Agenda: Grinding America Down

Curtis Bowers, an Idaho Republican has produced a well-made, eloquent film which tells you where the Conservative critics of the Obama administration get their ideas from. It is called Agenda: Grinding America Down; and begins with thunderclaps and military music.

You might think this is a pointless link, but in last weekend's Independent there was an article on Uganda which argued that the law against homosexuality that has been passed in that country is the result of the activism of Christian 'evangelists' (or homophobes) who have been converting people to their message since the fall of Idi Amin in 1979, notably the 'International House of Prayer' and a man called Pastor Scott Lively who in addition to his work in Uganda campaigned for Russia to criminalise the 'advocacy of homosexuality'.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...s-9193593.html

The film relies on a lot of history to prove its points, while at the same distorting history; as a coherent statement of what Conservatives believe it is in fact, incoherent. I have provided the vimeo link to the 98 minute film because the quality of the YouTube full version is not as good.

In essence, Bowers argues that what has made America 'the greatest country in all world history' has been its family values, its belief in God, and free markets.

Americans have been struggling against a Communist movement which did not die in 1989, it just changed its name to continue a campaign begun by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin. The key tools of attack that the socialists have used to seize state power have not been bombs, but public policy. Using a continuously expanding graph, Bowers shows how the communist movement that began with Nietszche, Marx and Darwin -what all three have in common is a disbelief in God- begat the Fabian Society, which begat the Frankfurt School, which begat Saul Alinsky who begat the Students for a Democratic Society, which begat the Weather Underground one of whose former leaders is a personal friend of Obama; and the aformentioned people and groups plus the feminist movement, the homosexual movement, and the environmental movement all found their natural home in the Democrat Party whose President is the Communist in the White House.

The crucial tools in this campaign have been:

Public policy -using education to groom a generation of Americans to believe they have rights and entitlements that should be met by the Government, thereby creating, since the 1960s a huge welfare programme which raises taxes to take money from the Middle Class who work and give it to people who do nothing. (At no point in the film is unemployment mentioned or explained).

Feminism -again, through education and other campaigns, the aim is to convince American women they are victims, that motherhood and family life are unnatural. As Phyllis Schlafly says in the film the American woman, far from being a victim, is 'the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the earth'.

Homosexuality -courtesy of the Mattachine Society, American have been groomed to believe that homosexuality is normal, that families do not need fathers.

The Media -Hollywood and the Media (press, tv) have also been crucial tools of subversion in the promotion of Homosexuality and the erosion of American family values. Rupert Murdoch never gets a mention, which is probably not a surprise. The profusion of Hollywood names who have 'come out' to lead the charge against the American family is also oddly small...

The Environmental movement whose aim is to so overburden business with regulation and red tape as to make it fail.

There are many absurdities in this programme. Bowers claims that Communism could have died with Marx in 1883 because only 9 people attended his funeral, completely oblivious of the existence of the German Social Democratic Party, founded with Marx's blessing in 1878 -which was emerging as the largest single party in the German Parliament with millions of voters, but which had more or less abandoned Marxism by 1918 although it did not formally ditch its original constitution until 1959.

The ignorance of Europe is astounding. The campaign to turn people into members of 'socialistic' societies has been successful in Europe- as one man puts it in the film: 'Europe is lost', as if Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Helmut Kohl, Silvio Berlusconi and Boris Yeltsin had never existed.

The crux of the film is the belief that Americans have been deliberately detached from the moral anchors that made America great -what counts is the family, Christian worship, and free markets. Note that Christian worship means the Bible is to be taken as the 'revealed' word of God not the 'social religion' of un-named sects; and the fact that the same people who argue for the nuclear family are unable to present the life of Jesus as their model, given that as far as we can ascertain Jesus lived in what they would think of as a hippie commune. Although it is implied at the end that Islam might be a threat to American family values, it is chilling to think that the guru of many Jihadis, Sayed Qutb believed the Quran was the 'revealed word of God', and that capitalism had in fact subverted family values -his family values are not much different from Bowers, in fact. Just swap Jesus for Muhammad.

The appeal to an America of free markets, low taxes and military strength extols Ronald Reagan, while choosing to ignore the millions of people who lost their jobs in the 1980s, or the simple fact that Reagan left behind the largest public deficit in American history.

Bowers claims that the environmental movement in the 1990s was small, whereas in fact the Sierra Club (1892), the National Audoban Society (1905) and the Wilderness Society (1935), far from being insignificant used the 1970 Environmental Protection Act signed into law by Richard Nixon to successfully delay the industrialisation of Alaska by five years and in the process created important standards of environmental monitoring that most people think corporations ought to honour.

Bowers used the truly awful figures of mass murder in the Nazi and Communist countries of Europe (and communism and nazism are presented as the same thing) to relieve the USA of any blame for large numbers of casualties at any time in its history, at home or abroad.

The role of free markets is taken for granted, yet no awareness of how this developed in the golden age is made. For example, millions of Americans in history relied on small local banks from New York to California, yet as Calomiris and Haber point out, there have been 14 banking crises in the US in the past 180 years, but only two in Canada, and they were in 1837 and 1839 and relatively mild compared to the banking collapses in the USA (Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber, Fragile by Design. The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit, Princeton University Press, 2014).

I welcome political debate from all sorts of positions, it is what makes democracy worthwhile. I cannot welcome deliberate distortions of history or bogus arguments, but I guess that is part of the mix. We should always question the powers of government, the taxes that are raised and what is done with them, and I see nothing wrong with family life -or homosexuality, or the environmental campaigns whose aim is in fact to preserve nature rather than destroy business. The origins of the people of the USA, and of Europe, is diverse -we are not always 'white' or 'middle class' or Christian or heterosexual, and I see this diversity as a strength not a weakness.

Anyway do watch the film if you want to.

My first attempt to load the link failed, here is the url. There is another version on YouTube

AGENDA: Grinding America Down (Full Movie) FREE to watch for a limited time! on Vimeo

Agenda: Grinding America Down (Legendado) - YouTube