Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

[Nemo888]

This standard all or nothing posturing guarantees your marginalization in the political landscape.

 

[Reccesoldier]

This standard all or nothing posturing guarantees your marginalization in the political landscape.

Do you have anything to add to the debate or are you going to troll just for fun?

How about a "better idea"...

 

[a_majoor]

As the Blogger says, it is amusing to see cultural relativists fighting against each other. (How do relativeists define what is worth fighting for anyway?)

http://unambig.blogspot.com/2007/11/but-some-animals-are-more-equal-than.html

Wednesday, November 14, 2007
But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others...

Quebec's Council on the Status of Women (CSF) is in trouble with another status group, the Montreal Multicultural Women's Coalition, for allegedly creating a "hierarchy" of human rights. It's incredible when you can get one social relativist fighting against a cultural relativist over the same thing: the advancement of a people based on their gender. It's an interesting thing to talk about equality, when one belongs to a group which seeks the improvement of status of one kind of human being alone. Nevertheless, I agree with the general thrust of the CSF in context with the multicultural disagreement.

Annie Lessard writes in The Suburban that the recent troubles began when the CSF stated that the equality of the sexes is paramount in cases where equality could be compromised by religious freedoms [an allusion to the Islamic gender apartheid]. The CSF wants the Quebec Charter of Rights to add the provision that government officials cannot display religious symbols at work, and that education should prioritize gender equality over religious and cultural considerations.

Ms.Lessard rightly points out that the "hierarchy of rights" argument from the multiculturalists is a "red herring":

    The international law of human rights establishes an undeniable hierarchy of rights. There are many conventions whose purpose is precisely to fight against the exploitation of women and girls by religious and cultural creeds. As for the Canadian Charter of Rights, it contains a specific provision guaranteeing equality between men and women. This provision is in addition to the provision prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender. This additional provision (section 28) reflects a Canadian value that is so fundamental that it takes precedence over all other provisions of the Canadian Charter, including those guaranteeing freedom of religion and the promotion of Canadian multiculturalism.



The red herring is the same tried and tired argument of the multiculturalists who use cultural relativism to devalue Canadian rights by accusing those who disagree of being ethnocentric neo-colonialists, racist and xenophobic, or other rhetorical garbage. Ms.Lessard argues that a Muslim teacher in a burqa presents an obvious conflict of interest from one who is responsible to provide an education of sexual equality while clothed in the fabric of a symbol of gender oppression.

In essence, Muslims want the right to subjugate women as their religious traditions and customs require, while Canadians want the rights of secular gender equality to supersede. It's not about a hierarchy of rights. It is a basic Canadian right to be free from the religious influence of a culture which seeks to use "cultural equality" in a relativist triumph to give them the right to treat women like garbage.

Posted by Raphael Alexander at 3:32 PM

 

[Greymatters]

"The red herring is the same tried and tired argument of the multiculturalists who use cultural relativism to devalue Canadian rights by accusing those who disagree of being ethnocentric neo-colonialists, racist and xenophobic, or other rhetorical garbage. Ms.Lessard argues that a Muslim teacher in a burqa presents an obvious conflict of interest from one who is responsible to provide an education of sexual equality while clothed in the fabric of a symbol of gender oppression.  In essence, Muslims want the right to subjugate women as their religious traditions and customs require, while Canadians want the rights of secular gender equality to supersede. It's not about a hierarchy of rights. It is a basic Canadian right to be free from the religious influence of a culture which seeks to use "cultural equality" in a relativist triumph to give them the right to treat women like garbage."

Well written! 

 

[Reccesoldier]

This example (the burka'd teacher) doesn't pass the test of logic.  If she (the teacher) were truly an example of Islamic subjugation of women she not only would not be in a classroom (either as a teacher or as a student) but she would certainly not have a job.

Seems to me that the decision to wear the burka (in this individual example) is more correctly tied to culture rather than discrimination.

Is the wearing of a yamika also a sign of religious intolerance?

 

[IN HOC SIGNO]

or a crucifix?

 

[a_majoor]

Apparently, the NDP are taking "group rights" to is logical conclusion. No mention in this plan of the individual qualifications of the proposed candidates:

http://hallsofmacadamia.blogspot.com/2007/11/good-news-for.html

Good news for...

Wheelchair-bound, Tongan, lesbian immigrants with an interest in politics...

    The plan, drafted by a party committee over two years, says:

    -Thirty per cent of constituencies not held by New Democrats will be designated for female candidates.

    -Ten per cent of such constituencies will be designated for candidates from “under-represented groups,” notably youth, persons of colour, the disabled, aboriginal people and those who are either gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

    -When an incumbent New Democrat does not seek re-election, the constituency will be designated automatically for women candidates to ensure woman are running in seats where New Democrats have been previously elected.

