Progressives Have a Serious Problem with the Truth

American progressives’ lies have systematically misrepresented what is transpiring in the United States for a very long time. What they shrilly claim is so different from actual reality, they must be living in a parallel universe.

I am not referring to the foundational lies progressives tell to themselves as well as to everyone else. Those are falsehoods of interpretation that skew their views of Reality. Those fabrications are examined in the following posts:

• Lies Progressives Tell (Especially To Themselves!)
• More Lies Progressives Tell To Themselves
• Even More Lies Progressives Tell To Themselves!

Instead, I want to look at their lies about some very basic facts. As is often asserted, anyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts!

Falsehoods about the General Nature of Republicans and Trump

Some of the most egregious progressive lies concern the personal attributes of their ideological opponents. In fact, a few of the accusations appear more applicable to the accusors than to anyone on the American Right. Here are a few of the most often seen and heard. As you will see these particular lies are intimately related to other accusations about the nature of the U.S. and about current events.

1. Republicans and Trump are Fascists.

For me, this is one of the most puzzling accusations charged to Trump and the Republican Party. It displays a complete misunderstanding of the word “fascism”. Just like communism, fascism is a form of socialism.

Long ago, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek personally observed the collapse of the Weimar Republic into Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Comparing the fascism of Adolf Hitler with Stalin’s communism, Hayek noted there was not a dime’s worth of difference between the two. They both had total control over their respective economies. Thereby, they also had total control over the lives of all their citizens.

From this observation, Hayek concluded the most useful definition of socialism was not as government ownership of the means of production. Instead, what was most important was who controlled the means of production. The polar extreme of socialism was the total government control of the means of production. Both fascist Germany and the communist Soviet Union very closely approached this Socialist platonic ideal.

So, when progressive Democrats accuse Donald Trump of being a fascist, they are asserting he wants to gain tyrannical control over the U.S. economy. Yet, by this measure, Trump and the Republicans are very peculiar fascists indeed. If anything, Trump’s administration is deconstructing many administrative controls over the U.S. economy. It is the Democrats who want to accumulate more state control over the economy. We must conclude Democrats are projecting their own characteristics onto Republicans. This fact is so obviously true, Democrats can not possibly believe their own lies.

2. Republicans and Trump are Racists.

This accusation appears to have at least a glimmer of justification from almost ancient history. We fought a civil war to end black slavery from 1860 to 1865. Then, from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Jim Crow laws — supported primarily by Southern Democrats — ensured blacks would remain subservient to whites.

As progressive Democrats started to outnumber Southern “yellow dog” Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s, the Democratic Party began to champion civil rights for all. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the removal of Jim Crow laws, black Americans massively shifted their allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democrats.

Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s did not help their reputation in all this by wooing disaffected southern racist Democrats — the so-called “Southern Strategy.” Some Republicans did this to cynically gain political power in the Southern states.

Nevertheless, as the U.S. has evolved after the Civil Rights Act, racism has had a diminishing presence in American society, among Republicans as well as Democrats. This assertion is supported by the graphs below, produced by the University of Illinois.

However, if Trump and the Republicans continued to be racists, would:

• The Republicans have so many elected black officials among them?
• Blacks and Hispanics have the lowest unemployment rates in recorded history due to Republican policies?
• Trump have opened special opportunity zones for blacks?
• Republicans have restored financial support for historically black colleges and universities?

These facts would seem to be incompatible with a racist Trump and a racist Republican Party.

3. Trump is a Mercantilist, Destroying the Liberal International Order.

I must admit that I at one time shared this opinion about Donald Trump. Many point to Trump’s proclivity to slap tariffs on countries that always charge high tariffs on U.S. goods as evidence that he is a mercantilist. Yet, the major justification for international free-trade, Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage, only works effectively if both trading nations are free-markets. In free-markets, capital is allocated predominantly by individuals and private companies, not by governments.

In fact, the law of comparative advantage points to how countries can maximize their wealth production if those countries use comparative advantage to choose what to produce and sell on the international markets. Unfortunately, nothing forces countries to use comparative advantages to make such decisions. As we have learned to our cost with China, countries will often use other criteria to make their trade decisions. In the case of China, it is geopolitical power and their own domestic social peace for which they lust more than economic prosperity.

