By Dennis Linthicum, Oregon State Senate – District 28
August 30, 2023
“We, the People” are finally waking up.
The curtains have been thrown wide-open and the public is being exposed to facts that they never dreamed possible. We are now witnesses to the daily corruption of political power, from the simplest idiocies to the most complex, convoluted and Byzantine criminal activities.
Corrupt political power influences every institution in American life. There is no longer any meaningful debate for balancing policy objectives with prudence, common-sense or fiscal responsibility. The agendas are driven by clamoring from our political parties. Those with the best bumper-sticker sloganeering, media ad-campaigns or skewed polling graphics are on a one-way track leading to more government, more control, and less individual autonomy.
As local, county, regional, and state governments join in the fray to gain money out of the fiscal tragedy that is the federal government, entities of every stripe want a piece of the pie. This is a self-perpetuating cycle that is quite difficult to stop. The main recipients of this largess are the big-government “destructionists” in the Democrat Party.
Here, I use the word “destructionists” without hesitation and with full confidence in my assertions. The phrase is defined correctly by Ludwig von Mises in his classic book: SOCIALISM: An Economic and Sociological Analysis.
In the years following the second World War, circa 1951, Mises wrote, “The socialist idea dominates the modern spirit. The masses approve of it, it expresses the thoughts and feelings of all; it has set its seal upon our time.”
It is this socialist idea, or socialism itself that leads to destructionism. Mises continues with a definition that we can use,
“In fact, Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created. … [E]ach step leading towards Socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists.”
Mises warns,
“Capital consumption can be detected statistically and can be conceived intellectually, but it is not obvious to everyone. To see the weakness of a policy which raises the consumption of the masses at the cost of existing capital wealth, and thus sacrifices the future to the present… requires deeper insight.”
Mises highlights two methods aimed at public policy-makers, “the first aims directly at converting society to Socialism; the second aims only indirectly at this conversion by destroying the social order which is based on private ownership.”
It would be hard to find a Democrat party member, whether moderate or radical, not directly engaged in either of these methods for the transformational reform of our cultural norms and traditions.
Mises’ second category is harder for us to grasp because it is such a comprehensive weapon of revolutionary Socialism. Mises claims it, “is primarily concerned to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the old one.”
This is the same revolutionary zeal seen in academia, or the left-leaning mainstream media outlets and the cultural rampage spilling from the fear-mongering and disinformation within the social media giants.
In the big picture, destructionism is rampant.
We see it in transportation as it surfaces with the push for inefficient EVs. In energy production, there is a war on ‘fossil fuels’ and a focus on wasteful ‘green energy’ projects, which will demand unquantifiable increases in mining operations and a nearly complete grid overhaul and rebuild, all funded with tax-payer dollars.
Destructionism is obvious in public health, too.
Healthcare is being razed on two fronts. First, via the COVID pandemic fraud, complete with tax-payer funded, state-sanctioned malfeasance. Secondly by state and federal intrusions into the treacherous waters of single-payer healthcare. Both will destroy individual health through the one-size-fits-all mandates that suck tax-payer money into a perpetual machine of humanistic, unnatural and dangerous emergency use authorizations or technocratic initiatives.
We see destructionism, in our education realm through critical race theory and post-modern deconstructionist concepts which are foisted on unsuspecting young people, coinciding with the 1619 Project and re-writing American history. Education is also being destroyed through the denial of valid real-world observations about human biology, common-sense, math, science, and history.
Innocence, too, is under attack. Our youth are being teased into age-inappropriate emotions, illustrations, and sexually explicit library material which are beyond their current level of maturity and understanding. What good can be expected from having grown men performing in Drag to audiences of young children? This is destructionism, but it appears to be the rage as the Democrat Party promotes the manipulation of our kids for their own political purposes.
The end result will not be healthy.
We will be raising a generation of psychologically and emotionally challenged individuals with distorted views about identity, relationships, family, and sexuality. These kids, in turn, will be the future justification for more state intervention in pharmacological solutions or narcotics, followed by increases in funding for behavioral and mental health bureaucracies.
Destructionism is pervasive in Democrat controlled metro-areas. It is easy to see by mapping the recent Antifa riots across America (and the world). In Portland, the DA was unwilling to prosecute the most malevolent rioters, even though the city lost several billion dollars in businesses, infrastructure, lost wages, lives and livelihoods.
On the global stage the destructionist mindset of the left is readily apparent.
It only took the Biden administration 6 months to up-end our 20-year nation-building enterprise in Afghanistan. In truth, despite 20 years of political propaganda telling the public that our regime change effort was both good and working, most could see the sheer waste in money and lives. While the military adventure was probably a bad idea from the beginning, our extrication did not need to be a wasteful and destructionist endeavor.
The cultural clock of the Left runs on destructionism.
Here are two unrelated but illustrative examples, first, is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Soviet enterprise collapsed because of the inescapable destiny of an empire dedicated to non-market economics and anti-liberal institutions. The communist/socialist system could not muster any long-term measures for efficiency, prudence, profit, loss, accountability, or corporate malevolence other than their own politically enforced standards.
While scholars continue to debate whether the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine was purposeful or not, history shows us that the rapid destruction of private property and the forced collectivization of local, successful, family-run farms utterly destroyed the once majestic bread-basket of the Ukraine.
On a different plane, cancel-culture suffers from the same dilemma. There are no universal measures guiding who might get cancelled (destroyed), or which offenses are cancelable. One’s demise might be immediate, or a slow and lingering death spiral where one can get cancelled for anything, at any time, and for any reason whatsoever.
Whether at the local, municipal, regional, state or national level, the proponents of more control and regulation imagine that government alone is capable of developing a plan to solve our problems and settle the issues highlighted above. Yet, each government solution must necessarily jettison all notions about sustainability, efficiency, profit and loss because the material factors guiding production has been placed into the political sphere.
Such is the state of Oregon and the ruling majority party.
Although the destructionists appear to be winning, more and more hard working, common-sense Oregonians do not agree with their agenda. In my next newsletter I will look at steps we can take to stop the socialist destruction of our American traditions.
© 2023 Dennis Linthicum – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Dennis Linthicum: d4linthicum@gmail.com
