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Redstate.com...
Straight Into Darkness
Posted by Repair_Man_Jack
Tuesday, February 22nd
Image at http://visualideology.asoe.net/primary/ - check it out
2010 became the year many Americans realized that the emperor stood
shivering in the nude. Liberalism was dead, the Liberals had killed it;
what now would the Liberals do? The impact of this Nietzsche-like
revelation has awakened the American conscience to the existence of a
major crisis. Namely, America is run, lock, stock, and barrel by a set
of governments designed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They are designed
to execute an antiquated vision of the Liberal ideology that will lead
our people nowhere except to cataclysmic failure.
Conrad Black explicitly describes why the great system set up by
Franklin Roosevelt became a casualty of The Great Society of Lyndon
Baines Johnson.
Under Kennedy and Johnson and their inept Democratic successors,
liberalism ceased to be perceived as helping the deserving and instead
became taking money from those who had earned it and giving it to those
who hadn’t in exchange for their votes. - (HT: The American Spectator)
At this juncture, Liberalism was philosophically dead but, like a
runaway truck on a downhill, icy road, it ran forward on inertia.
Vote-bribing interest groups with the promise of a Visigoth Holiday at
the Gold Man’s expense may be immoral, but nobody parsing the 2008
Election returns would argue with its potential to bring victories.
Thus, as long as it worked for the Liberals, Liberalism would be
defended to the hilt. This natural human reaction to potentially
adverse change betrayed the core values of the Liberal experiment.
Walter Russell Mead describes the morphing of Liberalism’s
philosophical crisis into a moral problem as well.
…most of what passes for liberal and progressive politics is a
conservative reaction against economic and social changes that the left
doesn’t like. The people who call themselves liberal in the United
States today are fighting desperate rearguard actions to save policies
and institutions that are old and established, that once served a noble
purpose, but that now need fundamental reform (and perhaps in some
cases abolition) lest they thwart the very purposes for which they were
once made. (HT: The American Interest)
This juxtaposition forced the Modern Left to behave in much the same
way they succeeded in condemning former generations of Conservatives
for behaving. Perhaps having inhaled too deeply of the founding beliefs
of LBJ’s Great Society; the Liberals came to believe they could build a
more perfect world. To create this perfect world, they fell under the
spell of an age-old messianic urge. Ernest Steinberg of SUNY Buffalo
describes this new strain of Leftist thought as Purificationism. In a
2009 paper, entitled “Purifying The World. What the New Radical
Ideology Stands For,” he makes the following, dare I say radical,
claims about the Left.
The past decade has seen the coalescence of a new ideology that
envisions social movements in a cataclysmic struggle against global
capitalist Empire. Controlled by U.S. militarism and multinational
corporations, in cahoots with Zionism, Empire contaminates environments
and destroys cultures. Its defeat will bring about a new era of social
justice and sustainable development, in which the diverse cultures
harmoniously share the earth. Is this a totalitarian ideology? From
fascist and communist precedents, we learn that lovers of renewed
humanity are not sufficiently motivated by abstract ideals. They must
also identify humanity’s enemy, the cause of all suffering. Equipped
with a scapegoat, diverse communities can achieve solidarity through
shared execration. (HT: Yale University)
So we’ve established the following regarding the Left. The quest for
political power has tainted the Left. Thus Social Justice has
degenerated into vote buying. This vacuum where their moral principals
should reside has resulted in a Consequentialist pushback from the
people constantly getting squeezed for all of the vote-buying bribes.
But, rather than realizing this path was in error, the Modern Left has
doubled down on the corruption and adopted an ideology that dehumanizes
all who disagree. It casts the modern political debate as a Liberal
Crusade to thwart, once and for all, the unrighteous Capitalist,
Imperialist, Phallo-Centric Pigs of Western Society.
So how come is it that Barack Obama didn’t lose Election 2008 by about
25%?
Here the Hegelian Dialectic is instructive. Like The Newtonian Laws of
Motion, Hegel expostulates that a system in power will remain enthroned
until a major crisis knocks it flat off of its perch. As Conrad Black
describes it, the vast dislocations of The Great Depression resulted in
America settling on Rooseveltian Liberalism as its governing social
model. Walter Russell Mead calls this the Blue Social Model, Mead
describes this stability below.
In the old system, both blue collar and white collar workers hold
stable jobs, a professional career civil service administers a growing
state, with living standards for all social classes steadily rising
while the gaps between the classes remain fairly stable, and with an
increasing ‘social dividend’ being paid out in various forms… (HT: The
American Interest)
As long as Barack Obama claimed he could guarantee us all of that, he
was golden. As long as he could argue that he represented the party of
government, and that government would fix all that the careless
capitalists had broken, he was untouchable. Until that illusion broke
apart, Liberalism would win regardless of how corrupt and
non-functional it had become.
Yet now that entire contract Liberalism made with America has been
utterly breached. Two entire generations have now grown up well aware
that they will probably never have things as good as their parents did.
They now are being mined by the generations that came before so that
our current government can maintain the impossible promises it made to
those who came of age after WWII. Social Security and Medicare are
untenable and eventually will fail to pay the beneficiaries unless
radically reformed.
The stability and security of government employment has grown to
increasingly drain the dwindling resources of the private sector
taxpayers. What has gone shamefully unmentioned is the tenure
commensurate with government employment. As a Civil Servant, I have
significant job security; when I worked as a salesman, in the big, bad,
real world, I was always day-to-day.
As a Federal Employee, I gripe that I pay a whole lot more of my
pension plan and health coverage than the school teachers do in
Wisconsin. Back when I worked on commission, retirement planning
involved selling my nuts off and health insurance consisted of looking
both ways before I crossed the street. With that in mind, I remain
stunned and amazed at exactly how civil the Tea Party Movement has thus
far remained. The 1773 Crowd has to feel that the ladder they were
promised out of the Abyss of social poverty has been pulled up by an
evil malefactor that looks down upon them and insultingly laughs.
Thus I look at men like Governor Walker in Wisconsin and Governor
Christie in New Jersey as America’s heroes; standing on the wall at a
vital juncture in our history. The unions and other Liberal interest
groups have to have their power reduced. We can no longer afford the
injustice that Liberalism has become. The American people appreciate
public school teachers, but they will not continue to pay for their
pensions when their retirement plan is to go sell their nuts off.
Thus the American Conservative must support our stalwart governors.
They are the peaceful resolution of the crisis triggered by the
philosophical, moral and ethical failures of modern American
Liberalism. The only pathways other than what Gov. Walker and Gov
Christie propose will only lead America straight into darkness.
(HT: Faye Kellerman) for an awesome idea for a title.
Read it at Redstate
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