PRACTICAL POLITICS
Propaganda as an art form
Most people don’t know who H.L. Mencken is, much less know anything about the quote attributed to him. He was born in 1880 and died in 1956, and was a journalist, editor, writer, and satirist. We don’t know when he wrote the quote, but it had to he the late 19th century or the first half of the 20th.
He says, in 33 words, all you need to know about practical (professional) politics and politicians. So what is practical politics?
Practical politics refers to the activities, strategies, and decisions that politicians and political actors engage in to achieve their goals within the realm of governance. It involves the day-to-day workings of the political system, including election campaigns, policy-making, negotiations, and the implementation of laws and regulations.
In contrast to political theories and ideologies, practical politics deals with the practical and real-world aspects of governing and making decisions in a manner that reflects the complexities of the political environment.
In other words, practical politics is what politicians do to govern and keep their jobs. Yet Mencken says the job is to keep people excited by non-existent threats so they will want to be saved. Amazingly, the same crap exists today, probably worse or more intense that in was in Mencken’s time.
In political science classes we’re taught that a government can respond to a negative internal problem by finding someone external to blame for something else, taking the public’s mind off of the internal issue. Welcome to Propaganda 101, the invention of an American, Edward Bernays in 1928. The rest is history. When we pick on some foreign issue rather than looking to our problems at home, that’s propaganda.
Is the government’s support for the war in Ukraine a propaganda project to allow the southern border to remain open, per the socialist/communist plan? We think it is, and furthermore we believe that the hobgoblins Mencken mentions are invented by our government to insure we’re continuously excited, scared, and willing to let them save us.
I, for one, am not in need of saving by a government that doesn’t support the Constitution, the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, or the Bible. When a government arrests people, puts them in jail with no bond and no trial, and suppresses information that would prove them innocent, we’re concerned. When the government allows rioters who destroy whole city centers to go free with no charges, we’re a bit skeptical of the government’s interest in our rights or safety and more than convinced there is a two-tiered justice system. One for January 6 rioters who did minimal damage and one for rioters who killed, burnt buildings down, and put up tent cities on land they did not own or have permission to use.
Are our international competitors a dangerous exposure? Surely they are, but are they more of an exposure than open borders? They certainly are not. Open borders allow dangerous aliens to enter the country along with those who are not dangerous, but are still breaking the law. The open border is a clear and present danger to our country. We may be – almost certainly are – allowing terrorists into our country. We’ve written about this exposure, so if you’re interested you can read our article titled Immigration II for more information.
The fixes needed to stop the government for lying, which is what they do when they tell us one thing and know the truth is different, are massive. We’d need more space to write and more brains to document what needs to be done that we possess. The fix is to make government service something a person does out of duty rather than greed, transparent in all it does, requiring the bureaucracy to be faithful to the Constitution and not a political party, to have citizens involved wherever possible.
As one of our readers commented on another article, How to Fix DC, that’s a heavy lift, and it is. We’re not sure one person can get it done, but we’re more sure it will never be done if no one tries.
When we can determine which of the hobgoblins are real and which are imaginary, we’ll be well on our way to proving H.L Mencken wrong, and that would be a good thing.
Meanwhile practical politics will continue to destroy the USA under the guise of protecting and preserving the country.