Additionally, if you're a secular socialist, you have to maintain your power in ways the public inherently dislikes: paying off supporters by putting earmarks in appropriations bills; holding secret conferences to write bills; making absurd deals to pick up enough votes to pa.s.s legislation; and appointing really bizarre people to top government jobs. You learn to hide what you are doing, deny what you are doing, and if caught, try to deceive the people about what you've done.

Finally, if you're part of a movement that believes it knows better than the American people what's best for them, you inherently scorn the values and judgment of the people you intend to change. Since the vast majority of Americans have the "wrong" values and the "wrong" att.i.tude, they have to be misled into voting for the enlightened elite who will remake them into the right att.i.tudes and the right values.

Thus, in order to achieve its historic mission of transforming America, the secular-socialist movement must resort to dishonesty in communicating with the American people.

ALINSKY'S RULES FOR DISHONESTY

Perhaps n.o.body has been more clear about the Left's need for dishonesty than Saul Alinsky.

One of the twentieth century's most influential radicals, Alinksy is considered the G.o.dfather of community organizing. His two most famous works, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, were published in the late sixties and early seventies. In these works, Alinsky draws a distinction between meek, garden-variety liberals and brave, revolutionary radicals. "While liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues," Alinsky writes, "radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives."

Many of his "rules" are guidelines for engaging in immoral, dangerous, political dishonesty. Echoing the maxims of Vladimir Lenin, the architect of Soviet Communism, Alinsky justifies almost any immoral act, especially outright dishonesty and hypocrisy, if it's done while pursuing revolution. Alinksy writes, "[The organizer] does not have a fixed truth-truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist."

David Horowitz, in his small book Barack Obama's Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, cogently explains the significance of Alinsky's teachings to the modern Left.7 In particular, he cites what he calls the "most important" chapter in Rules for Radicals, "Means and Ends," whose "rules" include the following:* "In war the end justifies almost any means."

* "Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa."

* "The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluation of means."

* "You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments." (Later, Alinsky discusses the Communist Leon Trotsky's summation of Lenin's speeches: "They have the guns and therefore we are at peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.") For Alinsky, a radical's primary goals must be acquiring power and destroying the current system. What replaces it is of secondary concern. He teaches that you ama.s.s power by organizing people based on their naked self-interest, not on any idealism or common vision for the future. In fact, he argues that clearly naming or describing such a vision-and spelling out clearly how to get there-only alienates some people and therefore divides your potential power base.

Now consider Alinksy's eleventh rule of Means and Ends:Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty," "Equality," "Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace." Whitman put it: "The goal once named cannot be countermanded." It has been previously noted that the wise man of action knows that frequently in the stream of actions of means toward ends, whole new and unexpected ends are among the major results of the action.8 "Change We Can Believe In" fits nicely into that list of bromides. Horowitz aptly sums up Alinsky's teachings:In contrast to liberals, who in Alinsky's eyes are constantly tripping over their principles, the rule for radicals is that the ends justify the means. This was true for the Jacobins, for the Communists, for the fascists and now for the post-Communist left. . . . The very nature of this future [they desire]-a world without poverty, without war, without racism, and without "s.e.xism"-is so desirable, so n.o.ble, so perfect in contrast to everything that exists as to justify any and every means to achieve it.

. . . The German philosopher Nietzsche had a phrase for this: "Idealism kills." And of course, the great atrocities of the modern era, whether n.a.z.i or Communist, were committed by people who believed in a future that would save mankind.9 If you think it's unfair to hold the current leaders of the Democratic Party responsible for the teachings of a deceased left-wing radical, consider that in his early days in Chicago, Barack Obama taught courses on Alinsky's techniques for community organizing groups. So his endors.e.m.e.nt of these tactics of fundamental dishonesty is a matter of a public record.

President Obama's own website displayed a picture of a younger Obama teaching in a Chicago cla.s.sroom. On the chalkboard behind him are written the phrases "Power a.n.a.lysis" and "Relationships Built on Self Interest."

In an interview with Ryan Lizza of the New Republic, Obama said, "The key to creating successful organizations was making sure people's self-interest was met, and not just basing it on pie-in-the-sky idealism. So there were some basic principles that remained powerful then, and in fact I still believe in."

Saul Alinsky's son, L. David Alinksy, writing in the Boston Globe, marveled at how many of his father's methods were evident at the Democratic National Convention. It was clear, he wrote, that "Obama learned his lesson well."10

THE PERVERSION OF LANGUAGE.