Your New Democratic Autocratic Party has spoken.

 

[Greymatters]

Apparently, the NDP are taking "group rights" to is logical conclusion. No mention in this plan of the individual qualifications of the proposed candidates:
http://hallsofmacadamia.blogspot.com/2007/11/good-news-for.html 

That makes limited sense.  Its commendable to promote the rights of groups of minority groups, but there needs to be (a) some qualities and credentials to back them up, not just a niche in the Human Rights Act, and (b) not everybody will want to vote for a candidate who got nominated just because they filled a blank spot on the chart. 

 

[IN HOC SIGNO]

I look at this way, it will keep them limited to the fringes of the political spectrum where they belong.

 

[a_majoor]

Group and identity politics in its full, toxic, bloom. HT to Jonathan Kay for being able to sit through this and report:

http://communities.canada.com/nationalpost/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2007/11/18/jonathan-kay-adventures-among-the-anti-racists.aspx

Full Comment
Jonathan Kay: Adventures among the anti-racists

One of the nice things about writing an op-ed column for this newspaper is that you get invited to speak on a lot of "media panels" at academic conferences. I flatter myself to think people are genuinely interested in what I have to say. But I suspect the main reason I get invited is that I provide "balance": Even when a confab is wall-to-wall campus lefties and CBC types, the words National Post on my podium placard signal there's at least one right-wing maniac in the house.

Which is to say, I'm used to being the odd man out. But I've never felt quite so odd as I did last week at Combating Hatred, a day-long biennial anti-racism conference hosted by the University of Toronto for the benefit of the city’s lawyers, judges, police officers, educators and government workers.

My panel (“The Media: Part of the problem or part of the solution”) didn’t start till the late morning. But I showed up a few hours early to enjoy the free breakfast and listen to the keynote speaker, a native activist and lawyer named Donald Worme.

And I'm glad I did, because a large part of Worme's speech was dedicated to the delightful theme Why Jonathan Kay Is a Racist.

Worme warmed up the crowd with a few jokes ("My Indian name is 'Dances With Worms.’”) But then he got right into it, quoting at length from an article I’d written in this space last month called Off The Reservation, which argued that out system of native reserves is inhumane, and should be dismantled for the good of aboriginals themselves. To Worme's mind, the article established me as nothing less than a bona fide hate criminal. He said I wanted natives to “cease to exist as a people,” that I was calling for the “destruction” of First Nations and – most outrageously – that I was an advocate of “a form of ‘final solution.’”

And all this while I was 100 feet away, eating a blueberry muffin and drinking a double-double.

After Worme finished comparing me to the Nazis, he then went on to excoriate Margaret Wente of The Globe and Mail, who wrote a brilliant column last month about abused native children who are put at risk when politically correct government officials refuse to place them with white families. Between the two hit jobs, the overarching theme for the day had been established: Challenging the received pieties of identity politics renders you a presumptive racist.

In fact, Worme proved to be tame compared to some of the speakers that followed. One anti-Black activist, for instance, claimed (without evidence) that Canada’s leaders “validate racism,” and argued that special Afro-centric schools should be set up for Toronto’s blacks because their culture is being systematically “denigrated” in multiracial public schools. Then he made my jaw drop by quoting – not once, but twice – from the poetry of Amiri Baraka, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist who believes Jews were warned to stay away from the Twin Towers on 9/11.

(I was further astonished to find out that this same activist is also a “consultant” who is employed by corporations seeking to rid their workforces of racism. I wonder how his client base would react if they knew that his literary hero is the same African-American “poet” who wrote these charming lines: “Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed / Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?”)

Next came a Muslim activist who upped the ante by arguing that things in Canada are even worse than in Pakistan, where political dissidents get thrown into jail and Sunni suicide bombers explode themselves in Shiite mosques. Hatred in Pakistan, she argued, at least had the advantage of being overt. Here in Canada, on the other hand, it is subtle and hidden – which apparently makes it much more invidious.

Then my panel began, and a very nice middle-aged female academic launched into a stream of jargon-laden duckspeak about “white privilege,” “racialized spaces” and “existing paradigms of public discourse in the media.” I must admit to being rendered slightly dozy by the onslaught of post-grad verbiage. But the larger point seemed to be that media hotheads like me shouldn’t be allowed to write the sort of thing that the Donald Wormes of the world find offensive.

By the time my turn was up, I'd thrown out my prepared speech in favour of a strenuous take-down of what I'd just heard. All of it, I said, was proof that radical anti-racism had become not only a cult of censorship, but a mental toxin as irrational and destructive as racism itself.

