Moore “World of We” - Michael Moore is practically the Leni Riefenstahl of socialism.

National Review Online ^ | July 13, 2007 | Rich Lowry

[neverdem]

July 13, 2007, 0:00 a.m.

Moore “World of We”
Michael Moore is practically the Leni Riefenstahl of socialism.

By Rich Lowry

Michael Moore set out to make a movie attacking the American insurance industry and ended up attacking the American character. By the end of his movie SiCKO, his plaint is less about American resistance to government-run health care than its overarching rejection of collectivism. As Moore puts it, everywhere else it’s “a world of we,” but here a “world of me.”

His voice thus joins a vast, age-old chorus of left-wing bafflement and disillusion at American exceptionalism — our national traits that have prevented the development of a statist politics along continental European lines. Moore’s explanation for this phenomenon is typically twisted: Americans are saddled with debt from college loans and health care, and that keeps us from demanding French-style pampering from our government for fear of foreclosure by The Man.

Tellingly, Moore picks up this theory in an interview with Tony Benn, an old-school British socialist of the sort who simply doesn’t exist in the U.S. Here, our left-wing politicians vote for war funding before they vote against it, always trimming to keep from rubbing too strongly against the American grain. Moore fervently wishes that grain were different, and he celebrates all countries where government has a vaster reach and tighter grip — from Cuba to France.

He is practically the Leni Riefenstahl of socialism. Anyone in a country with government-provided health insurance is portrayed as tripping through daisies to the hospital, where everything is free and the care is perfect. America, in contrast, is a vista of unrelieved gloom. Moore is adept at the propagandist’s art — keep it simple and keep it dishonest.

You would never know that America ranks highest in the world in patient satisfaction, or that only about half of emergency-room patients in Canada get timely treatment. This is not to say that Moore doesn’t highlight real problems in the American insurance system — which is badly distorted by the fact that most people get their insurance through their employers — but his complaint goes much deeper: Americans don’t have the “free” things of the French, who not only get lots of paid vacation, but have government nannies come to their homes to do their laundry for them after they have children.

Moore hints at — of course — a conspiracy to try to keep us from liking the French for fear that we too will develop a taste for the good life on the government’s dime. Unfortunately for Moore, it’s worse than that. America has a deep-seated individualistic value system that, coupled with the lack of European-style class conflict, inhibited the rise of social democracy here. As one historian has put it, if you were to set out to design a society hostile to collectivism, “one could not have done much better than to implement the social development that has, mostly unplanned, constituted America.”

This exceptionalism has its downsides — our high rates of violence, for one — but it also has created a extraordinarily dynamic and open society that can adjust to and thrive in the globalized economy in a way that sclerotic social democracies can’t. Just as Moore is apotheosizing France, its people took to the polls in near-record numbers to elect a reformist president devoted to making them work harder and weaning them from cushy benefits. In this sense, Michael Moore is more French than the French.

He hails the street protests that engulf France every time the government threatens to take away some benefit. We don’t match the French in demonstrations, but once established, our government programs are just as fiercely defended. Liberals agitate for more government programs knowing that they create their own self-perpetuating constituencies and chip away at our culture of self-reliance. For now, that culture is still robust, as American exceptionalism remains stubbornly exceptional.

If you really want sweeping French-style social-welfare programs and repressive tax rates, your only alternative is to, like the American expats Moore glorifies in his movie, move to France.

© 2007 by King Features Syndicate

[SteveMcKing]

the absolutely ... unrepentant Hitler-loving Nazi to the very end of her entire century of life

I've read mostly the opposite. Where did you read that she remained a Nazi?

It's possible she lied, of course. You can't know what someone is thinking.

[elcid1970]

Frau Riefenstahl gave an interview when she was well into her nineties. She said that she found Hitler to be a nice man, and that neither she nor the Fuehrer knew anything about atrocities committed against the Jews.

“I did nothing wrong, Hitler did nothing wrong, Germany did nothing wrong.”

That mostly summed up Frau Riefenstahl’s attitude toward 1939-1945.

[Corporate Law]

I have to give credit to the many unnamed Freepers who have used this moniker before me and which I then gladly stole for my own use. I think it says it all.

[Delacon]

American exceptionalism is a term I don’t see often enough. I am an unabashed American exceptionalist. Except no imitations. Good article ND.

[Delacon]

Republican ethos and ideas about nationhood
Proponents of American exceptionalism argue that the United States is exceptional in that it was founded on a set of republican ideals, rather than on a common heritage, ethnicity, or ruling elite. In the formulation of President Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, America is a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. In this view, American is inextricably connected with liberty and equality. It is claimed that America has often acted to promote these ideals abroad, most notably in the First and Second World Wars, in the Cold War and today in the Iraq War. Critics argue that American policy in these conflicts was more motivated by economic or military self-interest than an actual desire to spread these ideals, and point to an extensive history of using South American nations as slave economies, suppressing democratic revolutions against US-backed dictators when necessary.

The United States’ policies have been characterized since their inception by a system of federalism and checks and balances, which were designed to prevent any person, faction, region, or government organ from becoming too powerful. Some American exceptionalists argue that this system and the accompanying distrust of concentrated power prevent the United States from suffering a “tyranny of the majority”, and also that it allows citizens to live in a locality whose laws reflect that citizen’s values. A consequence of this political system is that laws can vary greatly across the country. Critics of American exceptionalism maintain that this system merely replaces the power of the national majority over states with power by the states over local entities. On balance, the American political system arguably allows more local dominance but prevents more national dominance than does a more unitary system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism#Republican_ethos_and_ideas_about_nationhood

[Nebr FAL owner]

Also good looking . As opposed to The bloated socialist toad Micheal Moore.