Another primary weapon in the secular-socialist a.r.s.enal is the deliberate misuse of language. George Orwell, one of the most insightful a.n.a.lysts of tyranny and politics in the first half of the twentieth century, explained the danger of corrupted language in "Politics and the English Language." In that brilliant essay, Orwell warns, "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." He explains, In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: "While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.11 Remember Orwell's warning the next time you listen to a secular-socialist politician, academic, or TV a.n.a.lyst employ euphemisms and other rhetorical tricks that allow them to avoid calling things by their proper names. Consider these examples:* The "Employee Free Choice Act" strips the right to a secret ballot for workers voting on whether to join a union, exposing them to coercion tactics from union thugs, thus threatening their freedom to choose.

* The Obama administration announced it would refer to terrorist attacks as "man-made disasters" and the war on Islamic terrorists would be called "overseas contingency operations."

* Supporters of the cap-and-trade energy tax bill, which would cast a tangled web of new bureaucracies and regulations over our economy, say their bill is "marketdriven."

* Supporters of the so-called "public option" in health insurance claimed it will introduce "compet.i.tion," even though more than 1,000 health insurance companies are already competing against each other in America. In reality, the public option would allow the government to gradually drive private insurers from the market altogether.

* President Obama claimed the stimulus bill had no "earmarks or the usual pork barrel spending." This a.s.sertion, however, relies on an extremely narrow definition of an "earmark" as an outlay for a specific project or company. Although they cleverly avoided this level of specificity in the stimulus, Democrats packed the bill with spending on narrowly defined programs. For instance, in the $8 billion set aside for high speed railway, there was a specific outlay for a Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas maglev. There was also $1 billion for a zero emissions energy plant in Illinois, of which there was only one in development. These are earmarks in all but name-and everyone knows it, including President Obama.

HOW SECULAR SOCIALISM BUILDS THE MACHINE.

It would be hard to overstate the degree to which the modern Left appeal to the self-interest of their various interest groups rather than to any sort of unifying vision for the future. There's a reason for that: while secular socialism is the intellectual mindset of the left-wing party bosses and politicians, it is not the worldview of the vast majority of Americans. It would be impossible to build a governing majority around such an alien ideology.

But secular socialists know the bigger and more powerful government gets, the more politicians can use its power to benefit their supporters. In other words, secular socialism doesn't win power because it's a compelling vision for the future; it's just a convenient way to pay off members of their coalition and bribe new ones into joining. And the more power secular-socialist politicians have, both in elected positions and in the bureaucracies, the better these coalition members can be fed from the public trough.

The secular-socialist machine is diverse. Trial lawyers are among the biggest donors to left-wing Democrats, who return the favor by preventing tort reform. This allows the lawyers to continue suing doctors and businessmen and women for huge sums of money that the lawyers then donate to left-wing Democrats.

Union bosses are another key machine component. They donate money to secular socialists from compulsory member dues and "encourage" their members to man phone banks and conduct get-out-the-vote operations. They expect their candidates, once in power, to change laws to give union organizers even more leverage against the businesses they are bankrupting, as well as to prevent reform of our union-dominated public bureaucracies, like education.

"Social justice" groups like the corrupt ACORN organization have received public dollars to perform voter registration drives that are really just operations to turn out voters for far-left Democrats, who gratefully steer more money toward groups like ACORN. Although ACORN's long history of fraud has finally put it out of business, the group's branches are now reorganizing to continue the same scam under new names.

And finally, big business hedges its bets by funding big-government supporters in both parties, hoping they will craft legislation that gives big business an advantage over its compet.i.tors.

There is one name for this kind of cynical cronyism and cra.s.s political manipulation: machine politics.

The way the Left govern in Sacramento, Albany, in many local governments, and especially in Washington is clearly indicative of a machine. When a $787 billion stimulus package can pa.s.s in days with no elected official having read the bill, it is evidence of a machine. When a 300-page amendment can be attached at 3:00 am to a bill pa.s.sed at 4:00 that afternoon with no hearings and no amendments (the maneuver that bought enough votes to pa.s.s the Waxman-Markey energy tax), it is evidence of a machine. When 4,500 pages of healthcare bills affecting one-sixth of the economy are negotiated in secret, bypa.s.sing the normal open bill resolution process, it is evidence of a machine. When New York City mayor Bloomberg reports, as he did on Meet the Press, that no senators or congressmen he had talked with knew what was in the health bill they had voted for, it is clearly evidence of a machine.

