Liars Read Free

characteristics, Populism was not merely a mode of organized political expression, but a mood and an attitude of mind. It covers a broad spectrum of movements, ideas and writings, characterized, to a greater or lesser extent, by common views and preconceptions about American society. Among these was the conviction that history was a conspiracy of rich against poor, of idlers and parasites against productive businessmen, farmers and workers, of bloodsucking finance capital against creative agricultural and agrarian capital, of sinister, subtle, sophisticated English and Jewish manipulators of world power against simple, upright American ordinary folk. The Populists tended to believe that the two great political parties of their country were a sham, essentially identical, both corrupt tools of the interests, engaged in loud but spurious battles as a means of diverting the attention of productive America from the fact that it had been deprived of its political birthright.
    Sound familiar?
    Progressives, meanwhile, were filling in whatever gaps existed in the fear factor game: food and drug safety (were you being poisoned?), workplace safety (were the bosses deliberately working women and children to death? would workers lose limbs or even their lives?), economic security (would the unemployed or the elderly starve?), big business (were the big guys squeezing out the little guys and jacking up your prices?), big-city corruption (what were those Irish saloon keepers up to in the political back rooms?).
    It’s no accident that among the most memorable phrases in all American rhetoric is Franklin Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.”
    FDR may not have been a great economist, but he was a brilliant politician. Most politicians will subtly (or maybe not so subtly) play upon your fears. But in Roosevelt’s case, he laid it all on the line:
    You’re scared silly. You’re afraid of losing your jobs, your savings, your homes. You’re scared of empty pots and starving children. I will save you from hunger. I will save you from bankers. I will save you from the saber-toothed cat! Just hand over your gold and your future income, and let me plan your retirement for you.
    And so, before a terrified America even knew it, FDR (who was soon about to frighten radio audiences with talk of “high finance” and the “malefactors of great wealth”) produced the CCC, the AAA, the WPA, the PWA, the NYA, the NLRB, Social Security, Medicare, and on and on and on.
    Fear + Progressives = Government Control.
    The progressive cure to your problems always involves giving more power to them . Always. They are the experts. They know best. They know just how big a business should be allowed to get before it becomes dangerous. They will write regulations and collect taxes andgenerate debt to pay for their programs. They know just how much of your income you should be allowed to keep. The free market, the free individual , operates recklessly and wastefully, creates imbalances and unfairness. Freedom of choice should be feared because some people, most people, will choose badly. They will run things scientifically, nonideologically. And whatever their new programs might cost, somehow they will all magically cost less—and even more magically, someone else will pay for them.
    Trust them. They’re from the government, and they’re here to help.
    Or maybe not. More than a century later, after more than a hundred years of progressive “solutions” (Square Deal, New Freedom, New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, Hope/Change), progressives are still sounding the alarm about basically the very same fears. We’ve moved from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to genetically modified foods, from outlawing booze to banning Big Gulps, from the Sixteenth Amendment to bashing the one percent. From banning the word sauerkraut in