To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine Part 1

To Save America.

Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine.

Newt Gingrich.

To my wife Callista, whose support and love have made the adventure of our life together exciting, enjoyable, and fulfilling.

Introduction.

This is a book I never expected to write.

After the victory of freedom over Communist tyranny, of religious liberty over secular police states, and of American pride over the malaise and cynicism of the 1970s, I fully expected America to follow an upward curve of consistent improvement.

I did not expect the Left to ignore the lessons of history and move further into ideological extremism. I did not expect them to react to their meager popular support by seeking to impose a corrupt, Chicago-style political machine on the entire country.

After leaving Congress in 1999 with a balanced budget and a booming economy, I certainly did not foresee Republican failure so vast that it allowed left-wing radicals to take over the House, Senate, and Presidency.

America as we know it is now facing a mortal threat.

The Left have expanded their power through their control of academia, the elite news media, union leaders, trial lawyers, the bureaucracy, the courts, and lobbyists at the state and federal levels. They share a vision of a secular, socialist America run for the interests of the members of the political machine that keeps them in power. It will be an America where government dominates the people rather than represents them. In short, they want to use government power to change who we are and how we think.

This danger to America is greater than anything I dreamed possible after we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991. We stand at a crossroads: either we will save our country or we will lose it.

AN ALIEN IDEOLOGY.

The left-wing Democrats who currently control the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and many state capitols are committed to a secular-socialist ideology that is alien to America's history and traditions.

Traditional America values hard work, entrepreneurs.h.i.+p, innovation, and merit-based upward mobility. But the secular-socialist machine rewards its members, punishes "overachievers," kills jobs by over-taxing small businesses, and even exploits your death to tax the savings you hope to pa.s.s on to your children and grandchildren.

Traditional America was based on a profound belief that "we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights." But secular socialists are so opposed to G.o.d in public life that they can't tolerate school prayer or even allow a cross to stand in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Our government traditionally regarded the protection of American lives as its top priority. Our primary concern with captured terrorists (or pirates, the old equivalent of terrorists) was interrogating them and using that information to stop further attacks.

The secular socialists, however, want to give our enemies the same const.i.tutional protections we afford our own citizens, effectively placing the rights of terrorists ahead of the lives of Americans. With the Left in charge, when a foreign terrorist tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit, he was read his Miranda rights (which, as a foreign enemy combatant, he was not actually ent.i.tled to have). Taxpayers were forced to pay for the terrorist's lawyer, who most likely advised his client not to answer questions except as leverage to get a plea bargain.

Americans traditionally believed in American exceptionalism-that America has a special mission to protect and spread freedom. For many in the secular-socialist Left, however, the only thing exceptional about America is our supposed viciousness. They believe America is an exploitive, imperialist aggressor, and that the U.S. military is a nefarious tool of corporate interests. Some on the Left even hope for America's wartime defeat as a means to stop us from promoting American values across the world.

Historically, America was a low-tax, high-job-growth, small-business-oriented society in which families, charities, local governments, and the private sector were much more important to daily life than was the federal government. But the secular socialists believe the only reliable inst.i.tution is a bureaucratic, centralized, supremely powerful government. Their answer to virtually every problem is higher taxes, more spending, and bigger bureaucracies, because they don't believe Americans can be trusted to make the "right" decisions.

Americans traditionally believed that elected officials served the people and were obligated to listen to them. "No taxation without representation" was really a battle cry insisting that free people have the right to temporarily loan power to elected officials. In contrast, because the secular-socialist Left cannot win by proclaiming their real goals, they resort to dishonesty to ram through their agenda. They represent the worst aspects of a Chicago-style political machine combined with the greatest political corruption ever seen in modern America.

Given this enormous gulf between historic America and the secular socialists, it's clear that if the Left stay in power, they will transform America into a radically different nation-a union-dominated, bureaucratically controlled, high-tax, low-growth country. Powerful politicians will impose their will on an exhausted, submissive citizenry, who will look to government bureaucrats for guidance and permission to succeed in life. Naturally, there will be no place for G.o.d in this new, purely secular society.

As my daughter, the columnist Jackie Cushman, wrote, "We were told to vote for change we could believe in and found we had elected people who wanted to change what we believe."

The America in which we grew up is vastly different from the America the secular-socialist Left want to create. And that's why saving America is the fundamental challenge of our time. The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as n.a.z.i Germany or the Soviet Union once did.

This diagnosis may strike some readers as alarmist. But this book will show just how radical, how corrupt, and how ruthless the Left have become. You will also see why the term "secular-socialist machine" is the only honest way to describe the Left's ideology and the way they operate today.

Time has not run out, but it is running short. It's up to those of us who love our country to save America from the destructive, irreversible transformation that the Left have in store for us.

CHAPTER ONE.

Who We Are.