And since I was in the mood to make friends, I went further. I told the crowd that conferences like these were actually hurting minority communities by giving them a one-size-fits-all excuse to avoid confronting their problems. Talk about gang culture, AWOL fathers, teen motherhood and shocking crime statistics in black communities, and “diversity consultants” accuse you of racism. Connect the dots between Canada’s radicalized mosques and the terror threat, and you get accused of Islamophobia. Write about the economic dysfunction and social pathologies that fester on native reserves, and Donald Worme accuses you of penning a new Mein Kampf.

By this point, a few audience members were audibly sneering at the angry right-wing freak who, for reasons known only to himself, was ruining this otherwise respectable festival of white guilt. But not everyone forgot their manners. During the Q&A, the moderator – a Globe and Mail journalist, no less – was gracious enough to give me ample time for rebuttal, even when the conference organizer herself broke protocol (by her own admission) by rising from her chair to denounce my views. There were a few other predictable barbs. (One school-board official, for instance, got up to tell me that I had no right to comment on issues affecting black people because I wasn't black.) But generally, the discourse was civil. Which is to say that no one else compared me to Hitler.

In any case, I left the conference feeling more pity than anger. For all their claim to progressive politics, there is something slightly old-fashioned about the people who run these conferences. Many of them have been fighting the evil of racism since the early days. And they have chalked up some spectacular successes during that time: the anti-discrimination provisions in the Charter of Rights, human-rights tribunals in every province, hate-speech laws, gay marriage, etc. Even more importantly, they have managed to make race hatred the ultimate taboo – a subject that can get you fired from any job or ostracized at any social gathering. But instead of taking a bow and moving on, the anti-racism industry is still chugging, seeking desperately to justify its existence by trumpeting more implausible and exotic theories of discrimination.

As I sat there, I did indeed feel quite “privileged” – though not because of my race. It was because I am an opinion journalist who can write about these issues candidly. But the jurists, NGO types, tenured academics and public servants staring back at me from the audience enjoyed no such freedom. Whether they believed the anti-racism orthodoxy or not, they inhabit politically correct professional milieus that require them to at least pretend to believe it. For these people, anti-racism has become a sort of communist political re-education camp – one you can never leave.

Most perversely of all, many of these same folks pay for their indoctrination out of their own pocket. When I flipped to the list of conference “Donors & Sponsors,” I found a list of some of Toronto’s best-known law firms and financial-services companies. As a farcical metaphor for the guilty attitude of Canada’s white elites, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect vignette: a parade of suits and ties slapping down thousands of dollars so activists can tell them how racist they are.

Nice work if you can get it.

    jkay@nationalpost.com

 

[Greymatters]

Good article - is a sad day when asking people to take responsibility for their problems is equated to racism, and its been going on for far too long.

 

[DBA]

Indoctrination along those lines seems to becoming more and more widespread. University's indoctrination rates as mind control. Seems like a provocative and overly alarmist title until you read about the details of the program itself and then it seems spot on. (list of materials)

It saddens me since it seems so irrational and counter productive.

 

[a_majoor]

A double header here:

http://voterick.com/wordpress/?p=86

We Must Salt the Earth

    If the Conservatives ever take power, they will have to salt the earth to hold on to it.

These are the words spoken by a good friend, before the Harper administration was reality. The truth of their content has not changed. I was reminded of them when watching the civil war movie, “Ride with the Devil”. The movie distinguished itself for a revealing kernel of truth embedded in it.

One of the characters is a southern gentleman who describes a trip to a northern state where he relates how he saw the “seeds of their (the south’s) destruction”. He describes the nascent system of public schooling in that state, by saying that all the children were herded into the new schools to be taught “how to live and think like the rest of them”.

This caught my eye because of the parallel to our current Canada. A cursory reading of most newspapers will reveal that a majority of young reporters have been inflicted by a default liberal/socialist/politically correct view. Any time I have doubt of this, it is wiped clean by my daughter’s renderings on the left-leaning tripe she is force-fed in university. Thankfully, her exposure to my conservative beliefs has made her wary of accepting without question, what is taught her, and challenging the sirens’ allure of socialist promise?

By coincidence we are currently viewing, in full technicolour, the end result of this evolving process. The double barreled Canadian Human Rights Commission furors over the actions of Mark Steyn (a book critical of Muslims) and Ezra Levant (publishing of Muhammad cartoons), is a clear stifling of what remains of our freedoms. But why does an institution like the CHRC even exist in a country like Canada? Now that its most horrid warts are readily visible and rightfully feared by those of us who can see the danger to our freedom to think, how on earth did we allow this monster to take root among us?

