As part of their dogma, the Left believes society only operates “fairly” when more power is concentrated in the Federal Government and fewer rights are exercised independently by individuals. In their view, one of the major purposes of the Government is to equalize outcomes across society (try to find that in the Constitution). Note that it’s the equality of outcomes, not equality of opportunities, that is their definition of fairness. To achieve that goal, Liberals need an excuse to take rights and responsibilities from individuals and shift that power to the Government. Then that Governmental power can be used to institutionalize fairness by passing laws and regulations that provide for the equality of outcomes across society. However in spite of these plans, the Left has a major cultural roadblock in their way. One of our traditional American values is to treasure and defend our individual rights. When Americans are thinking rationally, we rarely, if ever, voluntarily give up any of our rights.

When the Liberals want to influence American opinion on an issue, they need to overcome that obstacle. To do so, they use a consistent formula to warp the public perception in their favor. Their approach does not involve an in-depth analysis of the facts with the subsequent generation of possible alternatives to be evaluated. Frankly facts get in their way. Their strategy is simply based on manipulating the public’s emotions. Liberals want to generate guilty feelings or stir up hate or trigger rage. Their tactic is to generate strong emotions in the public and with those emotions shut down rational thought. Create a crisis. Create an injustice. Pretend there is no time to think about, discuss, or even read the bill. We have to act now! Sound familiar?

The Left knows that if they can get people to act on emotion, they can convince the public to accept changes that they would never rationally support. This approach is how the Left incrementally pushes forward their “causes” which slowly erode individual rights and responsibilities. As individual rights are eroded, the Left shifts that authority and power to Government bureaucrats and agencies. Obamacare is a real life example of how the Left forced Government run healthcare down our throats in spite of the fact that a majority of the voters wanted nothing to do with it.

The Liberal’s formula for manipulating public opinion comes straight from Sal Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals. The three-step process is:

1) Create a Victim (even if one doesn’t exist)
2) Identify the Villain (even if they aren’t responsible)
3) Position Government as the Solution (to increase centralized power)

The first step is to create a Victim. It is easy for the Left to create victims. A victim is anyone who doesn’t want to take responsibility for their own actions or inactions. Individuals who aren’t willing to be proactive to improve their position in life are quite willing to accept the message that it’s someone else’s fault that they don’t have as much money, as nice of a house, an education, an insurance plan or the job that another person has. Envy is the emotion the Left uses to manipulate individuals into believing that they are victims. After all, if Tom has something you don’t, that isn’t “fair”. Then the individual jumps to the conclusion, “if it isn’t fair, I am being taken advantage of and someone needs to correct the injustice.” For the Left, the victim is a necessary pawn in their chess game. The victim the Left created for Obamacare was anyone who didn’t have medical insurance. The Liberals conveniently ignored the fact that included in their “class of victims” were people who:

– could afford health insurance or directly pay for healthcare but chose not to purchase it
– were in the U.S. illegally and thus shouldn’t even be in the country causing additional stress on our healthcare system
– could receive care, under existing laws, from hospitals, clinics and healthcare facilities across the U.S. without insurance if they had critical or life threatening condition

The next step is to identify the Villain. Again, it is easy for the Left to identify a villain in any situation. For their purposes, a villain is anyone who has something that another person does not. Their villain doesn’t need to be responsible for the victim’s plight. Their villain simply needs to have something that the victim does not have. In Obamacare, the villains were pharmaceutical companies and rich people. “Rich” people are the default villains for the Left so class envy is one of their favorite strategies. However the Left’s definition of “rich” depends upon who they are talking to at the moment. Rich is anyone who makes more than their current audience. That’s why in Obamacare the evil rich people were sometimes individuals who made over $1 million but at other times were people making $200,000 or $250,000. In the end, Obamacare involves taking fees and taxes from most working Americans. So it appears for their purposes, they thought we all were rich.

The Left’s final step is to position the Government as the ultimate solution for the problem. Since they have pitted one group in society (the victims) against another group in society (the villains), the Liberals feel like they now have generated sufficient emotion (guilt, hate or rage) to make their move. Pitting one group against the other is part of the distraction they create so that in the chaos we won’t pay attention to what they are doing in the background. As the solution to the conflict, they position the Government as the only party with the power to defend the victim from the villain. After all, the Government can correct the injustice and make things more “fair”.

Enforcing fairness fits the Left’s ultimate goal of adding more and more power to the Government and taking more and more rights and responsibilities from individuals. It is often said that “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” For Liberals, “if all you want is a Government program, anybody can be made into either a victim or villain.” The Left knows that once power is granted to a Government program, that program rarely goes away. Thus slowly and incrementally they shift rights from we the people to the Government bureaucracy. The growth in the Government bureaucracy causes the need for more and more of our tax dollars to feed the beast. This need to extract more and more tax dollars from the public is the ultimate manifestation of the other major objective of the Left: the redistribution of wealth.

So the next time the Government is attempting to take more and more of your paycheck, realize you’ve already lost something more precious than money. The money they take from you today is to pay for the Government control over your rights that they took away from you yesterday. Now who’s the victim?