Rage Inside the Machine
But as with liberalism of the 1950s, the New Left is now very much the establishment themselves. And a movement that sees itself as avant-garde is now the very definition of garde.
To put it mildly, this sort of cognitive dissonance can cause tension.
Which brings us to Ronald Radosh’s new post at PJM, in which he explores The New Republic and “the Crisis of The American Intellectual: Can the Old Liberal Stalwart Play a Role in Today’s World?”:
A few years ago, [incoming New Republic editor Richard Just] participated in some of the meetings held to create an American version of the Euston Manifesto, which TNR publicized, and of which Just was a co-author and signer. (The full American manifesto can be found here.) As the American authors of what began as a British endeavor explain:
The statement was a defense of liberal democracy and human rights as well as a rejection of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and terrorism.
Regarding the British one as a “turning point in contemporary intellectual and political debates,” the American supporters came up with their own domestic version.
Unfortunately, the high hopes its framers had came to naught. Its influence was virtually nil. In Europe, rather than have a great effect, the climate of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, especially in London where Euston originated, has only become worse.
The problem that Just and TNR have, however, is one brilliantly addressed by Walter Russell Mead in his latest important blog post on “The Crisis of the American Intellectual.” Read argues that the reason today’s intellectuals are ill-equipped to play a major role in addressing what we must do about today’s issues goes way beyond Just’s hopes that liberalism questions itself and its own favored exponents of the doctrine.
As Mead explains, “the United States is stuck with a social model that doesn’t work anymore.” Mead writes that the problems go beyond the erosion of our cultural model, the problem of the deficit, and the problems of international competition, all of which he thinks can be dealt with. The problem is nothing less than the Weltanschauung of the American intellectual class.
* * *
Instead, he argues that they are “backward looking and reactionary.” By that he means they are stuck in the old Progressive era notion of “progress” and I would add the vision of statist socialism favored by many on the Left. First, Mead addresses ideology:
Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state. The government, guided by credentialed intellectuals with scientific training and values, would lead society through the economic and political perils of the day. An ever more powerful state would play an ever larger role in achieving ever greater degrees of affluence and stability for the population at large, redistributing wealth to provide basic sustenance and justice to the poor. The social mission of intellectuals was to build political support for the development of the new order, to provide enlightened guidance based on rational and scientific thought to policymakers, to administer the state through a merit based civil service, and to train new generations of managers and administrators. The modern corporation was supposed to evolve in a similar way, with business becoming more stable, more predictable and more bureaucratic.
And this, to get back to the problem facing TNR, is still the perspective most of its editors hold. They think the “administrative, bureaucratic state,” as Mead defines it, can still be handled via regulatory measures. Hence their defense of and support of the disastrous ObamaCare, which outgoing editor Foer mentions as one of the magazine’s most important efforts. As Mead writes so powerfully, “if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and institutions of twentieth century progressivism.” Its promises have dissolved, and its “premises no longer hold.” This goes against the grains of many of our best intellectuals, Mead claims, an observation justified by reading many of TNR’s own writers and editors when they write about domestic issues.
For America to prosper, Mead argues:
Power is going to have to shift from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, from the state to society and from qualified experts and licensed professionals to the population at large.
And good luck with the left ad0pting that remarkably open model in the near future, especially when the current iteration of what was called progressivism, having been eclipsed by the adaptability of the modern, open, technologically savvy society, is angrily attempting to turn the clock back on freedom, entrepreneurship, and in many cases, technology itself.
It’s just non-stop 24/7 rage from the left. No wonder independents are flocking to the GOP in droves. They’re scared/tired of the leftie rage-machine.
Angry impatience comes with the territory of developmental immaturity.
I have recently lost (given up on) two sets of friends, who have all gradually changed from being liberal but non-political, to political, to almost always pissed off, to constantly and continuously enraged and bitter.
The standard “outrages” to liberals that are constantly pushed by NPR and other similar outlets, now spring up repeatedly in every conversation. For example, my friends now insert vicious smears of Sarah Palin and George Bush into every topic, be it a new restaurant, the weather, a movie, clothes, travel, sports, or anything else. I find that it has moved from being merely boring, to being irritating, to being completely off-putting.
These are intelligent, extremely well read and well traveled people with advanced technical degrees. They seem oblivious to the changes in themselves, and it is no longer enjoyable to be around them, or to even talk on the phone with them.
“completely off-putting…”
What is the next step?
Can anyone say, “Physical Violence”..?
Thanks Wil,
You certainly hit the mark. I too have several friends that have gone over the edge. It is amazing to watch them tranform from reasonable intelligent people you can have a discussion with into someTHING full of rage, hate, and hypocrisy.
About a year ago we had a dinner party, where one of these friends (a couple), who own a large motor home, a home in Texas and a home here in Michigan, retired at 50 through inheritance, and travel the world, informed me that my wife and I where leaving too large of a carbon footprint with our home, which is not all that big by any measure(at 61 I am still working and my wife just retired after 32 years of teaching).