The intrinsic danger in leftish thought, is the simple answer to that question. The platitude-ridden landscape of socialism and political correctness, promises group-hug solutions to everything. To the unwary, socialism’s flags – helping the weak, saving the planet, making the fortunate contribute more, etc. – are irresistible lures. Their humanist aura is enough to preserve the mental laziness that is required to keep us blind to their poor logical base. The burgeoning ranks of those hired to serve these causes is insurance of their longevity, and guarantee that more will sprout from the fertile minds of this bureaucracy. The political observer will have noticed that the Conservative government’s biggest challenges have come from the generations of encrusted liberal bureaucracy. (Specifically the Canadian wheat board, the CBC and the commercial communication monopoly, the nuclear watchdogs, just to name a few.)

Allan Borovoy, who laid the foundations for the CHRC, must have had the best of intentions. All the social dictators of the world started with an idyllic vision. But even he has begun to see the unintended consequences of feeding our freedom to this monster.

The southern gentleman in the movie, went further to identify the real threat posed by collectivist mentality. While his main concern was defeat of his beloved south, he saw beyond that and into our present, when he said that those people were a threat because they wanted everyone to live like them. If you have been the focus of intolerant frenzy that characterizes the leftish rabble, when they have identified you as different or actively interrogating their politically correct catechism, you know what he means. The recent celebration of Israel Apartheid Week in our institutions of higher learning, is instrumental. This farce was given wings, not because university administrators are equitable in their willingness to expose the student body to diverse ideas. But, because they have taken sides against Israel, and because these ideological cowards fear the repercussions if they don’t.

As the ranks and power of the socialist bureaucracy increases, history has shown us repeatedly, where the sum of our fears leads. Power wants to be wielded, and those who are not amongst the believers become the targets. Because socialists wrap themselves in humanist agendas, they seldom consider the possibility of being wrong. And since they are so right - to the David Suzukis of the world - incarceration is an acceptable method of achieving those goals. Other methods soon evolve from that righteous assurance.

http://canadaconservative.blogspot.com/2008/02/must-read-book.html

A Must Read Book!!!

LOL... gotta love this new book out of the States...

WASHINGTON – Just when liberals thought it was safe to start identifying themselves as such, an acclaimed, veteran psychiatrist is making the case that the ideology motivating them is actually a mental disorder.

"Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."

"A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do," he says. "A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation's citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do."

Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:

creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;

satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation; augmenting primitive feelings of envy;

rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.

"The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind," he says. "When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."

posted by Christian Conservative @ 9:38 AM

 

[a_majoor]

Spelling out the differences between Liberal Democracy (AKA Classical Liberalism) vs "Progressive" ideology:

http://unambig.blogspot.com/2008/02/progressivism-challenges-liberal.html

Sunday, February 24, 2008
Progressivism Challenges Liberal Democracy

Liberalism as it is known and understood in western civilization has enabled a kind of evolutionary ideological finality understood as the Liberal Democracy, embraced in conjunction with prosperous capitalism it is a political philosophy which has no peer. It has a universal appeal which is at once superior in ideology to any other mode of failed social systems, yet accommodating of integrated religions and cultures from all over the world. Indeed, it has been considered that Liberal Democracy is the finality of social progression within a tolerant and just society which enables rule of the majority, while taking careful consideration for the importance of the individual strength and spirit. It understands that society is built upon the greatness of bestowing the freedom of the individual, repelling such stagnant notions as National Socialism and Communism, eschewing variants to them for the freedoms which grant the individual the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of whatever it is that makes them happy.

And yet the greatest challenge to our twenty-first Century western civilization is the derisive and unlikely philosophy of Progressivism, the antithesis to the Liberal Democracy which has gained us status as the most forward and free peoples on the planet:

    (1) The ascribed group over the individual citizen

    The key political unit is not the individual citizen who forms voluntary associations and works with fellow citizens regardless of race, sex, or national origin, but the ascriptive group (racial, ethnic, or gender) into which one is born. This emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender leads to group consciousness and a de-emphasis of the individual’s capacity for choice and for transcendence of ascriptive categories, joining with others beyond the confines of social class, tribe, and gender to create a cohesive nation.

    (2) A dichotomy of groups: Oppressor groups vs. Victim groups, with immigrant groups designated as victims

    Influenced (however indirectly) by the Hegelian Marxist thinking associated with the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci and the Central European theorists known as the Frankfurt School, global progressives posit that throughout human history there are essentially two types of groups: the oppressor and the oppressed, the privileged and the marginalized. (For a detailed examination of Gramscian or Hegelian Marxist influence in contemporary American political life see my "Why There is a Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America" (Policy Review, December 2000/January 2001.) In the United States, oppressor groups would include white males, heterosexuals, and "Anglos;" whereas "victim" groups would include blacks, gays, Latinos (including obviously many immigrants), and women.



