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Opening Arguments

Group think

I started out liking Julian Castro's keynote speech at the Democratic convention last night. The first few minutes, with its tale of generational aspirations, would have been warmly greeted at the Republican convention. His grandmother sacrificed in order to give a better life to her daughter, who then sacrificed to give better lives to her children. That's the American story, right?

But then, being the good progressive that he is, he naturally had to veer away from individual effort and into collectivist dogma:

America didn’t become the land of opportunity by accident. My grandmother’s generation and generations before always saw beyond the horizons of their own lives and their own circumstances. They believed that opportunity created today would lead to prosperity tomorrow. That’s the country they envisioned, and that’s the country they helped build. The roads and bridges they built, the schools and universities they created, the rights they fought for and won—these opened the doors to a decent job, a secure retirement, the chance for your children to do better than you did.

It's a variation of "You didn't build that." Government isn't there to protect your rights so you can seize opportunities. It's there to create the opportunites. And then build the roads and bridges to get you from one opportunity to another!

The whole evening was a weird exercise in trying to blend American individualism into a group obligation while making it sound like anything but that. Castro used "investment" or one of its forms nine times in its speech. I bet if you counted up all the times it was used in all the speeches last night, the number would approach triple digits. "Invest" means "spend," of course, either "tax and spend" or "borrow and spend" depending. But they can't actually admit that.

The essence of the evening was one video, now being disavowed by the national Democrats,  shown not to the TV audience but to those in attendance, which proclaimed: "Government is the only thing we all belong do." That's not just wrong. It's downright creepy.

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