Past Columns
The columns in this section are from the past eight years (2012-2020)
Featured Past Column:
Elizabeth Warren, Dolores Umbridge and Their Plans for That
August 2019
She has a plan for that. Boy does she. One of the facets of presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is a voluminous outpouring of plans to remake the fundamental structure of the United States. If she were an honest person, and her past would indicate that virtue may not be part of her character, she would admit that what she really means is that she has a plan for YOU. “That” is one of those terms that sounds really good when considering the upside. She has a plan for healthcare, taxation, infrastructure and immigration. But her plans for YOU include taking away your private insurance, increasing your taxes, telling you how to run your business and taking money from you to support immigration health care from day one.
Many conservative pundits would argue that Warren’s belief system was inherited from the progressive build out occurring in the first part of the 20th century. These progressives believed that man was clay in their expert hands and if only they had the power, and a plan, they could remake society into a better place. That limited government, individual choice, and natural rights were impediments to these dreams of utopia meant that super government, removal of individual choice and the dismissal of natural rights theory were all necessary. In Warren’s plans one sees all of these things. We could cite real world examples of where these actual systems were implemented and the results thereof. Chavez’s Valenzuela, Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia all went down this road with disastrous results. Mao’s great leap forward plan meant the deaths of tens of millions. Hugo Chavez’s plans for his country meant that in 2019, residents cannot find enough toilet paper in what was once the richest nation south of the United States. Warren’s progressivism also has roots even deeper than Woodrow Wilson in a Hobbesian belief about the power of the central state. And Hobbes himself would have looked further to a time when figures such as Charlemagne, Augustus, or Shi Huang Do transformed their realms. These people got things done. They had plans.
History is not the only indicator of impending disaster if we elect the planful Warren. We can go to literature as well. Though JK Rowling may not admit this, the Harry Potter tales have an underlying conservativism to them for anyone who looks. The dictatorial tendencies of the ministry of magic, the agency of individuals in the eventual overthrow of Voldemort are but two examples. But one of the key examples is Dolores Umbridge, a pernicious bureaucrat working for the ministry of magic. Umbridge has many, many plans to remake not just the administration of the magical school, Hogwarts, but she wants to remake the kids as well. Remake them into better, more permissive, more obedient citizens. Keep in mind Senator Warren for this speech from Umbridge: “Let us move forward, then, into a new era of openness, effectiveness, and accountability, intent on preserving what ought to be preserved, perfecting what needs to be perfected, and pruning wherever we find practices that ought to be prohibited.” Umbridge has many plans. In the movie from the same book that introduces Umbridge, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Umbridge has the despised Filch nail her many edicts, or plans, on the wall at Hogwarts. One of these is what is termed “ministry approved curriculum.” No doubt Warren has a comprehensive plan for the remake of education that will not only be determined by the power of the federal government through a steroid induced department of education, but will be highly Progressive in ideology.
Upon not seeing enough progress in her transformation of Hogwarts, Umbridge uses the power of the Ministry to gain ever more powerful positions and later begins to run curriculums throughout the school. She later regulates the behavior of the students through educational degrees that numbered nearly 30. Many plans.
But it is not the plans, nor the attitudes that makes the fictional Umbridge or the real-life Warren so frightening. Rather it is their certitude. Whether Umbridge is brow beating colleagues, cowing students or hurling epithets she does not doubt. Throughout the series, the three teenage leads express doubt or uncertainly of their plans, and even of their motives. Their protector, the Churchillian Albus Dumbledore on several occasions expresses uncertainties about the next move or about events having taken place. The world was complex before the industrial revolution, before America was 330 million strong, before China, and Iran, and North Korea, before immigration and healthcare. Today it is beyond complexity but like Dolores Umbridge, Elizabeth Warren just knows the exact right thing to do transform ALL OF IT. She has a plans.