SUPPLY SIDE IDEALISM | 2010-08-15
In Why None Dare Call It Treason I said I would talk about what happened to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who drew a major portion of their income from siding with the Soviets when the Soviet Empire fell.
This is a practical question, a question anyone who knows anything about real political science would wonder about. But since only Mommy Professors are in political science, they have no idea what makes real politics what they are.
A political science Mommy Professor sees these hundreds of thousands pf Cold Warriors as disappointed idealists. He does not see them as job-seekers.
Until Obama, it was hard to realize how many people's job resume consisted entirely of "social activist." I've SEEN them. In 1995, when the Democrats lost their majority in Congress and a third of the entire staff on the Hill went to the Republicans it was barely mentioned outside the Beltway.
Another wave of Idealists and Intellectuals hit the streets. Barely five years before, an even greater wave of pro-Soviet Idealists and Intellectuals hit the streets. As the USSR went down every single professional pro-Peace, pro-Soviet, whatever term you want to use, became an Environmentalist.
It is important to realize that intelligent Americans, no matter how anti-American, do have one trait in common: They MAKE their opportunities.
Watch out now, I may be tooting my own horn, but I come from the Belly of the Beast. If you want an easy life in DC, you go to Harvard and join the CIA or the civil service. Totally contrary to popular conception, Capitol Hill is not a place for time-servers.
One man who wrote a popular book called "Workaholics" points out to his New York audience that, contrary to their beliefs, New York was not America's workaholic center, Washington was. For a New Yorker to take second place in anything "tough" is like a World War II veteran admitting anyone else was in a REAL War.
But I could show up at Capitol Hill offices at 2 a.m. and the place was lit up like a Christmas tree. John Ashbrook caught me in my office at 2 a.m., took one look at me, and said, "Bob, you'll work better if you're ALIVE. Get out of here."
So I have to tell you that the activists on the other side were nothing like what you would think of as Washington bureaucrats. A senior staffer who lost his job at the age of fifty would go out and MAKE himself another one.
This would never occur to anyone as part of the growth of the Environmentalist Movement, the swelling of the militant Anti-Racist Movement.
I was right there, so as the USSR fell I dreaded what would come next from those people who had opposed me in the Cold War.
No political science professor is ever going to think of the tens of thousands of people in the political real world the collapse of a leftist cause brings. A new supply of activists, what he calls Idealists, causes a surge in other movements.
Call it Supply Side Idealism.