Politics Is Everything To Them…

     …therefore, everything must be politicized:

     Washington Post opinion editor David Shipley resigned Tuesday after the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced that, going forward, on the opinion pages, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
     […]
     Of Shipley, Bezos said, “I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’”
     “After careful consideration, David decided to step away.”

     Bezos’s great challenge at the Post, as at most legacy media enterprises, is that journalism, including editorial journalism, is more than 90% staffed with left-liberals. They cannot write convincingly about things that are antithetical to their convictions or opposed to their agenda. But the communications trades are all overwhelmingly populated by left-liberals, because that kind of work is exactly what left-liberals seek to do. Antonio Gramsci told them to seek it out.

     There are three pillars beneath any free society:

• Education;
• Communications;
• An Armed Citizenry.

     Without sound education, the upcoming generations will not understand nor appreciate freedom. Without trustworthy communications, citizens will be inadequately aware of what the State is doing and why. Without an armed citizenry, the State can expand tyrannically without fear of opposition. Nothing could be simpler. But note how the boosters of the Omnipotent State have striven deprive Americans of all three of those things.

     I doubt I need rant about the terrible state of education in these United States. The right to keep and bear arms has been under sustained assaults that are only just now being pushed back. As for communications, what do you suppose it is about the phrase mainstream media that makes your neck hair stand up straight?

     The Left’s “long march through the institutions” is most clearly seen – and its vileness is most deeply felt and hated – in these three areas. They’ve been turned into Leftist bastions, to be defended to the death. From those bastions they make sallies in furtherance of their larger campaign to politicize everything.

     Just so there’s no confusion about it, let me be scrupulously, minutely clear: To politicize a subject is to remove it from the private sphere. Once a particular question – any area of human endeavor or concern – has been politicized, decisions about it are to be made by political agencies or processes. They are no longer yours to make.

     A society in which all decisions are political is a totalitarian society, regardless of anyone’s notions about “democracy.”

     A few more words to “connect the dots,” and I’ll leave this subject to fester.

     The Left never describes its aims as totalitarian. No, no! They paint them as “democratic.” They simply want “everyone to have a voice.” A voice in what, you ask? Why, a voice in anything and everything that affects them!

     But what can any individual do that has absolutely no effects on those at its periphery? If I add a wing to my house, it affects how my property will look to my neighbors. It might also affect neighborhood property values. Shouldn’t those folks have a “voice” in my decision? Perhaps to stop me, if a majority of them deem it against their interests?

     The ripples aren’t easily confined. Changes to one neighborhood will affect the neighborhoods around it. Chaos theory tells us that there’s no upper bound on how large those effects will be. Pretty soon we’re talking about debating my new wing in the Houses of Congress. And who’s to say that the United Nations won’t get involved?

     Economists strive to separate out the externalities generated by particular decisions and actions, and to measure their effects on persons and communities other than those that made the decisions. It’s a major component of “Public Choice” analysis and what follows from it.

     The Left will argue that every action has immeasurable externalities. Therefore every decision can, should, and must be a political decision. Remember their mantra: the personal is political. They mean it – and they use their dominance of the communications media to push popular sentiment in that direction at all times.

     Jeff Bezos has demonstrated great acumen in business. But whether that acumen will permit him to reshape the editorial policy of the Washington Post, one of the foremost members of the Left’s communications brigade, is open to question. Stay tuned!