One would think a magazine titled Foreign Affairs would be about, well, foreign affairs. But in the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, the article “The Republican Devolution” makes it clear that the publication of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is not just for a global government, but for socialism here at home. It is not just that they hate President Donald Trump (whom they denigrate in every issue of the publication), they blame the Republican Party generally for standing in the way of a government more to their liking, which would be a left-wing progressive government.
“There is one overriding culprit behind the failure of the U.S. political system: the Republican Party,” write article authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. “Over the last two and a half decades, the GOP has mutated from a traditional conservative party into an insurgent force that threatens the norms and institutions of American democracy.”
For years, the CFR has included both Democrats and Republicans within its membership, and has focused on foreign policy, not domestic policy issues. But in this article, published in their bimonthly journal Foreign Affairs, the CFR takes the left side of the political issues on domestic politics, as well. The journal claims to “tolerate wide differences of opinion,” and, “It’s articles will not represent any consensus of beliefs,” but a cursory reading of the articles will lead to an obvious conclusion. Foreign Affairs, like the CFR which publishes it, is a left-wing publication. There is no wide difference of opinion in the journal. One will not find articles by a Pat Buchanan or anyone else who takes positions against the dogmas of the establishment, such as open borders, multilateral trade deals, and that more and bigger government is the solution to all ills.
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Hacker is a political science professor at Yale, while Pierson is a political science professor at Cal-Berkeley. Hacker coined the term, pre-distribution, an idea adopted by the Campaign for Co-operative Socialism in one of their publications. He contributed to the healthcare plan ideas of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards, the three leading Democratic Party candidates in 2008. His plan for healthcare, “Health Care for America” proposed requiring employers to provide health insurance for their employees, or enroll them in an insurance pool.
Hacker and Pierson wrote American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper, in which they call for a “mixed economy” for the United States. (In a “mixed economy,” some free markets are allowed, but all under heavy government planning.)
Knowing the background of the two authors leads to no surprises when one reads in the article, “The Democratic Party has moved modestly leftward,” while adding, “By contrast, the Republican Party has moved dramatically rightward and now represents a radically disruptive force that the U.S. political system is ill equipped to contain.”
In case a reader did not get the point, Hacker and Pierson add, “Republicans have moved much further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left.” How anyone can make such a statement, when surveying the present field of Democratic presidential candidates — with several socialist candidates — must say more about Hacker and Pierson than the Democrats or the Republicans.
The authors contend that Republicans have “deployed strategies designed to disrupt and delegitimize government” since the 1990s, specifically arguing that the Republicans have attempted “to hold the U.S. economy hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.”
“Positions that were once at or beyond the outer fringe of American conservatism have become first acceptable and then Republican orthodoxy,” the authors claim. What positions? “More than ever before, the Republican Party is dismissive of climate change, hostile to both the welfare state and the regulatory state, and committed to tax cuts for the rich.”
One must wonder how is this alleged hostility to the welfare state and the regulatory state, and commitment to tax cuts involve foreign affairs?
Yet, this is the substance of the article, as the authors even argue that the opposition of Trump and his Republican allies to the “political opposition” is part of overall an attack on “the foundations of democracy.” Really? Should Trump and the Republicans just concede the field?
Some of the article is just plain ludicrous, such as the assertion that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has “moved far to the right,” and calling tax cuts a “hard-right” policy.
But it is not just President Trump or the Republican Party that anger the two leftist authors. They accused the “newest members” of the Supreme Court of being chosen “for their combination of extreme social conservatism and Ayn Rand-style libertarianism.”
Hacker and Pierson lament, “Effective government [a euphemism for leftist government?] is elusive not because the problems Americans face are insuperable but because asymmetric polarization has collided with aging political institutions that are poorly equipped to handle a radicalized Republican Party.”
And just what are these “aging political institutions” that are blocking the leftist paradise envisioned by Hacker and Pierson? As if right on cue, the very next article, authored by Julia Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University, tells us, “It’s the Institutions, Stupid,” with the subhead, “The Real Roots of America’s Political Crisis.”
Azari begins her article assuring her readers that, while things are far from perfect, “they are better.” Ways that things are better, according to Azari, are that Colorado voters elected an openly gay governor, and openly gay man is running for president, along with six women and six “people of color” running for president.
But, Azari laments, “The structures of American democracy have failed to keep pace with the changes in politics and society. That has happened in three areas: political representation remains tied to states and districts, even as the political conversation has gone national; elections remain relatively de-emphasized in the Constitution, even though they have come to matter more and more in practical terms; and institutions remain formally colorblind, even though race shapes so much about contemporary American life.”
She specifically takes issue with the Senate, because every state gets two senators. The reason we can’t get stricter gun control, Azari notes, is because of the “structure of Congress,” in which members “do not represent national constituencies; they represent their states and districts.” Naturally, she would also like to eliminate the Electoral College.
Bluntly put, Azari argues that the problems that America faces are not so much Trump and the Republicans, but the very form of government created by the framers of the Constitution. This is the same view held by President Woodrow Wilson, when he was a professor at Princeton.
In a way, this should not be surprising, as Wilson did his best to create a world government, known as the League of Nations. It was that failure that led to the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations, the parent organization of Foreign Affairs by close Wilson associates Edward M. House, John Foster Dulles, and other globalists who were determined to change the thinking of the American public.
These two articles, along with others in the magazine, which also focus mostly on domestic matters from a leftist viewpoint, should make it quite clear that Foreign Affairs is not just a publication with “scholarly” articles on world events, but a publication intended to shape those events toward a new world order, and a leftist progressive order in the United States.
Steve Byas is a professor of history whose book, History’s Greatest Libels, is a defense of several historical personalities, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Marie Antoinette, and Joe McCarthy. Steve may be reached at [email protected]
