As always, life on the left imitates Liberal Fascism. Completed near the end of 2007; summing up the state of modern “progressivism” and its past and present offshoots, at one point in his book, Jonah Goldberg wrote:
Again, it is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian–or ‘holistic,’ if you prefer–in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists.
At the Weekly Standard, Matt Labash introduces us to the author of 538 Ways to Live Work and Play Like a Liberal.
No, really! Even eeeevil capitalists Amazon.com, a Website powered by non-Salon.com-approved air conditioned server farms in giant Randian office towers accessible via computer network invented by the military industrial complex itself sells the book!
Because the man can’t bust our ideology. Not when the person putting all the pieces together is the man, the myth, the legend, Justin Krebs:
Who is Justin Krebs, you ask? Only my sensei. My guru. The man who made plain that I had politics all wrong. I used to think along the lines of the British writer and publisher Ernest Benn that politics was “the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” Thus, I had put my politics in my political box, and my life in my living box. When I should’ve placed all the contents in the same box—a much bigger, biodegradable one. (You can get them at Treecycle.com.)
Krebs showed me that my politics shouldn’t be just my politics, but also my religion, my sun and moon, my inhalation and exhalation. Since politics, particularly liberal politics, bring people so much joy, wouldn’t I be better off politicizing everything—the way I live and work and play? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. The answer is a resounding “yes,” as evidenced right there in the title of Krebs’s new book: 538 Ways to Live Work and Play Like a Liberal.
The 32-year-old Krebs didn’t just write this book, which comes complete with a 538-item checklist. He’s lived it. He sharpened his liberal-living iron on the mean conservative streets of Highland Park, New Jersey; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and, finally, that repository of red state madness, the island of Manhattan. Girding him for battle were his parents—two good liberals, who sent him to a cooperative preschool, where he called all the other kids’ moms and dads by their first names. Krebs says his parents were his “playmates” as well, though all was not idyllic. There are some intimations of child abuse; they took him to a Walter Mondale rally when he was just 6 years old.
Upon graduating from Harvard, Krebs had his liberal ticket punched repeatedly. He served in the office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. He blogs on the progressive blog OpenLeft. He is one of the founding directors of The Tank, “a non-profit arts presenter in the heart of Manhattan.” But his enduring legacy, his gift to all of us really, was hatched over a pitcher of beer.
Seven years ago, like many a good liberal, Krebs and his friends were driven to drink by the “arrogance and authoritarianism of the Bush administration.” What started as an informal vinegar session in a Hell’s Kitchen dive was formalized into a “Drinking Liberally” club, which met every Thursday, a place for activist types to talk progressive politics, network, plot strategy, and get hooched up (though its organizers remind us, “As you drink liberally, always drink responsibly”). As the club gained more members, it begat chapters nationwide and led to offshoot Eating Liberally clubs for foodies, Screening Liberally clubs for film buffs, Reading Liberally clubs for bookworms, and Laughing Liberally clubs that use “humor and laughter to spread understanding of liberal ideas and advance progressive values.” (Sounds like a scream!)
There are now 330 Living Liberally chapters in 50 states and around the globe. It’s no longer just a few longhairs knocking back pitchers of cheap suds, bitching about the Patriot Act. Living Liberally has become a way of life. There’s even a Liberal Card, a membership card which is “about showing your liberal pride, joining the liberal community and claiming your liberal discounts.” It’s printed on renewable green “CornCards,” rather than the petroleum that is blackening not only the brown pelicans of the Louisiana marshlands, but also our souls.
As Krebs writes, Drinking Liberally “has never been about drinking . . . it’s about progressive politics in a social setting.” It’s about all of us being “in this together.” It’s not just about “how you vote on Election Day.” It’s about “how you vote with your wallet every day.” It’s not just about “what you chant at a rally, but what you laugh at or rock out to on your iPod.” It’s about saying “it’s about” a lot, and then saying something real meaningful afterwards. Like this: “Living like a liberal is never just about making politics personal, but about making personal politics public.” It’s about alliteration.
I’m just going to be honest again: All this alliteration wet my whistle (see, it’s catching). I wanted to find out what it was all about. Krebs’s book was due for release on July 4, the day we gained our independence as a country. But I was ready to gain my own independence as an individual—independence from this disengaged, right-leaning, but mostly apolitical way of life I’d been enslaved by. So I secured an early copy.
The 538-item checklist was daunting. As Krebs admits, “Some of the ideas are hard, or even uncomfortable. You don’t have to do them all. Just think about them.” So I did. For roughly 10 days, I thought about them and undertook a good many of them. There was no way I could tackle them all. But it was clear that if I wanted to gain my independence by Independence Day by biting off a representative sample, I’d still be busier than a one-legged Obama in an ass-kicking contest. Time to get to work.
Is Feng-Shui involved? Because that would be awesome (from the title onward, language alert):
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Serious question though: Once books such as Lisa Birnbach’s satiric The Official Preppy Handbook from 1980, and Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks’ early-2001 equivalent focusing on the center-left hit the shelves, the clock was ticking on those particular lifestyles. With its Whole Earth Catalog-sounding title, is 538 Ways to Live Work and Play Like a Liberal a harbinger of a movement similarly reaching its expiration date?
