The 50% Mystery

How Did We Lose So Much?

Did we really vote for what the U.S. government has become? If we didn’t, then where did it come from?

The leftists seem to march through the institutions in the U.S., taking control of one after another from the government and the school system to the mass media and the public libraries, and even science and the big corporations and mainstream religions. And meanwhile the left’s Culture War is a series of demands, from feminism to systemic racism to transgenderism, and the only solution to each new societal “problem” is that we surrender, and apologize.

The “50% Mystery” is: How does the Left seem to always get everything they want, when roughly 50% of the American people vote against them, and the Republicans win about half of the elections?

But have the Leftists really gotten almost everything that they want? Let’s have a look.

The History of the Mystery, from the earliest Euro-Socialist Invasion of our nation.

Toward the end of the 1800s, Euro Leftism/Socialism/Communism invaded America and set up political shop as Communist, Socialist, and “Workers” parties.

What the Leftists Always Really Wanted

The central ideas and themes of the U.S. Socialist and Communist parties of 1900, included:

○ the creation and empowerment of national labor unions

○ sweeping social programs to redistribute wealth from the people who earned it to the people who didn't,

○ class warfare and polarization

○ the government becoming the U.S. Safety-Net Insurance Company, motto “Pay Your Premiums or Go to Prison” (“a system of compulsory insurance” was called for by the Socialist Party platform of 1912)

○ federal government agencies to regulate and control communication and transportation systems

○ the weakening of the Constitutional protections of states’ and individuals’ rights

○ higher taxes and new kinds of federal taxes and (the call for a federal income tax was in the Socialist Party platform of 1900)

○ government employment bureaus and minimum wage laws (these were also in the Socialist Party platform of 1900)

○ centralized federal control of the public schools (the Federal Bureau of Education was called for in the Socialist Party platform of 1912)

This agenda of course amounted to a vast increase in the size and scope of the central government, to enable government intervention in almost every American institution and every aspect of the lives of Americans.

But what happened was that from 1900 on, the Socialists who had proposed that agenda failed to win even 1% of U.S. elections. No Communist party candidate ever won a national election in the U.S. Instead, from 1906 to 2016, candidates who promised to make government smaller and to cut government spending won at least half the national elections in the U.S. (Rightists probably really did better than 50% vote wise. The independent or 3rd party candidates who got lots of votes in that time period — such as Ross Perot, and Libertarians over the decades — tended to lean Right and favor of less government.)

And yet from the year 1900 to the year 2020, virtually the whole leftist agenda — the Socialist/Communist/Workers-Party/Leftist platform of the early 1900s — was enacted by the United States government. It all became U.S. law. After at least 50% of the American people had voted against it, election after election, for over a hundred years.

The 50% Mystery is: How did this happen?

Do you know? Are you sure? Because it’s important.

Government has now gone far beyond anything ever dreamed of in Jefferson's day. It has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations with the high dignity and impeccability of a state religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste.

H.L. Mencken (1926) quoted in The Gist of Mencken: Quotations from America's Critic edited by Mayo Dubasky

The History of the Mystery: A Second Look, from 1963

The Substack “David’s Thinking about the World” linked to a list from the Congressional Record of 1963. It was “45 Communist Goals for the Destruction of America”. You can see the whole list there. Some items are now obscure and little remembered, but here are most of them. You can see for yourself whether the leftists made progress in installing items of what was the 1963 “Communist Party” agenda.

○ Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

○ Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

○ Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

○ Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

○ Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

○ Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces.

○ Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

○ Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

○ Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

○ Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

○ Gain control of all student newspapers.

○ Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

○ Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.

○ Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

○ Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”

○ Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”

○ Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

○ Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”

○ Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”

○ Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”

○ Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”

○ Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

○ Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

○ Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

○ Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

○ Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

○ Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

○ Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

○ Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

○ Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

○ Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

○ Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

○ Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

○ Internationalize the Panama Canal.

This bit of history makes it even clearer how much of their wish list the leftists have gotten just in the last sixty years, less than one lifetime. The leftists didn’t “Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.” They took control of it — and the CIA, NSA, etcetera — and now use those agencies to attack people who oppose the leftist regime.

“Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.” Literally communist nations such as Viet Nam and Laos are treated the same as nations that do not impose communism on their populations and they receive $millions in aid from the U.S. government.

Since 1963, Republicans won six of the fifteen presidential elections and a higher percentage of Congressional elections. And none of the Democrat winners of the Presidential elections won by openly advocating the kinds of thing on the Communist wish list. And yet somehow the leftists got almost 100% of their wish list enacted.

If the American electorate was divided 50-50 between Left and Right, then how could it be that by the 2020s the U.S. left had taken control not only of essentially the whole U.S. government and all its agencies, but almost every institution in our country?

