As our planet revolves around the sun, its 23.5-degree tilt causes a change in the seasons. Likewise the worldview of Foreign Affairs, the bimonthly journal of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), has a distinctly leftward tilt — but without causing much difference in the political climate of its writers.
This is powerfully demonstrated in the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs. With a cover theme of “Which World Are We Living In?” this issue addresses, in separate articles, “the world,” or prism through which future public policy decisions should be formulated — the “Marxist” world is one, while another is the “Warming” world, for example.
Archibald Cary Coolidge, the founding editor of the publication, launched in September 1922, said they would “tolerate wide differences of opinion,” insisting, “Its articles will not represent any consensus of beliefs.” But upon reading the articles in this issue, and previous ones, it becomes quite clear that the “wide differences of opinion” all seem to line up with globalism, the welfare state, and more governmental control of the lives of individuals.
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In the article “Liberal World,” authors Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, professors at Johns Hopkins and Princeton, respectively, argued, “The variable that matters most for liberal thinkers is interdependence.” Deudney and Ikenberry cite concern over “climate change” as an example of why some problems simply cannot be solved within countries, or even regions of the world.
Champions of “liberalism” named by the two professors include Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela. (Both leaders in their respective nation’s communist parties).
We need to “return to the social democratic policies embodied in the New Deal,” and pass more “progressive taxation,” in order to “reduce inequality,” they argue.
One prevailing view throughout the publication is a dislike of President Donald Trump and his policies. Deudney and Ikenberry, however, do find one thing to praise Trump for — his bombing of Syria (done without provocation and without any authorization by Congress).
A Yale Law school professor, Amy Chua, is evidently quite fond of social engineering. In her article, “Tribal World,” she bemoans the tendency of individuals to identify with their “tribe,” rather than the good of mankind generally. For example, she calls for creating a “public service program that would encourage or require young Americans to spend a year after high school in another community, far from their own,” so they could learn the benefits of “working together toward a common end.” (Emphasis added.) The writers uniformily wish to play games with people’s lives, treating them as pawns in chess, to see how their strategies turn out — despite the also uniform failure of socialism across the planet.
Chua is worried about “variants of intolerant tribal populism … erupting across Europe, eroding support for supranational entities such as the European Union,” specifically citing Brexit as an example of a “populist backlash against elites.”
One person who certainly qualifies as part of those “elites” is multibillionaire George Soros. Robin Varheses, the associate director of engagement at the Economic Advancement Program of Soros’s Open Society Foundations, wrote still another article, offering a solution to all of these supposed problems facing the existing world order, entitled “Marxist World.” In her essay, she praises the author of the Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx — for his “remarkable insights” about the problems of capitalism.
Joshua Busby, an associate professor at the University of Texas, argues in his “Warming World” essay that climate change “matters more than anything else.” Naturally, Busby asserts that climate change’s “world-historical threats call for world-historical levels of cooperation.” While he commends the cooperative spirit of various governments to address the issue of “global warming,” the “process will have to go much further.”
Finally, a sociology professor at the University of California, San Diego, Lane Kenworthy, penned an essay, “How the Safety Net Can Survive Trump.” For Kenworthy, money — your money — appears to be the solution to surviving Trump, arguing “governments can tax and spend up to 55 percent of their GDPs before holding back economic growth.” That, he notes, “is around 20 percentage points higher than the share of GDP the United States spends today.”
Kenworthy dismisses concerns that a huge Welfare State threatens the freedoms of their citizens. “Social democratic states are at least as good as countries with smaller governments at safeguarding their citizens’ freedoms.” As evidence, Kenworthy cites a Cato Institute study that showed the socialist nations of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden scoring higher in protecting their citizens’ freedoms than the U.S. government. This probably says more about the values of the supposedly libertarian Cato Institute than it does anything else, but it also is probably a reflection of the fact that the Scandinavian countries are beginning to dismantle parts of their socialist paradises because they haven’t worked well and are very costly.
One problem in getting even higher taxes for an even larger Welfare State, in Kenworthy’s mind at least, is that “U.S. electoral rules do a poor job of translating votes into representation,” and proceeds to blame the way each state has equal representation in the Senate — a system, of course, created by the Founding Fathers as a way of preserving federalism.
Other “solutions” offered by Kenworthy included government-paid healthcare, a higher minimum wage, and parental leave, but he does leave us with “choices,” after a manner of speaking — “Should public preschool begin at age four or earlier?” and “Should the United States move to universal health insurance coverage by expanding Medicare, Medicaid, or both?”
These alternatives remind one of the “choices” offered in local political contests in the old Soviet Union where voters got to choose between two or maybe even three Communist Party members. Perhaps this is what Foreign Affairs has in mind, when it insists it offers a “wide difference of opinions” — you can choose government-run health care through Medicare or you can have it through Medicaid. They even offer a third option — “through both.”
Perhaps in the next issue, Foreign Affairs will offer essays by Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and even Donald Trump, and perhaps an article on why immigration is a problem, or perhaps why we need to eliminate the Federal Reserve banking monopoly.
But we doubt it.
Photo: Clipart.com
