I simply cannot understand the conservative approach to running the country. It seems on all of the major issues of the day that conservatives like to play pretend. They pretend that things are already super awesome and that we are number one in everything so we dont need to do anything except set taxes and regulation to zero and let the cash roll in. Anything else is an affront to our freedom. Also we're number one in freedom, except during the Obama presidency when were are simultaneously #1 and totally without freedom in a naziesque dictatorship. Using historical data ala Jonah Goldberg i will show that Conservatives are actually Communists.
A Sadly, No! post is a starting point for the idea that Conservatism is actually an extension of Communism.
I’m planning on writing a book called "Conservative Communism: The Collectivist Temptation from Mao Zedong to the Hoover Institute". Basically, the premise of the book is that even though people think that Communism is a phenomenon of the Left, it should be obvious to any serious scholar that Communists have more in common with today’s conservatives than they do today’s progressives. I mean, Lenin outlawed prostitution, and Focus on the Family wants to keep prostitution outlawed. Mao thought all businesses should be supported by the government, and modern conservatives think that the government should avoid taxing businesses and give them all kinds of grants and free money. You can see that they’re basically the same thing. Anyway, I’ve only just started working on this, but I can guarantee you that this argument has never been made in such detail or with such care.
All of those are excellent points and naturally generate interest in a reasonable reader. What it is ommited though is the single closest link between the USSR and todays conservative party "Lysenkoism".
As i mentioned in the intro Conservatives have a habit of pretending that everything is perfectly fine and that their policies are actually beneficial to the American people. This is exactly what the Communist believers in Lysenkoism believed. Conservatives are just like Communists. The story of Lysenko, his beliefs and their impact sound straight out of the conservative playbook.
Lysenko's political success was due in part to his striking differences from most biologists at the time. He was from a peasant family, and an enthusiastic advocate of the Soviet Union and Leninism. During a period which saw a series of man-made agricultural disasters, he was also extremely fast in responding to problems, although not with real solutions. Whenever the Party announced plans to plant a new crop or cultivate a new area, Lysenko had immediate practical suggestions on how to proceed.
So quickly did he develop his prescriptions - from the cold treatment of grain, to the plucking of leaves from cotton plants, to the cluster planting of trees, to unusual fertilizer mixes - that academic biologists did not have time to demonstrate that one technique was valueless or harmful before a new one was adopted. The Party-controlled newspapers inevitably applauded Lysenko's "practical" efforts and questioned the motives of his critics. Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics, who urged the patience and observation required for science.
You see? The everyman, say joe the plumber or sarah palin, is able to use practical commonsense to address every problem that arises. Screw science and understanding of complex problems. You know what else we dont need? real data. Common sense tells us that we can do anything and that the individual can solve all problems if they work hard enough.
Isaak Izrailevich Prezent, a main Lysenko theorist, presented Lysenko in Soviet mass-media as a genius who had developed a new, revolutionary agricultural technique. In this period, Soviet propaganda often focused on inspirational stories of peasants who, through their own canny ability and intelligence, came up with solutions to practical problems. Lysenko's widespread popularity provided him a platform to denounce theoretical genetics and to promote his own agricultural practices. He was, in turn, supported by the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes and omitted mention of his failures. Instead of making controlled experiments, Lysenko relied upon questionnaires taken of farmers to claim that vernalization increased wheat yields by 15%.
See he took polls and discovered his success! People believe that America has the best health care in the world so it does. Some people dont believe in global warming and so that doesnt exist either. Its all debatable and my poll is bigger than your poll. The rejection of science, biology, and evolution is a clear link between the conservatives and the communists. Conservatives reject your reality and substitute their own!
The results of Lysenko?
Thus, Lysenkoism caused serious, long-term harm to Soviet biology. It represented a serious failure of the early Soviet leadership to find real solutions to agricultural problems, allowing their system to be hijacked by a charlatan — at the expense of many human lives. Lysenkoism also spread to China, where it continued long after it was eventually denounced by the Soviets.
Pretending things are great when they arent is a recipe for long term disaster. We have a massive unemployment problem in this country. Instead of looking at a new round of stimulus, President Obama has leaks that we need to reduce the deficit. At a time when health care in this country is terrible we are failing to address it in the best way by affixing arbitrary price points like 900 billion to it. Our country has serious decisions to make about afghanistan and yet our media would rather have any decision than a right one. Our system of justice is looking to rebound after 8 years of destruction and the republicans freak out over an irrational fear that the terrorists will escape...or something. Add to this the utter failure to correct the financial system due to some pretending that because the dow is up the economy is fine.
Conservatives have descended into Lysenko territory. They have drifted so far from reality that their ideas, if put into practice, will be incredibly destructive. Hopefully our Democratic politicians can realize this and actually understand that they need to ignore the GOP and work in reality. We need health care reform, we need better infrastructure, HSR, we need a bill focused on jobs. We need reality and not a GOP continuation of Soviet Lysenkoism.