{"id":97,"date":"2015-05-19T10:15:06","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T10:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/conservativehistorian.com\/?page_id=97"},"modified":"2020-02-19T16:03:45","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T16:03:45","slug":"past-columns","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativehistorian.com\/columns\/past-columns\/","title":{"rendered":"Past Columns"},"content":{"rendered":"

The columns in this section are from the past eight years (2012-2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Featured Past Column:<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Warren, Dolores Umbridge and Their Plans for That<\/strong><\/p>\n

August 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

She has a plan for that.\u00a0 Boy does she.\u00a0 One of the facets of presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren\u2019s campaign is a voluminous outpouring of plans to remake the fundamental structure of the United States.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u201d is one of those terms that sounds really good when considering the upside.\u00a0 She has a plan for healthcare, taxation, infrastructure and immigration.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Many conservative pundits would argue that Warren\u2019s belief system was inherited from the progressive build out occurring in the first part of the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In Warren\u2019s plans one sees all of these things.\u00a0 We could cite real world examples of where these actual systems were implemented and the results thereof.\u00a0 Chavez\u2019s Valenzuela, Mao\u2019s China and Stalin\u2019s Russia all went down this road with disastrous results.\u00a0 Mao\u2019s great leap forward plan meant the deaths of tens of millions.\u00a0 Hugo Chavez\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Warren\u2019s progressivism also has roots even deeper than Woodrow Wilson in a Hobbesian belief about the power of the central state.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They had plans.<\/p>\n

History is not the only indicator of impending disaster if we elect the planful Warren. We can go to literature as well.\u00a0 Though JK Rowling may not admit this, the Harry Potter tales have an underlying conservativism to them for anyone who looks.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Remake them into better, more permissive, more obedient citizens.\u00a0 Keep in mind Senator Warren for this speech from Umbridge: \u201cLet 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.\u201d\u00a0 Umbridge has many plans.\u00a0 In the movie from the same book that introduces Umbridge,\u00a0Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix<\/em>, Umbridge has the despised Filch nail her many edicts, or plans, on the wall at Hogwarts.\u00a0 One of these is what is termed \u201cministry approved curriculum.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 She later regulates the behavior of the students through educational degrees that numbered nearly 30.\u00a0 Many plans.<\/p>\n

But it is not the plans, nor the attitudes that makes the fictional Umbridge or the real-life Warren so frightening.\u00a0 Rather it is their certitude.\u00a0 Whether Umbridge is brow beating colleagues, cowing students or hurling epithets she does not doubt.\u00a0 Throughout the series, the three teenage leads express doubt or uncertainly of their plans, and even of their motives.\u00a0 Their protector, the Churchillian Albus Dumbledore on several occasions expresses uncertainties about the next move or about events having taken place.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Today it is beyond complexity but like Dolores Umbridge, Elizabeth Warren just knows the exact right thing to do transform ALL OF IT.\u00a0 She has a plans.