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Most years, you don't have to sit for very long at a
Lincoln Day dinner to hear one of the Republican speakers
denounce social engineering.
It does have an ominous
sound, but in truth, the GOP was founded for just that
purpose in 1854 and has succeeded magnificently. Nor is it
just a historical curiosity; the party continues to promote
social engineering
today on both the state and
national level.
Let's start with the United States 150 years ago. Our
nation had just conquered a big chunk of Mexico in what one
young Army lieutenant, later to become a Republican
president, called a conspiracy to acquire territory out
of which slave states might be formed for the American
union.
How to respond to the conspiracy that Ulysses S. Grant saw? There was a bitter dispute about how to organize that territory.
The Democratic Party of the era was dominated by the
Slave Power.
The secretary of war in the Franklin
Pierce administration, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi,
commissioned railroad surveys to tie the territory to a
southern city like Memphis, St. Louis or New Orleans. He
even imported camels for transport along southern desert
routes to the West Coast. That vision for the land involved
plantations and slaves.
The Whig Party tried to avoid dealing with the issue,
and so there arose the Republican Party after the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, with the organizing principle
of no expansion of slavery to the territories.
But the GOP had its own plans for the land: Fill it with small freehold farms that didn't need slaves. Build a railroad to haul crops out and machinery in. Create colleges to teach residents how to get the most from their land. Organize the territory that way, and it would support the GOP.
This vision came to pass in the U.S. Congress of 1862 with the passage of the Homestead Act, the Transcontinental Railroad Act and the Morrill Act for land-grant colleges. Our West was organized on Republican principles to be populated by people who would vote Republican. That's social engineering on a continental scale, and it's a great Republican success story. The party's orators ought to be proud.
Move to current times, and consider the GOP in Colorado. The party is quite strong in the south metro area -- from Arapahoe County south to El Paso County. It's a growing area, and any place that specializes in two-acre estates with restrictive covenants near four-lane highways is almost certainly a Republican zone.
So the more population there, the more Colorado Republicans. The catch is that the area relies on a dropping water table. Colorado Republican water policy is to find ways to get more water to the south metro area so it can keep growing.
That may take a while, but in the interim, they can continue to mine the groundwater for more growth until there are enough people there to dominate the state government. Then they can write their own water laws and start raiding other basins.
That's social engineering again -- using the power of government to move society in a direction that benefits your party's interests.
On a national level, we have President George W. Bush
talking about replacing Social Security with an
ownership society.
The details are sketchy, but
there are proposed personal accounts
which would be
invested in the stocks of large corporations, which could
in turn support the administration and its policies. Think
of a multitude of Halliburtons, and you get the idea.
That will doubtless change the attitudes of millions of
Americans. As it is, I can regard Wall Street as a den of
swindlers, hucksters, embezzlers, shills and speculators
with a perverse reward system that increases a company's
value
every time it finds a way to reduce the number
of American jobs it provides.
But if the federal government required me to become an investor in this system, I might find myself cheering at the latest news of lay-offs, outsourcing or weakened pollution laws, since my portfolio's value would rise.
In other words, I'd start thinking like a Republican. And I certainly wouldn't be the only one.
The ownership society
is just another piece of
social engineering, and a clever one at that. I'm
impressed, but I have to wondery why Republicans spend so
much time denouncing social engineering when they're so
good at it?
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