Transnational Progressivism, or Liberal Progressivism, is the single greatest threat to our civilization today. It delineates from the theory of the west that freedom and equality is derived of stripping away our differences, and emphasizing the collective good that is in focusing on our unique and individual strengths. Instead we fall into a strange kind of counterintuitive "regressive liberalism" which seeks to highlight progressive groups which consist of previously aggrieved victim groups and their traditional hierarchal oppressors. Instead of celebrating the uniqueness of that which emancipated class warfare into individual success for blacks, women, and other immigrants, the progressivist seeks to destroy that by creating a class system in which the "privileged" are the barrier to access to a success which is entirely dependent upon individual industriousness. This illogical extension of liberties creates a social inequity by imagining some kind of past transgressions and grouping together people who because of their race, religion, tribal affiliation, or gender, represent some kind of oblique group which has always triumphed, and opposes it against that which has always been defeated.

It is these multicultural ideologists who have utilized a Marxist dichotomy which is in and of itself a paradox. The "multiculturalists" aren't so much interested in true diversity and pluralism as they are the binary groups of Marxist philosophy of oppressor and victim. This is seen in Stephane Dion's Liberal party with his progressive proportional representation being that of the percentage of perceived victimhood in society. Such imbalances receive attention because the progressive liberal paradigm dictates that imbalances in society do not reflect what be the natural order of egalitarianism. The logical extension to this is the change within all progressive societies to change itself according to demographic representation, instead of maintaining a liberal democratic individualist state. The reasoning is that nobody should be expected to conform to hegemonic culture, the latter incongruity formulating that hegemony must be battled with multicultural relativism and multilingualism.

A post-assimilative society is one in which the liberal democracts, Canadians, are borne into a kind of hegemonic thirst for preservation, where none existed before the advent of progressivism. Before, we simply were Canadians. Now we face a situation where the Marxist ideology has identified us as the oppressors in a class warfare, and so we fight back with notions of Freedom of Speech and Section 13.1 of the Human Rights Commission. The radical right which rebels against Muslim intrusion is not borne solely out of an obtuse racialism which self-identifies with white pride and the status quo. Instead it has been forced into an inorganic clash of class warfare between progressivist liberalism and Liberal Democracy. The individual who happened to be white and male is forced from his individual state of disassociative being, into one which is identifies with an enemy who would seek to brand him as the ruling class in the war. We speak of eliminating the Lord's Prayer in Queen's Park as a mode of forward progressivism, when it is in fact a desconstruction of our archetypal symbols and national narratives which described who we are, and where we came from.

Our history is now subject to vast revisionism. We weren't explorers, and settlers, and farmers. We were conquerers, and racists, and colonialists. Our very identity is marred by Liberal progressivism, as we seek to redefine our own ancestors as being sexist, racist, oppressive rulers who have only gained freedom and prosperity on the backs of the underclass victims who represent the Hegelian Marxist proletarian of subcategorical distinctions. We aren't citizens, we are global citizens. We aren't Canadians, we're hyphenated Canadians. Constitutional democracy is supposed to uphold the individual freedoms of each citizen, and yet we speak of ideas in cultural and gender significance. It isn't as though Canadians want to preserve western hegemony, but return to a state of individual liberal democracy in which each person is valued by his freedoms as upheld by the state. Progressivism has slowly gained a dangerous hold on our freedoms and our government, and rather than take us into a twenty first Century of devaluing the ascriptive groups of race, ethnicity, and gender [neo-feminism], we are more divisive and apart than ever before. I strive to be human. Yet I have become thrust into the class warfare of the progressive humanist worldview which challenges all which made western civilization the shining light of contemporaneous democracy.

 

[a_majoor]

Looking at Senator Obama's brand of Utopian ideology. Although the context is different here, many of the same ideas are in evidence in the Great White North:

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0225fs.html

Fred Siegel
Yes, We Can’t
From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Deval Patrick, the politics of hope have been a bust.
25 February 2008

Aging baby boomers see in Barack Obama’s down-the-line liberal voting record the promise of a left-wing revival. The college students and twentysomethings of the Millennial Generation see in him a way of pushing the quarrelsome, narcissistic baby boomers off the stage. Someone is bound to be disappointed by this extraordinary performance artist. But what both the boomers and the Millennials share is a desire to be part of what Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the 1840s, called “the politics of hope.” Emerson wrote during a time of numerous experiments in utopian living. Obama—whose candidacy rests upon a standard utopian dichotomy between the earthly evils of poverty, injustice, war, and partisanship, and the promise of the world to come if we allow him to rescue us—appeals to the same Elysian strain in American and Western political life, largely in remission since 1980, when the 1960s truly ended.

