Liars (34 page)

The decisions made in these moments make the difference between survival and death.

Do we ignore the commotion because the idea of someone going on a shooting rampage in our workplace is too ridiculous to take seriously? Those are things that happen on the news. Things that happen to other people. The difference between what we expect to be normal and what is actually happening delays our reaction time.

There are the different reactions to the unknown that we all exhibit. The most common of these is fear. Fear can be paralyzing. It can be all-consuming. It can delay our reaction time. But fear—along with the flood of neurochemicals associated with it—is also what
drives us to make decisions. We can choose fight or flight. Or we can surrender altogether.

When progressives use fear, they expect us to surrender. They want to drive us right into the arms of those who promise to save us. They want us to surrender our rights to an omniscient and omnipotent big government that can save us from the unknown and the dangers that lurk at home and abroad.

But we can do something else entirely. Our surrender isn't foreordained. We can fight back. We can recognize that something is amiss and take action. We can train our brains to see the threat for what it is, and instead of surrendering like lemmings, we can choose a different path.

It appears that the progressive moment of crisis is now at hand. Thanks mainly to the efforts of Wilson, the Roosevelts, Johnson, and Obama, the structures are in place, ready for the next person to push things even further. We don't know how long it will take to get to phase III, but thanks to Stuart Chase, we do have an idea of what that phase will look like: direct government control over nearly every aspect of our lives.

Progressives have been motivated by fear for so long, the fear that if given too much freedom, mankind will go down a dark path. They are convinced that they can save us from ourselves with more control. But this is the great lie and the great tragedy of progressivism.

We have a remarkable and unique gift: the U.S. Constitution. This document, the triumph of Enlightenment thought merged with Judeo-Christian values, protects our natural rights and freedoms while laying out the groundwork for a society that keeps everyone safe and free—including progressives. If only they could let go of their fear and see that we might have a chance of progressing toward
more
freedom, liberty, and, ultimately, happiness.

We need to show the progressives that there is a better way, that they don't need to be “dazed and blinded” as Chase was. There is a
better path to the ultimate light: the full embracing of our founding documents as a compass that always points us back toward liberty.

It starts with you, in your homes, your families, your schools, your communities. You must be on the lookout for creeping progressivism and, when you find it, fight it with ideas. Be firm in your commitment to your rights, and show others that true freedom comes from respect for the individual, not mindless collectivism. Be true to the ideas that have sustained us since our founding and remain enshrined in our Constitution.

They have saved us before, and they can save us again.

I
t's midday, downtown in a major American city.

You're walking along at your typical brisk pace, almost striding, and before you know it, you're quickly encroaching on the three people walking ahead of you on the sidewalk.

They hear your footsteps coming toward them, and they peer back to catch a glimpse of you. Your eyes meet theirs, and you can't help but notice a look of fear that you've rarely witnessed on city streets. Real terror.

It's not because of you. You're pretty unassuming. It's not even because of them.

No, it's because of where you are: Detroit, where nightmares of violence and decay long ago replaced the American dream. Motown has become the poster child for the failure of progressivism's good intentions.

It wasn't always like that in Detroit.

The city wasn't perfect, of course. It always had its faults. In the early 1920s, Henry Ford spewed forth anti-Semitic venom in his
Dearborn Independent
newspaper. In the 1930s, the “Radio Priest,”
Father Charles Coughlin, broadcast from his headquarters in suburban Royal Oak. Communists infiltrated Ford Motor Company's massive River Rouge plant, fomenting labor strife. In 1943, an ugly three-day race riot rocked the city. Franklin Roosevelt dispatched federal troops to maintain order, and tanks, which should have been rolling toward Berlin, instead rolled down the city's main drag, Woodward Avenue.

But for all its shortcomings, Detroit was the model for modern American industrial growth—
world
industrial growth, really. In terms of major northeast-quadrant urban areas, though, Detroit was a real latecomer. In 1900, the city had only 285,704 people (fewer than Anchorage, Alaska, has today). But once Ford and his newfangled auto industry arrived, the city took off like a rocket—or, rather, like a Model T.

Most major Eastern cities owed their population growth to European immigrants. But Detroit was different. Sure, it had its share of Irish and Polish and Italian immigrants, but a large chunk of Detroit's newer citizens migrated not from Europe but from elsewhere in America. White Americans from Appalachia and blacks from farther South came in droves. They came to Detroit for the same reasons Jews and Italians sailed in steerage class for Ellis Island: opportunity, freedom, and a better life for themselves and their children.

Back then, Detroit's economy, like that of America as a whole, was unfettered by regulations and bureaucrats. When America wanted better mousetraps—but mainly better cars—it counted on Detroiters to figure out not only how to make them but how to make them
cheaper
and
better
than anyone else.

They had a name for the way things worked back then. They quaintly called it capitalism.

The city boomed, and Ford wasn't the only game in town for long. Newcomers Chrysler and General Motors muscled their way into his markets. But because capitalism isn't a zero-sum game, people didn't
get poorer. Competition was good—for everyone. The Motor City grew from 285,704 people in 1900 to 1,568,662 in 1930 and then to 1,849,568 in 1950. From 1920 through 1950, it was the nation's fourth-largest city. In 1960, it enjoyed the nation's
highest per-capita income.

Pearl Harbor caused Detroit to retool, moving from making autos and trucks to churning out tanks and jeeps and planes. FDR had vowed that America would become the Arsenal of Democracy. A lot of folks think that Detroit earned that same title. FDR tapped Ford's once right-hand man Bill Knudsen to mobilize the country for war—and to do it within a matter of weeks. The six-foot-three former boxer and Danish immigrant had worked his way from the factory floor in his youth to the executive suites of Ford, eventually becoming the head of Chevrolet. With four military stars on his shoulder and the title of chairman of the Office of Production Management, Knudsen worked with CEOs and businesses across America to retool their factories to produce war machines—all for the exorbitant salary of one dollar a year.