As we have discovered, Trump uses tariffs as a blunt instrument to encourage countries with high tariffs on U.S. goods to move away from their own mercantilist policies. If they will not do that, we would do best to insulate our economy from theirs.

4. Trump is Responsible for the Spread of COVID-19 in the U.S.

This claim is an absolute lie. Trump became serious in fighting COVID-19 long before his Democratic adversaries did. As soon as it became clear the virus originated in China, Trump shut down all travel from China to the U.S. on January 31, 2020. Within hours, major Democrats and their allied media were saying the shutdown displayed Trump’s xenophobia and was unnecessary. Joe Biden immediately declared

We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.

Joe Biden on Twitter, February 1, 2020

Other Democrats and their media allies soon followed Biden in lockstep. Later, usually weeks later, they were forced to admit, usually without explicitly mentioning Trump, that Trump had been right. If they were serious in condemning Trump for the travel ban, they would have sent many additional thousands of Americans, perhaps hundreds of thousands, to their deaths.

In addition, China lulled the rest of the world about the coronavirus, minimizing its threat. Initially, they claimed it could not be spread from person to person. Backing up these claims, the World Health Organization further desensitized the world’s governments to the danger. Having lulled the world, China was able to export its epidemic before everyone else caught on. This ensured China would limit any competitive disadvantage they acquired due to COVID-19. Exporting the disease to the rest of the world made certain everyone else suffered the same handicap as China. As evidenced by the American progressive uproar over the travel bans from China and later from Europe, progressives would have made much more serious mistakes in handling the pandemic than Trump did.

From these facts, it should be obvious to everyone Trump was not primarily responsible for the spread of COVID-19. China was. Trump’s administration might have made some missteps, but given how little we knew about the virus initially, who did not? His prioritization of ventilator and virus test production, his immediate supply of military field hospitals and Navy hospital ships for local use, and his unprecedented “warp speed” program to rapidly produce a vaccine show he is doing all he can do to get us through the pandemic.

Another obvious fact is the Democrats would have done far worse. If you do not believe this, just look at what happened in New York State and California. And consider what would have happened if Trump had followed Biden’s advice to continue allowing travel from China to the U.S.

Falsehoods about the Nature of the United States

The lies progressives tell about President Trump and the Republicans are mirrored in the lies they tell about the United States. There is almost a one-to-one correspondence between the faults they attribute to Trump and those they associate with the United States. And just as they vociferously hate Trump, they strongly tend to hate the United States.

1. The U.S. is a Racist Country

Just as progressives accuse Trump of being a racist, they view the U.S. as being fundamentally, root and branch, a racist nation. I have written about this at length before (see here and here), so I shall not repeat the counterarguments here. While the existence of racism in past U.S. history is undeniable, and while it continues to exist to some degree, the historical evidence shows it is a diminishing force in the United States. Democrats who insist the United States is systemically a racist country are liars.

2. U.S. Capitalism is Predatory on the Public. The Economy is Rigged to Transfer Wealth to the Most Wealthy

While the American Left insists the U.S. is systemically racist, their underlying target is American capitalism. Black Lives Matter (BLM) advertises itself to be a civil rights organization, but it is basically Marxist. Recently, BLM scrubbed its statement of purposes on their website to be more anodyne. Before the scrubbing, however, one could read the following declarations.

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

This sentiment is a classic Marxist position. BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors stated in 2015 that “We actually do have an ideological frame[work]. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.” Our current social unrest and riots have been inflamed by leftists like BLM and Antifa with the primary goal of remaking the U.S. in the Marxist image.

American progressives in general have been reflexively hostile to the country’s capitalist institutions. Ever since the progressive movement began in the late 19th century, they have considered corporations to be evil tools used by the rich. They have viewed corporations as conduits of wealth, produced by the labor of common people, to the evil rich. The roles companies have in producing wealth, providing wages, and efficiently allocating capital to meet human needs are largely ignored.

In fact, this judgment on capitalism appears to be merely a modern elaboration of the Iron Law of Wages associated with David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. In the early 19th century they propounded the idea the rich would get richer and the poor poorer. They believed companies would not be motivated to pay wages any greater than required to keep their workers alive. In recent years, this idea was reworked by the French socialist economist Thomas Piketty.

