-By Warner Todd Huston
Professor Jedediah Purdy of Duke University Law School feels that you are not thinking right and therefore he wants you forced through “conflict” to accept his religion.
I assure you that this wouldn’t be his interpretation of the under girding of the essay he disgorged at Politico last week, but that is exactly what he is advocating nonetheless because his entire recipe for fixing our political culture is built on a religious-like belief in shadowy crises that he feels are besetting the country.
In fact, even as he pretended to be offering a “fix” for our political gridlock, he offered no proof whatsoever that the problems he thinks we face are based in fact. His entire piece was based on bald-faced assumption, all are forces taken as a given with not a single word to actually prove that his perceptions were real problems, the sort we should engage in “real” conflict to resolve.
Sadly, the essential lie-stiffened backbone upon which he hung the skeleton of his argument is what passes for “deep thought” at our fetid universities these days.
So, what did Purdy say? Well, he said that politicians spend too much time arguing about things that don’t matter (not necessarily an absurd comment, granted). But it is what he thinks is “important”–no what he assumes is important–is what made risible everything he wrote.
The piffling prof noted that our history is filled with real political conflict. The blood feud over slavery, battles over FDR’s ultimately disastrous New Deal policies, the fights that ultimately led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow were all more virulent than the conflicts we are having today, he said.
And it is conflict like that Purdy thinks we need. Purdy essentially said that what we don’t need right now is comity in politics. We need “real conflict, not its facsimile,” he bellowed.
But why do we need that? The reasons he thinks we need conflict are telling.
Because the United States got two big doses of reality in the last six months. One was the explosive arrival of Thomas Piketty’s finding that inequality is vast and that we are headed toward a second Gilded Age, if we aren’t there already.
… The other was the new set of U.N. reports on climate change, which confirmed, yet again, that the problem is real and accelerating.
This is where we realize that Purdy is a man who believes with religious-like fervor that we need “conflict” to silence the heretics he sees in our society. He bases his self-assuredness on these two “reports” that have been proven to be spurious and these are the lies that under gird his entire essay.
In the first case, Thomas Piketty’s new socialist economics book has made him the doyen of communist-yearning professors like Purdy, sure, but his book has been shown to be filled with flaws and false data.
Still, it is true that Piketty’s claim that income inequality is destroying the world’s economies and that the only solution is big government confiscation of wealth is dearly loved by our freedom hating professoriate. We see that born out in Purdy’s assumption that truth is contained in its pages and that we need “conflict” to force everyone to heed Piketty’s big government “solutions.”
Purdy’s other false premise climate change. Worse, it’s the UN’s climate change nonsense.
Note that in his view, both of Purdy’s “problems” can only be fixed by destroying “the rich” and taking away all our individual freedoms. The only solution is autocratic government eliminating liberty and forcing us to accept Purdy’s religious views. The only end of the “conflict” he envisions will be a public blindly accepting his so-called solutions.
Now, Purdy claims he is not calling for the logical end of his policies: bloodshed. He seems naïve enough–or maybe just stupid enough–to assume that his top-down control could possibly be achieved through a bloodless coup.
In fact, with many of the past political conflicts in American history he cites, bloodshed came along with them. Neither slavery nor Jim Crow went down with bloodless solutions.
So, Purdy’s claim that he wants “real conflict, not its facsimile” but wants this conflict to be short of bloodshed is either naive or simply a lie.
Of course, it s far more likely that, like all other leftists of his ilk, he would be quite happy with the deaths of all you infidels out there who won’t toe his line.
But in the end he is a liar even if his solution and underlying problems were 100 correct because he thinks we need “conflict” to address them. I say he is a liar because he doesn’t really want political conflict. He wants political conformity to his religious positions.
After all, if “conflict” led to his socialist ideals winning the argument he would then want an end to that conflict. This shows that “conflict” in and of itself isn’t really his goal. He only wants to use “conflict” as a means to his socialist ends. And in that way he is no different than humanity’s greatest dictators who used conflict as the means to gain total control.
But, one thing might be said with a rueful grimace. If Purdy got the “conflict” he really wants, he just might find that, as happened in past dictatorships, he and his fellow professors will be some of the first to find themselves standing at the edge of open graves in front of jackbooted troops in a field somewhere.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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