If so, how will the post-9/11 left morph in the coming years?
Dude, a little alliteration goes a long way.
There’s only ONE way to “live liberally”. Go to a liberal outlet (Kos, NYT, any network news) and get your marching orders on how to think and what to do. Then go think it and do it. You’re done.
…. get your marching orders on how to think and what to do. Then go think it and do it. You’re done.
Close but no Christmas box.
(Il)Liberals don’t think, they feel. That’s lots of what sets them apart.
Well, that Krebs dude must be a virgin because I don’t know how he could ever take time out to get laid.
You know what they say, “no woman ever fantasized about being ravished by a hippie.”
How liberal can he be if he needs rules and suggestions? Real liberalism is innate.
Sometimes Liberals take themselves beyond parody.
I’m continually reminded that over the last 150 years or so, the quintesential sin of our era is statism. Whether it be churches that mistake the great commission for a call to political action, or liberals creating substitute religions on the basis of political ideologies and failed economic systems, we’ve been consumed the last century and more by the mistake of equating The State with God. It’s like the great vengeful ghost of the divine right of kings infesting and squelching the democratic republican spirit. It’s the made dash down the road to serfdom, which wouldn’t be too bad except that they insist on taking me with them kicking and screaming.
‘Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray’, that this scourge may speedily pass away requiring fewer drops of blood to expunge our guilt than the last great national sin.
I have to disagree with Jonah on this point. He says American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, and then says that it’s not Orwellian. The point is that no Orwellian system starts out as brutal and oppressive, but once it gets control it becomes very defensive. It’s our amazing Constitution and the traditions it instituted which have protected us from the full-blown Big Brother. We invoke the “Orwellian” label far too often, because we forget that nobody gets sent to prison for criticizing the government, we still have public courts and news media that can report what they consider news. If you doubt that, listen to the Obama administration complaining about the press.
I don’t think that the government has much to fear from armed citizens, who don’t get to own grenade launchers, bombers, tanks, etc. What really inhibits it is the knowledge that our military would be unlikely to allow itself to be used against the citizenry or follow plainly illegitimate orders.
My point is that we’ve just seen how a government with the control of both houses of Congress and the White House can make some really destructive decisions, and without the prospect of regular elections, the tradition of free criticism of the government, I don’t think these narcissists could control their urge to crush opposition and impose their plans. If the passage of Obamacare didn’t demonstrate that, I don’t know what would.
The best way to Live Liberally, the only one that isn’t just a hypocritical cop-out, is to commit suicide. I wish they’d get to it, and leave the rest of us alone.
Ideally the 2010 election results will cause all of the liberals to liberally drink Jim Jones Specials.
Living like a Liberal is too ridiculous, but libs can at least think about it for a minute, and then go on hating.
Actually, most of my liberal friends give lip service to all the “correct” lifestyle choices, then do what they want anyway. It’s about how OTHER people are supposed to live, not themselves.
” 7. DSmith
The best way to Live Liberally, the only one that isn’t just a hypocritical cop-out, is to commit suicide. I wish they’d get to it, and leave the rest of us alone.”
Oh come on!
You know that if suicide were “good for us”, every Liberal on the face of the earth would be bound and determined to see us all dead first.
Then they might – or might not – follow.
538 Ways to Live…like a Liberal?
There are also 538 total votes in the Electoral College. Coincidence? I think not….furius
It is mildly surprising that Krebs could not cook up an additional 65 rules so that the rules of for Liberals could equal in length the list of 613 rules for observant Jews in the Bible. For control freaks there may be a special frisson that comes from deniably duplicating and mocking the pretensions of the stodgy old Judeo-Christian god. The number of rules is now arbitrary, padded out like a College sophomore adding adjectives and adverbs to make a paer fit the expected minimum length.
Is this Krebs related to the great scientist who traced the flow of energy through biological systems? One devoted himself to discovering knowledge that spurred further research and development; leading to longer, richer and more creative and meaningful lives for billions. The other has devoted himself to pushing a collection of frauds and confidence games supported by hate, fear, envy and pseudo science to convince people to lead more impoverished and miserable lives in a country that under the plunder and auto-emasculation it is being subject to under the guidance of his ideological companions will be increasingly unable to change the world for the better.
The bad news is that human beings are capable of being trapped in an irrational death spiral, not only as damaged individuals who become self destructive but also as communities. The Khmer choose to fade into the jungle rather than defend their empire from the advancing Thai and Viet. Gibbon felt possibly incorrectly that the Western Roman empire was deliberately abandoned to the barbarians because of the flight of Christians from faith in the City of the Caesars to the City of God. We obviously do not know much about the quitters in history because they ceased to exist.
The good news is that while a small number of people become life long devotees of religious disciplines like Marxism, and vast numbers can become swept up in passing enthusiasm for what projects a display of power, few will become seriously enamored over time to a cult of failure that depends on kitschy social pressures as effervescent as the enthusiasms that propel teen-age pop stars. The forest of Green Club devotees is likely to have very shallow roots. Real beliefs sink deep but astroturf fades fast.