Today, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Left are indisputably secular, they are socialist, and they operate as a machine. Therefore, "secularsocialist machine" is the most accurate way-in fact, the only accurate way-of describing the movement that now controls our government.

WHY SECULAR SOCIALISM NEEDS A MACHINE.

Once the Left's values and goals are clear, their secular-socialist agenda will be crushed in free and fair elections. To avoid this repudiation, they have to build a political machine that is too powerful to be defeated by popular anger. That is the Chicago model of "unrepresentative government."

Union funding for politicians who will eliminate the right to a secret ballot when voting to form a union is a cla.s.sic example of machine politics. This effort stems from the difficulty unions have had winning secret ballot elections in recent years. One solution would be to improve the union model so it could win secret ballot elections. But union leaders instinctively adopted a coercive strategy: eliminating secret ballots and relying on public commitments, which makes it easier to apply social pressure to coerce workers into joining unions.

Similarly, every test of voluntary payments to unions for political activism has resulted in a catastrophic drop in donations-as much as 96 percent in some cases. The unions' answer: make the payments mandatory so people have to fork over the money to be in the union, and they have to be in the union to keep their job.

Similar kinds of social and economic coercion are found in other fields. In Hollywood, if you are openly on the Right you probably won't get a job. And in many universities, conservatives will never get tenure.

This coercive brand of machine politics is the key to the Left's attempts to gain power and remake the American people. The secular-socialist machine does not seek to serve the American people; it wants to force us into accepting the values and obeying the inst.i.tutions of secular, big-government bureaucracies and their unionized employees.

WHY THE MACHINE HAS TO RELY ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF SECULARISM.

Transplanting secular-socialist values into people through government action requires a malleable view of human nature and a government-centric concept of citizens' rights.

To socialists, people are inherently bad and capitalism is always exploitive. Only strong government can take money from the rich, give it to the poor, and reeducate the ignorant or misinformed through government-sponsored programs. (Read the education philosophies of Bill Ayers or John Dewey to understand the Left's mania for incorporating public education into the secular-socialist machine.) This socialist worldview is the exact opposite of our Founding Fathers' outlook. As we've seen, the Founders believed our rights come from G.o.d, that our behavior should be shaped by a culture infused with religious values, and that government shoud be a carefully limited servant of the people.

A religious worldview inherently limits the purview of government. Even the concept of sin limits government by suggesting that external constraints of right and wrong should guide us no matter what the state says.

In short, our core religious values hinder the secular socialists from realizing a government-dominated, politician-defined world of limited citizenship and unlimited bureaucracy. Thus, the culture of secularism has to replace the culture of religion if socialism is to survive.

WHY SECULAR SOCIALISM IS CONDUCIVE TO DICTATORSHIP.

For secular socialists, the government's overarching goal is to condition people to accept alien behaviors and values. In practice, this outlook inherently produces creeping dictatorial bureaucracy and, ultimately, totalitarianism. George Orwell, despite being an avowed socialist, warned of this tendency in his essay "Why I Write":My recent novel [1984] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism. . . . I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences. The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.12 For those who ridiculed warnings that "death panels" would accompany a government-run health system, Orwell should stand as a stark reminder that the expansion of government power may be a small step on the long march to tyranny and domination by bureaucrats and politicians.

In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek, an influential critic of centralized government and a major influence on President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, similarly warned that "[government] planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals." He added, "The more the state 'plans' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."

Hayek clearly explains why the utopian fantasies of the secular-socialist machine are a direct threat to our freedom. Defeating this machine, and thwarting its furious attempts to impose alien values on us, is not a partisan matter between Democrats and Republicans; it's an effort to save America.

CHAPTER THREE.

The Lies They Told Us (Because They Had To) How does the secular-socialist machine gain power? That's easy: they lie to us.

But at some point in 2009, the American people realized they were not getting the truth from President Barack Obama, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

Perhaps it became clear in December during Congress's first round of voting on healthcare "reform." After an embarra.s.sing and shocking parade of political payoffs to achieve the necessary votes, House and Senate leaders met with White House officials to draft a final bill.

President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Reid bypa.s.sed the normal conference committee for the bill, opting instead to hash out the details behind closed doors. There, they struck a corrupt deal with their union boss donors that would exempt union members from paying taxes on certain healthcare plans while non-union Americans would still get taxed.

