Way back in my youth, I got a close up look at Progressivism. This was back in the early Reagan years when I was a part time employee for a Congressman. I was just a kid and a nobody, but the wife of the rep took a liking to me and that gave me the run of the place, so to speak. I used to have lunch with the Congressman two or three days a week. He was a nice man, but about as interesting as vanilla ice cream. That’s true of every elected official I met in Washington. privately, they were very dull.
The interesting people were the aides and activists. The ones on the Right were full of excitement about finally turning back the liberal tide. Even as a kid, I thought they were delusional, but they were fun. On the other hand, the old liberals defending the status quo were scary. They were deadly serious and ideology was everything. These were not people interested in free and open debate. They wanted to win and they were not interested in free-thinkers or critics in their midst.
The lesson I have carried with me ever since is this. Unless and until the Right comes to terms with what they are facing, America is doomed. These are not people with whom you can reason or compromise. They are fanatics. More important, their fanaticism transcends any sense of propriety. They will use any means necessary to destroy anyone who is seen as an obstacle. These are evil people who exist to undermines their host societies, which they loath and detest with all of their being.
The Bush years cured me of any hope for the American Right. Nice people in many cases. The problem is they are all like Jonah Goldberg. They make wonderful arguments in defense of civilization. They are often very good at warding off the zombie attacks from the Left. Their defect is they think the Left is just a bunch of people mistaken on matters of fact or reason. That’s not the case. The Left is a cult of lunatics no different from Islam. There’s no reasoning with them.
Until civilized people take the same view of the cult that sprung up on Rue Saint-Jacques, civilization is doomed. Maybe that’s starting to happen. This column by Kevin Williamson on NRO, of all places, takes an unvarnished view of the death cult running the culture.
The convocation of clowns on the left screeched with one semi-literate and inchoate voice when my colleague Jonah Goldberg, borrowing the precise words of one of their own, titled a book Liberal Fascism. Most of them didn’t read it, but the ones who did apparently took what was intended as criticism and read it as a blueprint for political action.
Welcome to the Liberal Gulag.
That term may be perverse, but it is not an exaggeration. Mr. Weinstein specifically called for political activists, ranging from commentators to think-tank researchers, to be locked in cages as punishment for their political beliefs. “Those denialists should face jail,” he wrote. “You still can’t” — banality alert! — “yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You shouldn’t be able to yell ‘balderdash’ at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year.” “Balderdash” — a felony. At the risk of being repetitious, let’s dwell on that for a minute: The Left is calling on people to be prosecuted for speaking their minds regarding their beliefs on an important public-policy question that is, as a political matter, the subject of hot dispute. That is the stuff of Soviet repression.
But then Soviet-style repression has long been a dream of the American Left. Consider the abuses of psychiatry that were the great hallmark of the Soviet way, and then consider that there is a cottage industry today among left-wing psychiatrists arguing that conservative political views represent a form of mental disorder. That psychiatric approach to suppressing dissent has spread quickly through the intellectual sewers of the Left, with writers everywhere from Daily Kos to Salon diagnosing instances of “RWA” — right-wing authoritarian — disorder among their political rivals. Robert Altemeyer, the father of this asinine school of so-called thought, denies that there exists such a thing as a left-wing authoritarian.
If Mr. Weinstein’s preferred method of enforcing intellectual conformity — coercion through state violence — seems extreme, consider that the jihad against Brendan Eich of Mozilla was no simple exercise in the operations of civil society. (Even if it were, it still would have been wrong; it is not as though social pressure cannot be put to illiberal and contemptible ends, something that gay-rights activists, of all people, should appreciate.) Mr. Weinstein’s victims of state repression are only hypothetical; Mr. Eich is a victim of state suppression in fact. His donation of $1,000 to a Proposition 8 group was made public through the commission of a crime by political powers — namely, the leaking of confidential IRS data to left-wing groups by their sympathizers within the agency. The leak was not intended to destroy Mr. Eich but rather to destroy Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign; Mr. Eich is nonetheless entitled to expect justice from the Department of Justice. Congress believes that it knows who the leaker is; but he has not been, and almost certainly will not be, prosecuted for his crimes. The reason for that is that the current management of the Department of Justice sympathizes with his political positions and does not wish to intervene to prevent the abuse — at the hands of government officials — of those it regards as its political enemies.
I’ve mentioned a few times that the Obama administration has been doing, with reckless abandon, what Nixon was merely accused of doing, in the articles of impeachment drawn up by Congress. If you want to measure how far down the pit we have fallen, ponder that for a second. Nixon was forced out because he contemplated doing that which we associated with authoritarianism. Today, the mass media celebrates a President using the IRS as a political weapon, conducting political prosecutions, spying on the citizens and refusing to enforce the people’s laws.
Williamson is mostly a faker, so no one should think he is anything but posing here or that the Right is starting wise up. The only way to dig out the fanatics from the culture is through the rough methods of revolution. I don’t see that happening. Instead, we will stagger on toward a soft, feminine authoritarianism. Heretics will be exiled to the fringes of life, but not thrown into camps. A sort or weird and semi-violent Shakerism among whites will eventually give way to a Latin authoritarianism as the white population is over run my Hispanic peasants from the south.
” The problem is they are all like Jonah Goldberg. They make wonderful arguments in defense of civilization.”
What utter bollocks, the clown is a rabid Zionist perfectly prepared to usher America into fascism if it achieves his goals.
Facts and reason are totally ineffective on liberals. I have, however, had some limited success with pliers and a blowtorch.
I’m thinking Eich was a soft target. I never heard of him and wouldn’t care what his feelings are personally. It’s a chipping away at what the left sees at the opposition. Silence the little guy. In the past I’d say this type of thing is off in the distant and doesn’t affect me. But now I’ve come to realize it’s getting closer and closer to where I may not have or express opinions openly. I think that’s where this has the potential to go. That is what scares me. Where have we seen this before?
America’s feminine fascist future sounds about right, maybe Hunger Games and Divergent aren’t so far off the mark. But I’d add that whites will eventually be far more authoritarian, violent, and repressive than usually occurs under Latin authoritarian leaders. The tide of illegal aliens will turn – it’s beginning to already – as America’s instability become ever more apparent.
Your analysis, and Williamson’s, is basically spot on. The Left in America is a real and growing threat that should concern the world. Soetoro has accelerated America’s fall into leftist liberal fascism, you see it in a thousand small ways in America today.
I also agree that Jonah Goldberg shares the commendable and common delusion of the right that one can convince liberals. You can’t, it’s like negotiating with Palestinians.
And last, it seems very unlikely that the right in the USA will change their ways, they’ll continue bowing their head before their executioners while wondering how it all could go so wrong. What shelters liberals and disarms conservatives is the cult of American exceptionalism, which added to the normalcy bias, makes it impossible for most Americans, leftists and conservatives alike, to believe that the current mess in American political life won’t eventually be resolved. It truly won’t be, because the Left is not interested in a resolution.
The general decline will continue, the executive’s use of bureaucratic departments as instruments of political surveillance and repression will escalate. And the right has little inclination to reverse that tide. So it’ll likely keep getting worse until the economy collapses, or something worse.