America’s founding fathers were a famously hard-headed lot; they understood that government had to be structured to remedy the “defects of better motives.” Since self-serving interest groups—or factions, as Federalist 10 calls them—were an unavoidable element of liberty, interest could only be checked by competing interest. But while this insight is the main stem of our political tradition, there is another, albeit punctuated, branch—a utopianism that derives from the millenarianism of the sects that emerged from the Protestant Reformation and eventually populated America. “Utopian . . . ideas,” notes Daniel Flynn in his new history of the American Left, are as “American as Plymouth Rock.” This is why, as Sixties activist Bo Burlingham put it, “the Left bobs up and down in American history, a battered and leaky craft which often disappears beneath the tide, but somehow never sinks.”

In the wake of bloody utopian experiments in 1930s Europe, a slew of erudite authors launched compelling attacks on them. Jacob Talmon, Karl Popper, Raymond Aaron, Czeslaw Milosz, and Hannah Arendt laid waste to the historical, philosophical, sociological, and literary assumptions that supported communism and fascism. But their arguments didn’t endure, despite their power. By the mid-1960s, utopianism had again taken hold, and its lure was such that even Arendt, once a vocal opponent, found herself drawn to the religion of politics. Propelled by her disdain for America in general and the Vietnam War in particular, as well as the promise, as she saw it, of worker-control experiments in Europe, she effectively reversed much of her earlier writings.

She wasn’t alone. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger had published The Vital Center, the canonical statement of disillusioned, empirical, and anti-utopian post–World War II liberalism. Schlesinger praised “the empirical temper” and a realistic sense of man’s limitations that recognized that “freedom means conflict.” Tracing the shared assumptions behind Brook Farm—the famous American utopian experiment of the 1840s—and the Soviet Union, he distanced liberalism from an optimism born of eighteenth-century rationalism and a nineteenth-century romanticism about progress, which left “too many unprepared for the mid-twentieth century.” Democracy, he wrote, “brooks no worship” of great leaders because “it knows that no man is that good.” And Schlesinger rebuked the leftists who, admiring the USSR, couldn’t believe that “ugly facts underlie fair words.” It was an intellectual tour de force.

But a little more than a decade later, Schlesinger—romanced by John F. Kennedy—walked away from these arguments. His admiration for the liberalism of a “moderate pessimism about man” was replaced by hero-worship and a sense of the dashing, aristocratic, articulate Kennedy as someone who could transcend standard political categories. Kennedy’s untimely death canonized the hard-nosed Massachusetts pol—with a mixed record at best as our first celebrity president—as JFK, a Lincoln-like martyr to civil rights, the King of Camelot who, if he had lived, would have made all right with the world. This Kennedy passed into Democratic Party legend and still inspires some today: remember Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign ads, featuring a picture of the young Clinton visiting the White House with a group of young student leaders and shaking hands with Kennedy. Kennedy, the ads implied, was passing the torch.

Obama, the celebrity-like candidate drawing on his generational appeal and noble bearing, fits better into Kennedy’s robes than Clinton did. Unlike Kennedy, who didn’t think of himself in messianic terms, Obama seems short on irony. Still, for lovelorn boomers and for youngsters who’ve known only the failures of the Bush years, Obama promises a Camelot-like reenchantment with politics. “I’ve been following politics since I was about five,” says TV host Chris Mathews. “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers, he’s the New Testament.” In this view, just as Kennedy’s victory in 1960 brought the country out of its Eisenhower-era stupor and put the Catholic question to bed for good, so an Obama victory will reenergize our politics and bring an end to poverty and racial division.

Hillary Clinton has searched in vain for a way to combat Obama’s appeal. In the recent Austin debate, she criticized Obama for borrowing generously from the speeches of his good friend and coeval Deval Patrick, the first African-American governor of Massachusetts. “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches,” she challenged in the debate’s one charged moment, “is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.” Clinton’s arrow here was not aimed so much at plagiarism—all candidates borrow heavily from each other and from past campaigns—as at Obama’s claim to authenticity. But with the press, on both left and right, all but openly rooting for Obama, little came of her attack; more important, the press missed the true importance of the Patrick comparison.

Bay State journalist Rick Holmes describes Obama and Patrick, fellow Harvard Law School graduates, as “peas in a pod.” Patrick is the Obama campaign’s national cochair. Obama’s presidential campaign has modeled itself on Patrick’s gubernatorial campaign. Patrick’s 2006 campaign slogan was “Together we can,” while Obama’s is “Yes we can.” The brilliant Chicago political operative David Axelrod has managed both men’s campaigns. Both candidates have made persistent appeals to “the politics of hope.”