Not only did this flagrant venality mock the very idea of equal protection under the law, but the process that created it was the polar opposite of the way President Obama and Speaker Pelosi had promised to govern.

When Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in November 2006, Speaker Pelosi pledged, "This leadership team will create the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history."

They promised to give members of Congress-and the American people-twenty-four hours to review bills before voting on them, to conduct rigorous internal ethics investigations, and to reform the earmark process to stop taxpayer-financed political payoffs.

Similarly, candidate Obama pa.s.sionately vowed to make Washington more bipartisan, more transparent, and more accountable to the American people. Condemning backdoor negotiations, he called for "bringing all parties together and broadcasting [healthcare] negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are."

He made this pledge at least eight times during the campaign, and the pledges were compiled in an online video. In one clip, he explains that he is personally responsible for making this happen, insisting, "One of my jobs as President will be to guide this process."

C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb asked congressional leaders to live up to those pledges so the American people could see how their representatives decide the vital issue of healthcare. But President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid refused. And no wonder; TV cameras would have exposed exactly the sort of corrupt bargaining on behalf of major political donors that candidate Obama had pledged to "shame"-his word-congressional leaders from making.

Thanks to that video, President Obama's C-SPAN flip-flop may have been the most vivid example of the Democratic leadership's unwillingness to uphold campaign promises, much less the ideals of this country. That instance of hypocrisy, however, is just the tip of the iceberg.

"THE MOST HONEST AND ETHICAL CONGRESS IN HISTORY"

Any honest a.s.sessment of the campaign promises made by the current Democratic Congress reveals a stunning gap between words and deeds. Despite the Democrats' much-heralded promises of transparency, accountability, and higher ethical standards, the current Congress has featured unprecedented corruption and secrecy.

During Obama's presidency, we have seen Democrats ram ma.s.sive, complex legislation through the House and Senate and sign it into law so fast that members-as well as the American people-had no time to read it.

We've also seen Nancy Pelosi protect Democratic congressmen under criminal investigation. One such congressman, Charles Rangel from New York, who has taken a "leave of absence" from his position as head of the committee that writes our tax laws, is under an ethics committee investigation for alleged tax dodging, filing deficient financial disclosure forms, and other charges. Although the committee "admonished" him-its weakest reprimand-for taking corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean, Pelosi declined to join many of her Democratic colleagues in calling for Rangel to step down as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. In fact, in an interview with ABC News' This Week, Pelosi conceded that the admonishment of Rangel was "not good," but stressed that Rangel's actions were "not something that jeopardized our country in any way." Is this the new ethical standard we were promised-that corruption is acceptable as long as it doesn't "jeopardize" the country?

In fact, under the Democrats, we've seen the very apparatuses used to police ethics in Congress made more and more f.e.c.kless. For example, even though they created the Independent Office of Congressional Ethics, the Democrats failed to give it subpoena power and have ignored its findings.

Meanwhile, under Democratic control, the ethics committee seems surprisingly eager to clear members of Congress of wrongdoing. The committee cleared two members of Congress who, according to the panel, tacitly tied requests for campaign donations to earmarks that would have benefited the donors. Five others-four congressmen and one delegate-who took the same Caribbean trips as Congressman Rangel were cleared after claiming they did not realize the trips were sponsored by corporations, even though they repeatedly took pictures in front of corporate logos. The ethics committee has even issued guidelines for congressmen on how to get around new rules that prohibit lobbyists from throwing parties in their honor: make sure the parties are honoring more than one member of Congress.

Most significant, in order to get President Obama's initiatives approved in Congress, the Democratic leadership used the American people's money to buy the votes of key senators and congressmen and to pay back their own political allies, behavior that the Founding Fathers rightly called corruption and for which they rebelled against Britain.

Look, for example, at the shameless bribes used to get wavering Democratic senators to vote for the healthcare bill. These bribes were so outrageous-even by Washington standards-they each earned a nickname:* The Louisiana Purchase-Senator Landrieu was promised an additional $300 million in Medicaid funding for Louisiana.

* The Cornhusker Kickback-Perhaps inspired by his Louisiana colleague, Senator Ben Nelson secured exemptions for Nebraska's Medicaid payments worth around $100 million. Along with Michigan senator Carl Levin, he also got a carve-out from the insurance fees for his state's Blue Cross/Blue Shield programs. Moreover, insurance fees for Medigap policies sold by Mutual of Omaha and other Nebraska companies were reduced. As California governor Arnold Schwarzenneger put it, "[Nelson] got the corn, we got the husk."