For the first time since the Civil War, we as Americans have to ask the most fundamental question possible: "Who are we?" In 1861 that question related to whether the American Experiment was to be dissolved, whether one-half of our country was to perpetuate the inst.i.tution of slavery, or whether we, as a united country, were going to abolish it.

Today, we face a challenge equally grave: whether the United States as we know it will cease to exist. I'm not talking-not yet-about the threat of terrorism, or of the growing power of China, or about any other external threat. I'm talking about losing what defines us as Americans.

Most of us know who we are. We know that America is an exceptional country with a unique genius for combining freedom and order, strength and compa.s.sion, religious faith and religious tolerance. But today we have given power in Was.h.i.+ngton and in state capitols nationwide to a radical left-wing elite that does not believe in American exceptionalism. Barack Obama has told us so. When he was asked by a Financial Times reporter whether he believed in American exceptionalism, he replied, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

In other words, everything we cherish about America, our president thinks is not so very special, not so very different from any other country. That's why he and his supporters feel free to change our country as they see fit, to use all the levers of federal power to annex our healthcare system to the federal government, to act as if the bureaucracy-not the private sector-is the great job creator, to make America a more socialist, more secular society.

To put it plainly, America is facing an existential threat-and it comes from a movement that fundamentally rejects the traditional American conception of who we are. No longer, in the Left's view, are we the Americans of the frontier, the st.u.r.dy, independent farmers; no longer are we America the capitalist colossus serving as the a.r.s.enal of democracy; no longer are we the America that believes our liberty is an unalienable right that comes from G.o.d. All this, the secular socialist wants to deny-and is denying-in favor of a secular, bureaucratic society guided by government elites.

Overall, the fundamental definition of what it means to be American is being undermined and distorted by the values, att.i.tudes, and actions of the secular-socialist machine.

This brings us back to the essential question: who are we? By this, I mean what are America's basic values and traditions, and what ideals have successfully guided us in the past? By contrasting these historic American att.i.tudes with the alien, destructive values the Left are now imposing on us, we can develop solid principles that should guide our efforts to rescue our country from secular socialism.

The fundamental difference between historic American ideals and those of the secular-socialist Left can be seen in ten conflicting values:1. Work versus theft 2. Productivity versus union work rules and bureaucracy.

3. Elected representation versus bureaucrats and judges 4. Honesty versus corruption 5. Low taxes with limited government versus high taxes with big government.

6. Private property versus government controls.

7. Localism versus Was.h.i.+ngton control 8. American energy versus environmental extremism.

9. Conflict resolution versus litigation.

10. Religious belief versus secular oppression.

Any one of these conflicts represents clas.h.i.+ng values on the most basic level. Taken collectively, they indicate two irreconcilable worldviews that, in the long run, cannot coexist in the American system. Eventually one of these value systems will defeat and replace the other-and that time will come sooner rather than later. If we lose this struggle, the America of our fathers and forefathers will be forever lost, giving way to a secular-socialist machine that will never relinquish power of its own accord.

1. Work Versus Theft.

The work ethic is so central to the American experience that it was already being emphasized over 400 years ago, in 1607, during the very first summer of English-speaking colonization in Jamestown, Virginia. When wealthy aristocrats told Captain John Smith they did not have to work, he replied with a dictate reminiscent of St. Paul's second epistle to the Thessalonians: "This is a new world and we can't afford to carry people who won't work. If you don't work you won't eat."

Thus, from its earliest days, America was based on a simple proposition: people should work hard, and in return they could keep the fruits of their labor.

There is a vivid contrast between a free, work-oriented society and the dependency-dishonesty model of Soviet Communism-and to some extent of the left-wing welfare state. Soviet workers had a motto: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." Americans had a remarkably different slogan: "An honest day's work for an honest day's pay." America today is still filled with small businesses, self-employed people, professionals, and others who live by that principle every day.

Because we are self-reliant and operate in markets where people won't pay us if we cheat, Americans have created an environment where honesty pays. In contrast, the secular-socialist machine, with its commitment to a socialist vision of wealth redistribution, has undermined the very concept of "an honest day's work," especially through its union power. In fact, it spreads the opposite ethic: game the system to get as many benefits as you can while working as little as possible.

A typical example is the Long Island Railroad. According to a September 2008 New York Times investigation, nearly every career employee of the Long Island Railroad is approved for disability payments shortly after retiring.1 In one recent year, 97 percent of all new retirees applied for and received disability, part of a scam that has cost taxpayers at least $250 million since 2000.

Here's another example: at the heavily unionized Big 3 auto makers in Detroit-General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler-thousands of workers were paid not to work. They were part of a United Auto Workers "jobs bank" plan to keep them as dues paying members even if they did nothing productive. According to Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, the jobs bank program cost the Big 3 automakers more than $4 billion between 2005 and 2008.2 With these kind of union "deals," is it any wonder the auto companies got in such trouble?