So Clinton’s criticism seems an opportune moment to ask how Patrick’s inspirational rhetoric has translated into governing a state where Democrats control both houses of the legislature—the likely scenario for Obama, too, should he take office. Patrick’s governorship is the closest thing we have to a preview of the “politics of hope”—and that governorship has been a failure to date. As Joan Vennochi observes in the Boston Globe, “Democrats who control the Legislature ignored virtually every major budget and policy initiative presented by a fellow Democrat.” Patrick’s record in office, Vennochi concludes, “shows that it can be hard to get beyond being the face of change, to actually changing politics.” His stock has sunk so markedly that Hillary Clinton carried the state handily against Obama in the Democratic primary despite, or perhaps because of, Patrick’s support for his political doppelgänger.

In one area, however, Patrick has achieved some of his goals. In thrall to the state’s teachers’ unions, he has partly rolled back the most successful educational reforms in the country. Most states gamed the federal testing requirements that were part of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. But Massachusetts, thanks to Republican governors William Weld and Mitt Romney, created the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability to ensure that the state’s testing methods conformed closely to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—federal tests that are the gold standard for measuring educational outcomes. In 2007, Massachusetts became the first state to achieve top marks in all four categories of student achievement. One of Patrick’s first efforts as governor was to eliminate the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability.

Patrick hasn’t delivered reform, much less the transformation that both he and Obama promise. This should come as no surprise. Obama’s utopian vision of transcending the interests that make up the fabric of our democracy is unlikely to fare any better than the “politics of hope” did in Emerson’s time. The key question at hand is whether Obama’s Edenic bubble bursts before or after the election.

Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.

 

[JBG]

I consider myself"left wing" or progressive. I am a liberal in the sense that I believe in breaking down class and tradition-bound barriers to progress, acheivement and work. The New World is about opportunity, and people showing what they can do and offer. That is the respect in which I am "liberal", i.e. the way Adam Smith and John Locke were. In a more modern context, I regard Harry S. Truman in the US as a true liberal, for starting in a forceful and effective manner the integration of Ameircan society, and recognizing Israel, a force for progress in the world.

I mean really, in what way does Ted Kennedy, Jean Chretien or Paul Martin stand for progress? At least JFK (who I don't overly admire) was in favor of building infrastructure that would reduce costs and improve the quality of life, as well as letting people handle more of the money they earned. Truman broke down raical and religious barriers so that all could accomplish according to their abilities. And Pelosi, Martin and Chretien? Helps well-connected big shots.

 

[a_majoor]

The source of the "Fascists are right wing" fallacy date back to 1930's Soviet propaganda, but the connections are much deeper and more extensive:

http://jr2020.blogspot.com/2008/03/liberal-fascism-book.html

Sunday, March 2, 2008
“Liberal Fascism” - the book

What do you call a conservative who is winning an argument with a leftist? "A fascist!" Thanks to effective leftist propaganda and plain ignorance, fascism is widely held to be a right-wing ideology. This lie has been so successful that even many right-wingers are prone to believing it. However, the truth of the matter is quite the opposite. Nazism, Fascism and fascism are distinctly left-wing phenomena. Like most variants of socialism, they are totalitarian ideologies.

Most right-wingers can personally relate to the experience of being called a fascist. I recall an Alliance Party rally for newly elected leader Stockwell Day in Victoria. Outside the conference center we were greeted by a mob of young, placard wielding ‘protesters’, many dressed in black leather, chains, and jack-boots, calling us ‘fascists’. They likely had little understanding of what fascism is, but were simply reflexively applying a conventional insult to a group of ‘right-wingers’.

This is how Jonah Goldberg came to write his new book "Liberal Fascism". He says he was tired of being labeled a fascist by "know-nothing" leftists, so wrote his book to counter the lie.

Goldberg’s basic thesis is not new. More than a half century ago Ludwig von Mises, in his classic book ‘Socialism’, clearly identified the socialist roots of Fascism and Nazism (Epilogue, sections 7 and 8). Oddly, Goldberg makes no mention of Mises. Nevertheless, this omission aside, he does a remarkable job of tracing the historical roots of fascist thinking and identifying its clear linkage to the American progressive movement and modern American liberalism. From the introduction:

    [there’s] a mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate the same social space." [...] in terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.

    ...international fascism drew from the same well-springs as American Progressivism.

    ... American Progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism [...and] projected their own sins onto conservatives.

Goldberg traces modern fascist thinking back to Rousseau, Robespierre and the French Revolution and then shows in great detail how:

    - President Woodrow Wilson (1913 - 21), the first (and last) Ph.D. in the Oval Office, was the twentieth century’s first totalitarian dictator "doing more violence to civil liberties in his last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first twelve".

    - the American progressive establishment of the 20's and 30's enthusiastically supported Hitler’s, Mussolini’s and Stalin’s totalitarianism, racism and eugenics.

    - fascism was manifested under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s heavily statist New Deal policies.