How do Leftists win everything when they lose half the elections?

The Leftists know that’s what really happens. The title of a 2016 book by a Leftist was, Why Liberals Win (Even When They Lose Elections). (Since then, the title has been changed to Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections).

Here’s what conservative Roger Kimball said about it in his book The Long March, in the year 2000.

The startling and depressing fact is that supposedly conservative victories at the polls have done almost nothing to challenge the dominance of left-wing... attitudes and ideas.

It’s true. But the 50-50 outcome of elections shows that “left-wing attitudes and ideas” have never been dominant among the American people. So then how then were all of the leftist attitudes and ideas enacted as the U.S. government policies?

1. UniParty?

If the Uniparty is real, then almost all candidates of both of the major parties are leftists, i.e. people who will, when elected, make government bigger and more powerful, will increase the national debt, and use government to “redistribute” money from productive people to unproductive leftists.

Congressional Republicans failed to terminate this program [Obamacre] under Trump when then-Senator John McCain voted with the Democrats to save it. Today, Republicans don’t even pretend to be opposed to this Obama-era program.

Cliff Kincaid "Why the Marxists Aways Win" Substack (2023)

Time and again, the Republicans had enough votes in Congress to repeal Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, secure the border and get control of immigration, really cut government spending, reduce the national debt, get rid of ‘alphabet agency’ overregulation, and so on, as they promised when they ran for office. But they never really did those things.

In May 2023, “raising the debt ceiling” once again became big news. A story reporting the results of a poll, began with the sentence, “Sixty percent of Americans say Congress should only raise the nation’s debt ceiling if it cuts spending at the same time…”

But what the American public wanted could not have mattered less. The Uniparty Congress passed a bill to spend $1.5 trillion more in the coming year. When they called it the “Limit, Save, Grow Act”, they left-handedly acknowledged that they knew that the American people wanted to limit spending. The word “Grow” was not supposed to refer to the massive growth in government but that’s what the Uniparty wanted, so that’s what the American people got.

That kind of massive growth in the size and power of government is what always happened, no matter what the people voted for.

If the Uniparty is real, then the U.S. has one-party rule. Elections don’t matter because the same thing will happen whichever side of the Uniparty wins. The reality is that the Uniparty has put the extreme leftist agenda into law, without the support of a decisive majority of Americans.

2. Coup

U.S. Constitution,

Article I, Section 1

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

That first law of the republic is simple and clear: Only Congress can make laws. It was never repealed. So all the decrees and regulations that have been and are being created by the unelected U.S. Deep State are illegal.

Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely content to govern merely through the law.

Philip Hamburger, The Administrative Threat (2017)

The idea that the U.S. laws are made by unelected bureaucrats are illegal may sound preposterous, but it’s historical fact. In the early 1940s a coup led by then-President Franklin Roosevelt, resulted in the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). That law, which created the Deep State, was unconstitutional, but a left-leaning SCOTUS, that had been cowed by Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court, ruled in favor of the coup. The replacement of the republic of the United States of America with a different, non-representative form of government happened. We go into the details, and present proof of the coup, in Did the Deep State Overrule the Republic?

Conclusion

The truth that no right-thinking American wants to believe is that the American Republic is gone, replaced by a very different form of government. The system that rules the U.S. now is not representative government. The American people never voted for that change, but it happened. A lot of people have written about this, and we could go on and on with proof that the form of government that the U.S. has in the 21^st century is a lot closer to a kleptocratic oligarchy than it is to a republic. But the practical question is: How did the leftists do it, and get away with it? How did they install all of their agenda of leftist control without winning even a decisive majority of the elections?

That is the question we have to answer: How did they do it?  …if we hope to unwind the leftists’ skein of control, undo the damage they have done, and take back our country and our freedoms. Doing that will be possible only if we understand how the leftists did that damage and took those freedoms.

We think the true answer is:

Underlying all of the leftists’ successes was and is their control of the mass media. Without that control, they could not have seized our institutions and replaced the republic with tyranny. But with control of the mass media, they did.

How the left took control of the mass media and used that control to transform America from the land of the free to a Euro-style kleptocratic oligarchy is a long story, but a fascinating if tragic one.

The leftists use the media to produce a stream of lies, as ammunition in their war against freedom and what’s right. Maybe if we understood exactly how they do that, we could turn the tables on them, use the truth as our bullets. The truth is always stronger than lies. But, as we illustrate in What If Left-Right Politics Was American Football? as long as the leftists control the stream of mass media, we will fail and they will win.