The Post Office, which is suffering from a $7 billion deficit, has a similar program called "standby time" that pays a large group of employees more than a million dollars a week to do nothing.3 Union rules prevent the Post Office from laying off redundant workers.

Worse, New York City has "rubber rooms" to house teachers who are so incompetent they can't be allowed to teach children. Yet because of their union contract, it takes up to seven years to fire them, so in the meantime they are paid to sit in a room and do nothing. This act of theft-taking something for nothing-costs New York City schools about $65 million a year, which should be spent on educating children.4 Or consider today's typical mode of school attendance certification. Students are officially counted two or three times a year, and the results determine how much the school gets paid for the rest of the year. On these counting days, some schools hold "pizza days" or adopt other gimmicks to encourage maximum attendance. After that, attendance can be dramatically lower because it does not affect the school's payments.

Clearly, we need reforms to restore the traditional work ethic. And it can be done. Just imagine a reform movement that insists:1. You should only get disability if you really deserve it.

2. You should only get paid if you actually work.

3. Teachers who can't be allowed near students should be removed from the payroll.

4. Every teacher should report actual attendance electronically every hour (a method McDonald's uses to report every sale in its 37,000 stores worldwide), and schools will only get paid for students who actually attend cla.s.s.

Think what would happen if these kinds of reforms spread throughout the entire economy-once again, we would live by "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay."

One thing's for sure: these reforms would provoke bitter resistance from those members of the machine who profit from the status quo. Their source of income might be called cheating or extortion (like New York's rubber-room teachers); it might even be considered theft in some cases (such as lying to get disability or workmen's comp). But they consider it "their" money, and they think they're ent.i.tled to it.

The people who live off your taxes without doing an honest day's work understand exactly what they're doing. They are beating the system. And if you advocate reforms that threaten their lifestyle, they'll try to beat you, too.

2. Productivity Versus Union Work Rules and Bureaucracy.

From the j.a.panese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to victory over j.a.pan in August 1945, America won World War II in three years and eight months. That's the traditional, can-do America.

In contrast, it recently took twenty-three years to add a fifth run-way to the Atlanta airport. More strikingly, we still have not rebuilt the World Trade Center more than eight years after it was destroyed. That's bureaucratic America.

The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, understood the danger of paralysis posed by a unionized, bureaucratic government. In 1937, he explained how government employee unions must be held to a different standard than private ones: All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. . . . The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.5 Unfortunately, FDR's Democratic descendants have ignored his wise counsel. Today, can-do America is being steadily eroded by its bureaucratic counterpart. America is now so tied up in regulations, litigation, and bureaucratic rules that key sectors of our economy-especially energy exploration-are becoming stagnant.

Consider New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who continually laments America's inability to match China's speed in developing large-scale projects. Yet, he cannot understand that the U.S. government bureaucracies he admires and the liberal policies he supports are the very heart of the problem.

For example, President Obama needed emergency stimulus money so fast that no one in Congress had time to read the $787 billion stimulus bill. Then that legislation met the federal bureaucracy. Consider the example of "fast track" green energy projects which, despite their name, still have to go through a multi-layered environmental impact and public review process. According to the website of the Bureau of Land Management (which handles green energy projects for the Department of the Interior), these projects could "potentially" be cleared for approval to receive stimulus funds by December 2010, almost two years after the stimulus was pa.s.sed.

Still, Friedman is correct that China is developing quickly. When my wife Callista and I were in China in August 2009, it was clear the Chinese were heavily investing in building the world's largest and most efficient high-speed train system. They are determined to connect all their major cities with 215-mile-per-hour trains.6 That project will allow the Chinese to save energy, improve the environment, and dominate the world's high-speed train market with the most advanced manufacturing in the world. They have an investment strategy rather than a stimulus strategy. They focus on getting the job done, rather than on following bureaucratic red tape.

We could apply the same technology in the Boston-Was.h.i.+ngton corridor or along the Florida and California coastlines, but the combination of union work rules, land use studies, bureaucratic red tape, and the likelihood of litigation bottles everything up, keeping Americans trapped in obsolete, slower trains-even Amtrak's high-tech Acela is outdated by the new Chinese standards.

Similarly, the United States has enormous amounts of energy reserves.a However, American energy is trapped by litigation, regulation, and hostile bureaucracies. Even when a decision is made to open up federal land for natural gas exploration, bureaucrats slow down the permitting process. Then, when the permits are finally issued, left-wing environmental groups file lawsuits. The Left's goal is to exhaust the time and money of potential energy producers so they will develop foreign resources instead of American ones. The result is a government-created energy scarcity that increases prices, drives jobs abroad, and hurts our balance of payments.