Yet, history has shown this idea to be fatally flawed. Its major defect is that skilled labor (and often not-so-skilled labor) is itself a scarce economic good for which companies must compete. As with any scarce economic good, companies must often bid wages up to attract labor away from their competitors.

However, this condition is true only for so long as companies actually need the labor. If economic growth is stunted by governments’ interference with their economies, real wages may actually fall in time. This gives credence for the Iron Law. This has been the case for most of the time since the late 1970s. This is the reason for the popularity among American progressives of Thomas Piketty’s resurrection of the Iron Law of Wages.

By cutting taxes and deconstructing parts of the regulatory state, the Trump administration has begun to reverse this situation. Trump’s policies are again giving the lie to the Iron Law. You can see the evidence for this claim in plots of wage growth for various income groups. Below is a plot of wage growth for the four quartiles of wage earners produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The first quartile is the bottom quarter of wage earners and the fourth quartile is the top quarter.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic began to shut down the economy in February 2020, the twelve-month moving average of the wage growth for the first quartile was 4.7%, 3.7% for the second quartile, 3.5% for the third quartile, and 3.1% for the fourth quartile. Clearly, the lowest wage earners received the largest wage growths. The economic shutdowns caused by the pandemic have not done much to change this picture, although they have greatly increased the unemployment rate and decreased the production of wealth. Nevertheless, as government interference decreases with the reopening of the economy, unemployment rates and GDP growth rates are showing a V-shaped recovery.

It will take time to dig out from the low-growth environment we have gone through, but statistical evidence from before the pandemic shows free-market policies will put us on the right course.

3. The American Right Is Fundamentally Xenophobic

Finally, there is the progressive claim that any attempt to control illegal immigration at our borders shows the xenophobia of the American Right. In fact, progressives assert any desire to limit immigration demonstrates yet once again America’s endemic racism.

Yet, the economic and social strains on the country caused by unconstrained immigration are a prime cause of the populist revolts seen both here in the United States and in Europe. There are two parts to the problem of unlimited illegal immigration. The first is one of immigrants’ assimilation into the nation’s culture. Operating under the influence of ideas from multiculturalism, dirigiste elites in both the U.S. and Europe have not insisted immigrants assimilate into the host culture. Often, there is not even a requirement to learn the national language. Other ills created include separatist communities, so-called “no-go” zones (mostly in Europe) where government officials such as police and firemen may not enter, foreign criminal gangs such as MS-13 and drug cartels.

The second problem created by illegal immigration is the additional economic stress on our country. Besides the increased demands for government services (schools, police services, welfare), poorly educated immigrants take low-level jobs from many poorly educated Americans, and many immigrants end up homeless.

It is not xenophobia that prompts desires to limit immigration. It is a concern for the welfare of the nation and for the well-being of our families. If new immigrants can help in the growth and well-being of the country, most Americans would be more than welcoming. If, however, they put additional large stresses on an already over-stressed social system, allowing them in would only destroy us. The United States does not have the resources to solve the social problems for the entire world.

Will There Be Consequences for All These Lies?

If a liar keeps on lying long enough, people will eventually cease to believe him or her. However, if a collection of liars forms a large fraction of the population and is supported by most of civil society’s elites, their lies might persist for a very, very long time. By now, even the dimmest bulbs should be able to see academic, media, and entertainment elites are supporting the world view of progressivism. In particular, most of the mass media have enlisted as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

If there were any justice in the world, Democrats would be annihilated in the 2020 elections for all their misstatements about basic facts. Twenty years ago, they would have been. However, as the American Left has seized the imaginations of increasing numbers of younger citizens, a very good chance exists that Biden and the Democrats will emerge victorious. Unless you get your information from a very small subsection of the news media (The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and The Washington Times come to mind), you are likely to be brainwashed by the Democratic Party’s propagandists. Heeding the progressive news media would convince you all the lies debunked above are the sterling truth.

Yet, what matters at the very end is what is objectively true. Should the Democrats win the coming election, that outcome would be the worst thing that could happen to them. Unfortunately, it would also be one of the worst things that could happen to the country. If they are allowed to replace the Republicans’ policies with their own, only social and economic catastrophe would follow. On top of that, the polarization of the American people would continue.

Progressive thinking about social reality is deeply flawed. Eventually, the disastrous results of Democrats’ policies would reduce them to asking of the public: “Who do you believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

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