What If Left-Right Politics Was American Football?
Maybe thinking about Left-Right politics as a game of American football could solve a certain mystery. This mystery...
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At the very end of the 1800s, Euro Leftism/Socialism/Communism invaded America and set up political shop as Communist, Socialist, and “Workers” parties.
From 1900 on, the Socialist parties failed to win even 1% of U.S. elections. No Communist party candidate ever won a national election in the United States. Instead, from 1906 to 2016, candidates promising to make government smaller and to cut government spending won roughly half the national elections in the U.S. (Rightists probably really did better than 50% vote wise. With the exception of Ralph Nader, 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 to be in favor of less government.)
And yet in the 120 years from 1900 to 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 mystery is: How did this happen?
Political Football
In a democracy, every vote is supposed to be equal. If about half the country supports one side and half the country supports another, you may expect major institutions to either be equally divided, or to try to stay politically neutral. This is not what we find.
Richard Hanania, "Why is Everything Liberal?" Substack (2021)
If the political struggle of Left versus Right was a football game, then the score should be tied. Because both sides have scored about the same wins in elections. But here in the 2020s, after the Left versus Right game has been going on for 120 years, the real score is more like: Leftist 1000 Rightists 0.
Thinking about this as football:
The leftist team’s end zone is a bigger, more powerful government, even socialist totalitarianism. The Right’s end zone is freedom: Free enterprise and individual rights.
And the leftists gain all the ground. On every down, the Left always make a first-down, and move the ball toward their endzone. The Right always loses ground and punts.
Each first-down is the leftists taking control of another U.S. institution: The education system, the media and entertainment, the government itself. And finally, even the big corporations and mainstream religions. The Left got touchdown after touchdown.
The leftists throw a pass:
“100% of white people are racists; 0% of non-white people are racists.”
“Censoring people who disagree with leftists is defending democracy.”
“America is the most racist nation in the history of the world.”
“Businesses will work better if they hire people based on race and sex rather than on merit.”
“Bigger and more powerful government, more borrowing and spending, and higher taxes will be good for most Americans.”
“The United States of America did not begin in 1776 with the declaration of our independence, but in 1619 and Americans never opposed slavery.”
“Men who pretend to be women are real women.”
Every pass is completed! “First Down! Move the chains!” “Men who pretend to be women are women!!!” It almost instantly became settled law.
Would Americans have voted that men can be women, if we had been given the opportunity to vote on it? Maybe, but if we had voted against it, it would not have mattered, because the outcome of elections do not seem to matter. Half the people vote against more and bigger government but 100% of the time we get bigger and more powerful government (as we show beyond any doubt in the books GovSwamped and OverRegulated).
But why, you may ask, is it the Left that always seems to have the ball? Why do they always get the ball back when they fumble, or throw an interception, that is to say, when they lose an election? Why does only Team Left gain ground? That’s the mystery.
Answers?
Maybe it’s just the nature of the game. Thomas Jefferson said, “The natural progression of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”
Politics and government are a leftist game. It is the Offense to want more government; all the Right can do is defend against that. So the Right are permanently on defense. The more politics and government you have, the less freedom and free-enterprise you will have. The less freedom you have, then the more government you are going to get…
The referees, umpires, and commissioners, that is, the officials of the game… are government regulators. the bureaucrats, the judges, and the politicians. It is the nature of government regulators to want more government. The officials of the game of government are not fair or unbiased. Far from it. And that goes for the so-called “Republicans” too. All government regulators are on the side of government, no matter what they pretend. We the public are just fans, powerless to change the outcome. All we can do is watch, and that’s all the people running the league want us to be able to do.
I’ve written about the two-party paradigm and how the Global Power Structures need you within it. They do not care which team jersey you wear, but they need you at the game cheering.
Sage Hana, “Hero Ball and 5D Chess: Speaking Truth and the Long Game” Substack (2023)
Now, Back to the Game…
The startling and depressing fact is that supposedly conservative victories at the polls have done almost nothing to challenge the dominance of the left-wing.
Roger Kimball, The Long March (2000)
If Las Vegas, inexplicably, put the odds of the Left-Right game at 50-50, then which team would you bet a $million on? You know the answer. But the odds really should be 50-50, if the Right wins half the elections. You know that the game is fixed.
The biggest reason why the leftists always win is one thing that few people seem to have thought about: In spite of the lie that the media is unbiased, the truth is that leftists control the media. That is where most of their power comes from. People who think that mainstream media are just cheerleaders, who bend over backwards to back Team Left have it wrong.
The mass media is controlling the score.
This answer comes from Mek, in the comments section of a Substack article. The writer of the article argued that the Right was making a mistake by emulating the Left and lying to make points. Mek wrote in the comment:
“…they [the Left] have all the reach. We cannot afford to be wrong, even once… We have to shoot a 100 score. They get away with shooting a 20 and calling it a 100.”
How do the leftists get away with shooting twenty and calling the score 100 to zero in their favor? Because when the Left scores 20, the sports reporters report that the Left scored 100. In this metaphor, the “sports reporters” are the mass media, and the mass media are leftists. Control of the mass media is the basis of most of the Left’s power to cheat in the game. The Left loses and the reporters report that the Left won. A leftist even wrote a book about it in 2016 titled Stephen Prothero, Why Liberals Win (Even When They Lose Elections). (In subsequent editions, the publishers changed the title a couple of times until it was Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars the last time we looked. leftists don’t like to tell the truth, and the truth is that they lose the elections but win the government.)
The outcome of the game is what the sports reports report, and the leftists always report that they won. 100 to zero. “Another shut out!” “Another knockout!!” “Team Left’s undefeated streak continues!!!”
Here’s what Cliff Kincaid said in the 2023 Substack article titled. "Why the Marxists Aways Win”.
Obamacare... was sold by Obama as the “Affordable Care Act,” when it was based on what even the liberal “fact-checkers” admitted was the “lie of the year” – “If you like your health care, you can keep it.” After he engineered the “fundamental transformation” of America, which included the socialized medicine scheme known as Obamacare, the debate moved even further to the left. Congressional Republicans failed to terminate this program 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… By framing the issue in terms favorable to the Marxists, the Marxists always win.
Cliff Kincaid "Why the Marxists Aways Win" Substack (2023)
The Republicans are the controlled opposition. That is, basically tackling dummies. Does this mean that politics and government are orchestrated and predetermined, like professional wrestling? A mere show and nothing more? We look into a theory (that originated with the philosopher Karl Popper) about exactly what kind of show the whole thing is, in the book about the Leftist System of Untruth Production.
Is there any way to turn the game around, make it a real contest again, one where we have a chance to win, to take back our country and our lost freedoms? We take a look at some ideas on our website, Rightful Freedom.
A note on the Left and Right team colors:
Which team should be red and which blue? The leftists have been gradually and intentionally switching the colors ever since 2000, when TV media decided that the Democrats should not be red in TV maps and other graphics because red really was the color of leftism in general and of Communism in particular. And so a new Blue-Red color scheme was created for the states in TV election news in the U.S. But still, in most of the world, and for most intents and purposes, red is the color of the Left. So, gradually the leftist media has made blue the color of the left and red the color of the right. Even Wikipedia acknowledges that this duplicitous switch was made by the TV networks on purpose.
.... Indeed, until the 1980s, Democrats were often represented by red and Republicans by blue. The current terminology of “red states” and “blue states” came into use in the United States presidential election of 2000 on an episode of the Today show on October 30, 2000, wanting to avoid any implied connection between the Democratic Party and the Communist Party.