Later in the evening in a discussion we were having I was informed by the wife that since I was a conservative I obviously no longer cared about the ‘disenfranchised’.
I asked if she was kidding. She wasn’t.
She then whinned about her high health premiums and hoped that Obama could get health care through so her premium would come down.
WOW!!! This was not the person I once knew nor her husband who had been a great friend for over 30 years.
We no longer speak.
The easiest response to liberals and leftists who claim you don’t care about the disenfranchised is to say, “It’s Democrats and not Republicans who want gas to go to $5/gallon. How will that help the disenfranchised?”
Very similar to experiences I’m having with soon-to-be-former friends and soon-to-be-estranged family members. The process seems to go one of 2 ways:
Either our liberal friends find it inconceivable that intelligent people are politically conservative, and stop associating with my wife and me soon after they learn that we’ve attended a single tea party rally, oppose nearly everything Obama does, or have read a book by Sarah Palin.
Alternatively, they inject their leftist political views into nearly every conversation, regardless how inappropriate or uninvited, making it extremely unpleasant for us to be around them.
We’re willing to stay friends with them regardless of their politics, as long as politics aren’t part of our relationship. But THEY seem incapable of divorcing politics from it. It’s quite sad, even hurtful for us, but seems not to bother them. They seem to have really swallowed that poisonous old Kool-Aid from the 60′s, that “the personal is the political.”
One of the Left’s articles of faith is that “the personal is political,” and that’s what most of the responders here are seeing in the transformation of their former friends and relatives into totalitarian zombies.
You’ll also find the seeds of this spittle-flecked rage in what Herbert Marcuse outlined as ‘repressive tolerance’. Worth a lookup and a read.
“the personal is political”
See if this sounds familiar … The scene: Zhivago has been ushered before Strelnikov, the Bolshevik leader of the Russian Revolution, on the Red train …
Pasha: I used to admire your poetry.
Zhivago: Thank you.
Pasha: I shouldn’t admire it now. I should find it absurdly personal. Don’t you agree? Feelings, insights, affections… it’s suddenly trivial now. You don’t agree; you’re wrong. The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it. I can see why you might hate me.
Zhivago: I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.
Pasha: The private life is dead – for a man with any manhood.
Zhivago: I saw some of your ‘manhood’ on the way at a place called Mink.
Pasha: They were selling horses to the Whites.
Zhivago: It seems you’ve burnt the wrong village.
Pasha: They always say that, and what does it matter? A village betrays us, a village is burned. The point’s made.
Zhivago: Your point – their village.
————————————————
The personal life is dead, Comrades. And if the Obama Administration ops have their way so will the private life be dead as well.
Pasha: I shouldn’t admire it now. I should find it absurdly personal. Don’t you agree? Feelings, insights, affections… it’s suddenly trivial now. You don’t agree; you’re wrong. The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it. I can see why you might hate me.
Zhivago: I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.
Pasha: The private life is dead – for a man with any manhood.
Bravo! You caught that, too. That exchange between Strelnikov and Zhivago popped right to mind, reading those responses. It’s funny how relevant that movie is to the current day.
or, perhaps not.
Ditto for me. However, being constantly introspective, I wondered if perhaps there was some change in me that was straining a handful of relationships with my liberal friends. Then I read something that clarified my observations. Something about people on the far left being unable to interact effectively with their environment. Bingo. It explained why these former friends with college degrees and IQs higher than mine were becoming chronically unemployed (in one case even homeless)and having relationship trouble. They became angry with me for having conservative values and said things like “You have a brain, why don’t you use it”. Things they all had in common were heavy use of marijuana, coming of age in the 60′s and MoveOn.org
Please leave weed out of your equation of your nutty friends.
Think how angry they would be without the smoke.
Everyone realizes what we are talking about here is a religion, right?
You hit it right on the head RickC. The far left movement, call it Communism, Marxism or progressivism, is a religion and that explains the ferocity of the far left true believers. It also explains their gut level antipathy towards Christianity (unless the churches are African American) but interestingly enough, not towards Islam.
Is the Human Mind capable of becoming intellectually passionate about anything, without that “thing” then becoming religious in its intensity? It sure doesn’t look like it. In other words, there are no secularists in intellectual foxholes.
Charles Krauthammer pointed out several years ago:
To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.
You do realize that the Left has to have politics permeate any and every institution, right? That’s the whole point of leftism: that government is the only institution that matters and that ultimately all issues are political. The corollary is that any problem in art, religion, business, science, education etc is ultimately political.
I’m careful not to bring up or discuss politics at family events. My entire family is very left-wing, most cheerfully, a few passively, and some very angrily. So it gives me a window into how the Left thinks.
A few years ago, I lost two dear relatives in a very short time, one on each side of my family. The two funerals had almost no one other than me in common. But in both cases, the funerals were punctuating by a constant barrage of liberal partisan rhetoric. One cousin, having heard second-hand that I am a conservative, walked up to me, shouting and raging incoherently about politics. I didn’t say a word as he sputtered on for a few minutes and walked off. No one thought the outburst was mean-spirited, unusual or even particularly noteworthy.