Again and again the process of studying, organizing, preparing, and then regulating and litigating adds months, years, and even decades to critical American initiatives.

Yet, the secular-socialist machine will resist any effort to bring back America's traditional can-do att.i.tude, which would reduce the machine's power. The Left have spent decades building a trap of bureaucracy, union work rules, and litigation to erode the independent, compet.i.tive, and productive instincts of the American people. And they will not relinquish their system without a fight.

3. Elected Representation Versus Bureaucrats and Judges.

Elected representation is the heart of the American political system.

Since our Declaration of Independence in 1776 proclaimed that "we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights-among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," we Americans have believed we have been entrusted by G.o.d with rights that no politician, bureaucrat, or judge can revoke.

This concept of freedom came to Americans during our long, bitter dispute with the British Empire, its London bureaucracy, and its imperial and dictatorial judges. Our forefathers believed ultimate power should always reside in the people, who would loan power to elected officials and who could reclaim it from them if necessary.

The government was viewed as a servant of the people, not the other way around. New Hamps.h.i.+re's state motto, "Live free or die," was typical of the intensity with which Americans guarded their natural-born rights.

Characteristically, one of the first acts of the first Congress was to pa.s.s a Bill of Rights that strictly limited the power of government. The First Amendment protects the right to free speech and also prevents the government from trying to control religion.

The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms-something that is not understood by many politicians today who confuse it with the right to hunt ducks, as President Clinton once did. The Founding Fathers knew better. The British were stopped at Lexington and Concord by a well-trained and well-armed local militia. The American right to bear arms turned out to be the key to retaining all other rights in the face of tyranny.

Secular socialists believe it's the government's right, and even its duty, to change the people-to make them more progressive, more secular, and more "tolerant." Thomas Jefferson believed so deeply in the opposite proposition-that it's the people's right to change their government-that he declared every generation might need its own revolution. He was speaking about a peaceful, democratic revolution, and he proved his seriousness in 1800 when a political party he helped to create, the Democratic-Republican Party, swept away the establishment and took control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

For the first 100 years of American self-government, elected officials dominated relatively small, politically appointed bureaucracies. The Jeffersonians completely reshaped government after their 1800 victory, abolis.h.i.+ng over half of all sitting federal judges-eighteen of thirty-five. A generation later, Andrew Jackson's election in 1828 led to a "spoils system" in which the winning candidate could dramatically reshape the bureaucracy by packing it with his supporters. And at the beginning of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln regarded one of his most important tasks to be appointing people to federal jobs. He believed the bureaucracy had to be changed to heed the will of the people as expressed through their choice of elected officials.

One occasion when unelected officials tried to impose their views on the country was the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision. Extending slavery to the entire country, the decision was a major cause of Lincoln's reentry into politics, and it sparked the rise of a Republican Party that split the nation and led to our most devastating conflict-the Civil War.

After a century of subservience to elected representatives, the bureaucracy began acc.u.mulating power in the 1880s, when the rising professional cla.s.s produced a civil service movement that aimed to modernize government. The Progressives, as they were called, believed well-educated professional bureaucrats were more capable than elected officials of rendering "correct" judgments. This view, derived from the sn.o.bbish elitism of the professional cla.s.ses, gradually came to dominate our bureaucracies, courts, and our universities, leading to a much bigger, more dominating federal bureaucracy.

Today, we have moved from a world of decisive elected officials to a world of elected officials being limited and trapped by red tape, litigation, bureaucrats, and lawyers. And the American people know it. A recent Rasmussen poll revealed only 21 percent of Americans believe the U.S. government has the consent of the governed.7 Much of the current anger at the political establishment resembles the righteous rage Andrew Jackson and his allies felt while fighting to clean up what they perceived to be an oligarchy trying to impose a corrupt, Was.h.i.+ngton-centered, elitist system on the American people.

"I weep for the liberty of my country," said Jackson, "when I see at this early day of its successful experiment that corruption has been imputed to many members of the House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office."

Today, the tea party movement, the explosion of insurgent primary challengers, the general anger at Was.h.i.+ngton, Sacramento, Albany, and all the other centers of unionized bureaucratic power-all these elements are coming together to force a fundamental choice in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian tradition: will the American people continue to select representatives to whom we loan power? Or will America become a European-style country in which the permanent bureaucrats and permanent judges decide virtually everything, while the politicians merely play partisan games to entertain the public and satisfy their own ambitions?

The people's fight to take back power from the bureaucracy is a fight all the Founders would support. With Bill Forstchen and Steve Hanser, I recently completed two novels on George Was.h.i.+ngton and the American Revolution. When you immerse yourself in the stories of people who fought to create this country, you realize how pa.s.sionately they believed in liberty. They really did risk everything-their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor-to give us a free country. And they fought for eight long years.