    - more recently, American fascism has softened and mutated into Hillary Clinton’s "It takes a village" progressive, happy-faced, politically correct world of diversity, multiculturalism, universal health-care and environmentalism.

    - modern liberal progressives are ‘nice’ fascists, but fascists none the less.

'Liberal Fascism' is a fascinating, revelational read - one of the few political books I’ve found hard to put down. It’s a must read for every conservative and libertarian. Liberals and other socialists should read it too. Though I suspect that most leftists aren’t keen on having their ideological roots so clearly exposed - and they’ll go out of their way to deny and denounce much of what Goldberg reveals.

Jonah Goldberg has clearly exposed the problem. The question remains - what can be done about it?

 

[Greymatters]

Good one, thats the kind of sourcing I was asking about in another thread... thanks for the good info!

 

[a_majoor]

A good article which explains the mania "Progressives" have for completely ineffectual laws and regulations:

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=348428&p=2

A Handgun Ban Won't Work

Lorne Gunter,  National Post  Published: Monday, March 03, 2008

Nearly 340,000 Canadians -- about 1% of the population -- were victims of violent crime in 2006, according to a Statistics Canada study released in late February. But just 8,100 were victims of a violent crime committed with a gun.

If you were the victim of a gun crime, it's probably no comfort to know you were one of "just" 8,100. Still, despite the hype, gun crime is not statistically a serious problem in Canada. Banning guns, or even restricting their use more closely, will have no appreciable impact on rates of violent crime. Knives are used in nearly three times as many violent crimes as guns, yet no one calls for a knife registry. Even blunt instruments are used more often than guns without demands that government licences be required before one may buy baseball bats and lead pipes. So why do liberal-left politicians expend so much energy trying to restrict gun ownership or even ban guns outright?

The principal reason, of course, is that modern liberalism is the victory of symbolism over substance. A public policy or law is seldom designed mostly to solve an identified problem. Its primary purpose is to reflect well on the good intentions of the person or group proposing it.

So what if laws and social programs produce no tangible benefits? They remain on the statute books and retain full funding -- complete with massive bureaucracies -- because they enable liberals to convince themselves something is being done. Activity is confused with achievement.

Gun control is constantly put forward by intellectually lazy politicians and do-gooder activists because attempting to restrict gun ownership is easier than taking on real criminals. More importantly, anti-gun laws enable politicians and activists to claim they are doing something to cure a problem that concerns voters and donors, even though restricting gun ownership among law-abiding citizens has no mitigating effect on violent crime.

Mandatory minimum sentences for guns crimes -- of the kind favoured by Conservative politicians -- may have little impact on violent crime rates, too. The number of violent gun crimes is small. A one-quarter or one-third reduction in gun crime would produce a negligible reduction in the overall rate of violent crime.

But at least mandatory sentences for using a gun punish only the guilty. And a one-quarter to one-third reduction in gun crime means 2,000 to 2,500 fewer victims.

On the other hand, restrictive gun laws punish an entire class of people -- law-abiding hunters, target shooters and gun collectors -- for the actions of others and are never likely to reduce victimization. StatsCan has reported that "handguns made up nearly two-thirds of all firearms used" for violent crimes. This is significant because for more than 70 years, it has been the law in Canada to register all handguns. If registration were an effective method for reducing crime, handgun crime would be nonexistent. Instead, handguns are far and away the most common crime-guns and their use is growing.

So if registering handguns will never reduce crime, perhaps banning them would. That is the solution proposed by Ontario's Liberal government and Toronto's Mayor, David Miller.

Again, this is attacking the problem in a way that will never solve it.

The simple fact is that most crime-guns -- especially criminal handguns -- are not legally owned now. They have never been registered. Their existence is unknown to police. They do not appear in our national firearms databank. Since they are already illegally owned, it's unlikely their owners would hand them in if they were suddenly banned. (Or should I say, "banned more?")

The only people harassed by a handgun ban would be sport shooters and collectors -- people who are already no threat to commit crimes. Drug dealers and gang members would ignore a ban as readily as they ignore existing laws on trafficking, extortion, robbery and murder.

In 2006, Saskatchewan Conservative MP Garry Breitkreuz obtained unpublished StatsCan tables showing that between 1997 and 2005, only 2.3% of homicides were committed with registered guns.

The does not necessarily mean 97.7% of firearms murders in Canada are committed with unregistered guns. In some cases the registration status of the weapon could not be determined.

Still, his numbers show how pointless a ban on guns would be; unless, of course, you were looking for a hollow symbol of your deep and abiding concern.

lgunter@shaw.ca

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

 

[JBG]

A good article which explains the mania "Progressives" have for completely ineffectual laws and regulations:

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=348428&p=2

I always thought hardened criminals took gun laws very seriously.