that parts of ObamaCare were a financial disaster--but plowed ahead anyway.

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The administration seems to think that it can fix the program--but the only workable fix appears to be making the thing mandatory rather than optional, which is hardly what they said when they were  passing it.

There are two possibilities here: they might have been incompetent, which is what most people are assuming.  Or this might have been the plan all along, to get the Country into a "Oops, we need this because it's a crisis" situation.

Quite frankly, it doesn't matter for this discussion.  The important question is this: What did they think would happen when people find out?

Offered as Exhibit B: Australia's economy-destroying Carbon Tax:

Firstly there’s the anti-democratic nature of it: apparently [Prime Minister] Gillard is doing things that are considered utterly beyond the pale in other nations. Ergas suggests that by granting “property rights” she is threatening to make the cost of removing her legislation all but insurmountable. (For all the world, it appears she’s determined to stop the opposition offering the people the choice to remove the carbon tax. Could it be, that for the sake of an advantage in the next election campaign she’s tossing the country down the nearest black hole?)

Secondly, the Australian Carbon Tax is a freakishly large sacrificial offering: Australians will be hit for  $391 for every man, woman and child, and that’s just the first year (according to the government estimates). Compare this to the EU. There in the land-of-exploding-economies,  each good citizen has had to fork out  the vast grand sum of (wait for it)  … one dollar fifty cents each (yes, $1.50). And, it gets worse, (how do you satirize this?)  — that’s the cumulative total since the EU started trading in 2005.

Maybe they'll pass it, and maybe they won't.  Maybe it'll be too insanely expensive to unwind once passed, or maybe it won't.  That will be a topic for another day, but the question at hand is the same as for the Democrats here Stateside: What do they think will happen when people find out what it does to them?

Both of these seem, quite frankly, as verging on the suicidal.  There's a new New York Times/CBS News poll out.  It's very interesting.  Here are some answers to the question "What do you think is the most important problem facing he country today?"

Healthcare: 3%
Environment: zero percent (yes, zero)
Economy: 27%
Jobs: 32%

Admittedly, this is the US public, not the Australian public, but I'll happily bet cash money that polls are similar with the Aussie public (please leave all wager offers in the comments; the ammo fund is running low here at FOB Borepatch).

So we see not just a minor miscalculation, but a situation where the math is off by a factor of ten.  Something is going on here, with supposedly intelligent and canny politicians burning (with Carbon Offsets for the Australian Labour Party, no  doubt) serious political capital.  To the first glance, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would say Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Immodestly, I'd like to suggest an answer to this conundrum.  It's Gramscian Damage once again.  As Progressives came to control all of the intellectual institutions (especially the Media and the University) in the Post-War years, they gradually squeezed conservative thought from "legitimate" discussion.  Of course, nature abhors a vacuum, and so it was replaced by a lot of twaddle.  A year ago, I described what happened next:

The Long March Through The Institutions is complete, but the results are not what were expected:

• American's trust in the news media has been falling since 1976.
• Newspaper circulation has been falling since 1990.
• None of the top dozen highest grossing Hollywood films has been made in the last 25 years (counting in inflation-adjusted dollars).
• Previously respected initiatives like the Environmental Movement are no longer respected.
• Trust that the Government will do the right thing has been falling since the early 1960s, from a high around 80% to the mid 20% range.

But the Progressive Politicians are indoctrinated members of the intellectual institutions, fully steeped in the dogma that Progressive politics is a one-way ratchet (every now and again a new shift leftward; never a shift back).  And so their eye is on the lookout for that ever elusive moment when the ratchet can be tightened another click.  Who really cares about the consequences, because it's a one-way ratchet, right?

Except it's not:

The deal was that the government would buy social peace. The problem for the people who make up the government is that the way to make a name for themselves is with bigger, more visionary projects. Let's take a simple example: city planning. The first really big advance was a Cartesian grid pattern for streets: north/south avenues and east/west streets. So what do you do if you're the next urban planner? Maybe radial grand avenues (like in Paris), but this isn't as useful. What if you're the 426th urban planner? The biggest wins are at the beginning.

And so with social programs. Bismark and FDR plausibly did save industrial capitalism, by helping to ameliorate people's fears of future poverty. It was actually a near thing, too, as a study of post-War Britain shows. So how does a new, ambitious politician make a name for himself? Go big, or go home.

But if you go big, you spend big (or you inflate big, which doesn't win in the long run). And so back to the deal: social peace in return for industrial capitalism. If the politicians have a different view of social peace than population, then there's your contradiction. Remember, the early gains are always the biggest. The biggest gains in people's perception of safety against future poverty were handled by Bismark, FDR, and LBJ.

Which puts Obama, Pelosi, and Harry Reid in a deep hole of contradiction. The health care bill is very unpopular, in no small measure because most people are generally happy with their health care program. Sure, some are not covered, and people with pre-existing conditions are screwed, but we're talking most people. And so you see a ratcheting up of the scare talk (it's a crisis!) at the same time that the details of the program are hidden (vote for the bill so we can see what's in it), and people aren't buying it. It's the Bismarkian Welfare State that's scaring people now.

It's been said that Gramsci's goal was not an intelligentsia that could argue more effectively against counter-Progressive ideas.  Rather, it was an intelligentsia where counter-Progressive ideas would not be able to be formed in the thinker's mind.

And so we look at ObamaCare, or the Australian death-by-Carbon-tax proposals and ask what did they think would happen when people find out?  They look at you with uncomprehending eyes.  It's a one-way ratchet.

Most people are happy with their health care, but the Progressive State may have to take it away because of the coming fiscal crisis (interesting that so many provisions only kick in after the 2012 elections).  Health care only concerns 3% of the population.  Global Warming doesn't even move the meter (zero percent), and yet Australian families are staring at $1000+ a year in taxes.

So what's coming?  A reckoning*.



The Dinosaurs became so closely adapted to their climate that, while dominating the ecosystem, they lived on the very edge of the abyss.  Today's Progressives have used a Gramscian strategy to adpat themselves very closely indeed to a top-down world dominated by a philosophically monocultural elite.  But the Elite sees the meteoric glow of the Team Party in the gloaming, and wonders what it might mean to their one-way ratchet.

The Dinosaurs sniff a change on the breeze, and roar their defiance.

* I suspect that your Gormogons are behind this (always a good starting assumption, actually).  Not only is this cunningly subtle intellectual misdirection, Doc Holiday is their Huckleberry.  Coincidence?  I think not.