Knudsen was, in many ways, Henry Ford's opposite. Where Ford believed in centralized, top-down mandates, managed efficiency (“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants
so long as it is black”), and artificially inflated minimum wages (his five-dollar-a-day wage, which nearly doubled wages at the time, shocked his fellow businessmen), Knudsen was a fervent believer in the spontaneous and voluntary actions of the free market. He persuaded FDR to scrap many of the New Deal's burdensome regulations and onerous taxes and instead to implement incentives for private business to retool for war products. And he took away power from Washington, which earned him hatred from Eleanor Roosevelt and the more extreme progressives in FDR's Cabinet, and gave that power to executives who knew better how to mobilize their businesses than
bureaucrats who operated by fiat.

And it worked. America had virtually no war industry in 1940. But by the close of 1943, America's industrial might surpassed that of Germany,
Britain, and the Soviet Union combined. National GDP doubled, and
unemployment was one percent.

This was capitalism, and its living, beating heart for half a century was Detroit.

♠

A couple of years ago,
Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Maraniss, a native Detroiter, wrote a book called
Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story
. He set his story in 1963, when, even that late into the game, Detroit was still a great city, boasting 296,000 manufacturing jobs. Yes, its population had slipped to 1,514,063, but just about every American city was in decline back then. Many recuperated. Detroit, instead, committed urban suicide.

Motown went on to lose jobs and population as no other major American city had done—ever. Today, fewer than 700,000 residents remain, and no one's quite sure that the city has even hit rock bottom yet. Remember that figure of 296,000 manufacturing jobs in 1963? Well, that dropped to just 54,000 in 2000, and now it's down to a mere 27,000.

Detroit can't provide public services or pay its bills. There are more than one hundred thousand different city creditors owed a staggering $20 billion (that's $25,000 per resident). The city has long held the unenviable title of Murder Capital of America, although it has recently lagged behind such other progressive bastions as
Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

In May 2015, Detroit's unemployment rate was 13.1 percent, mercifully down from 18.6 percent in May 2013, but it
remained twice the national average. Pamela Moore, president and CEO of Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation, said:

We know that the unemployment rate is at least double, perhaps triple the 13.1 percent reported for Detroit. The rate does not include those who are no longer seeking employment or receiving unemployment benefits. Recent research . . . indicated that there were 175,000 Detroiters in the labor pool who were not working and are not actively seeking a job. The number of jobs available is growing, but businesses are looking for
employees who are ready to work and skilled.

Ready to work and skilled? Unfortunately, that does not exactly describe every Detroiter. In 2011, the National Institute for Literacy reported that a shocking forty-seven percent of adult Motor City residents were functional illiterates. But it gets even worse. The Detroit Regional Workforce Fund reports that half of that forty-seven percent
who are illiterate hold high school degrees. Too bad they can't read them.

What's Detroit like beyond the depressing statistics? What are the little details of life within the city limits of America's progressive poster child? Here are a few examples, from a friend's personal experiences.

It's a beautiful sunny day outside a major league ballpark. You pull into a nearby parking lot for an afternoon of peanuts, popcorn, and Cracker Jack with your family. But before you get any further, you see an object glistening in the gravel below. You bend down and retrieve something. A live round of ammunition. That's a ball game in Detroit.

On a trip to church, you drive past block after block of nothingness. No houses. Nothing. Once people lived here, businesses functioned, neighborhoods thrived. Now there's nothing. And when you get there, before you are greeted by an usher or a clergyman, a guard—a very necessary guard—patrolling the parking lot salutes you. That's Easter Sunday morning in Detroit.

You visit the Detroit Public Library. A staffer retrieves a roll of microfilm for you, and you head for the reader. The machine's turning mechanism is broken and held together by tiny bars of scrap metal that are in turn held together by wire. You look at it and think this looks like nothing you've seen in a normal American library.
Is this America?
you silently ask yourself. And then the horrible thought:
This is how they hold things together in Cuba. This is Cuba.
That's academic research in Detroit.

So how did Detroit go from being the Arsenal of Democracy to one step above “Soylent Green”? Somehow progressives always blame Republicans—or the Koch brothers or climate change or something else completely irrelevant—for the disasters they've created. Republicans rarely run big cities, and when they do, they sometimes even help turn them around (see what Rudy Giuliani did with what was left of New York). But from Baltimore to St. Louis to Philadelphia to Detroit, progressives have run America's major cities for decades—usually right into the ground.

Back in the “Progressive Era,” it was fashionable to say that the states were the “laboratories of democracy.” States like Wisconsin or Oregon passed initiatives and referendums that other states might emulate. Well, for quite a while now, big cities have been Frankenstein-esque “laboratories of progressivism.”

♦

It didn't start with Detroit.
The most famous pioneer progressive mayor was actually New York City's Fiorello “the Little Flower” LaGuardia. He might have been a little flower, but he was a big RINO (Republican in name only). He supported Franklin Roosevelt, pushed for rent control, increased welfare programs,
and built public housing. He ran for reelection with the support of the Communist-dominated American Labor Party. His great protégé was the renowned fellow-traveling (pro-Communist)
congressman Vito Marcantino. Mainstream historians still rank LaGuardia as one of America's great mayors, but he helped set the world's greatest city on a decades-long path of decline. (Helping to keep it on that dreadful path was another media-darling RINO, 1960s mayor John V. Lindsey.)

LaGuardia was from the left wing, and many left-wing mayors, in city after city, have been following in his path. They all use the same basic playbook, the one first articulated by FDR's top aide, Harry Hopkins, in 1938: “We will spend and spend, and
tax and tax, and elect and elect.”