As conservatives (and this goes for libertarians, too), we have other priorities. For some of us (many of us PJM readers), politics is a fun hobby, but even we have a life outside The Ideology. Not so for liberals. To read a book, or go to a movie, or make a financial investment, or even just make dinner, and not have it be some kind of active affirmation of political doctrine is totally alien on the Left. The kind of community ties we get from our culture, religion or even family are grist for their political mill: suffused with politics, defined by politics, important ultimately because they can be used to advance politics.
Thanks Wil, I feel better knowing I’m not the only one to notice these disturbing changes in friends.
My first break came over Israel. At dinner in one cool restaurant, the husband said “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.” He is a New York City cultural jew and an academic. It was as if he had been body-snatched. We drifted apart over a period of years. Others have followed, though not over Israel. They are in a fog of “religion” that some call denial.
Even better are the pro-israel liberals who are struggling to find a way to reconcile the two. I find that many are finding ways to square the circle, and it’s frankly fascinating to watch their intellectual contortions.
One way is to be pro-Israel but anti-Likud, and then make your support for Israel entirely contingent on who they’ve recently elected. If Israel is being condemned by the Left and there’s someone, anyone who can be branded a “likudnik” and who can be blamed, then suddenly they can be pro-Israel (in general) and anti-Israel (in any particular case).
Another is to raise the mysterious specter of Secret Republican Antisemites. This once had a kernel of truth to it, but the importance is that by inflating dead Republicans from a century ago, or modern fringe non-Republican antisemites described as “right wing”, you can ignore the strong anti-Israel (and increasingly, antisemitic) vitriol coming from the mainstream Left today.
For many, they’re simply choosing one or the other. As with the Kurds, Georgians, Hondurans and others, the Israelis are just one more group of troublemakers who must be sacrificed to the Great Work of the Left, kulaks who can be attacked, condemned or ignored for their struggles to survive, but certainly won’t be mourned until their graves are long-cold, and then only parenthetically.
The basis for progressivism was intellectually bankrupt from the start. What a surprise that, after getting to implement all the happy horsecrap of egalitarianism for 70 years in this country, the biggest difficulty all these intellectuals have is: it doesn’t work.
When a hard-science intellectual must compare the results of lab testing with the hypothesis, and the hypothesis is not supported by the results, he must admit his hypothesis is wrong. He must deal with the facts: results. The lab experiment of liberal socialism has been running worldwide for generations, and the results have ALWAYS been the same. It is only the liberal intellectual, who can talk a good game but ignore the results, who seeks to sustain the hypothesis of “progressive” success.
Liberal’s social “lab” experiments are usually analyzed and reported by liberals. If you get to write the report, then the results are whatever you decide they are – you can ignore failures, because you redefine them as successes.
It’s worse than that. The Left isn’t just the political establishment in our time; it dominates all the critical education and communications mechanisms, with the exception of the Internet. It disposes of many billions of dollars in funding for persuasion. Its talking heads seem at times to be everywhere. It would be easier to get away from Big Brother’s telescreens.
But its ideology has been refuted — and not by “mere” logic, but by events. By reality itself.
So the Left finds itself in the position of having to do (at least) one of the following things:
1. Admit that it was mistaken;
2. Claim it needs more time for its strategies to work;
3. Find or synthesize an enemy to blame its troubles on;
4. Purge its ranks of “traitors;”
5. Modify its course without admitting that it has done so.
It seems to me that all of these tactics are already on display, except for Number 1. I can understand why that first one would be unattractive; it would cross-cut the assumption of differential rectitude that sustains the Left emotionally. But 2 through 5 don’t appear to be working all that well. Therefore…?
2011 will be an interesting year. 2012, perhaps even more so.
Numero uno will never happen.
LEFT means never having to say you’re sorry.
But its ideology has been refuted — and not by “mere” logic, but by events. By reality itself.
Which is why:
Conservatives shape policies, tempered by experience, to deal with reality. Liberal try to reshape reality to fit it’s policies.
Why do they not get it that reality always wins?
Good post.
What is reality?
-The Firesign Theatre
What is reality? Reality is something that will blindside you if you choose to ignore it.
“You can evade reality, but you cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”
–Ayn Rand
It’s not just in the US either. The Left in the UK are sick. Hatred and the wishing of death upon Sarah Palin, a person they have nothing to do with. And because of evil like she’s so unintelligent and can’t interview without making mistakes.
Last month my British friend of over 30 years said Sarah Palin needed to be in a mental institution. I wrote back “Could you give me some specific reasons for that diagnosis?” Silence.
I have been nearly a lifelong Anglophile. No more.
I’ve been the only regular American to attend what may be the largest center/right forum for the UK, Conservativehome.com, pretty much since it’s inception about 5 years ago. I’ve stayed because there are a handful of members with honorable values and no anti-Americanism, outstanding individuals; but there are also self-proclaimed conservative Brits that do not like us one bit, with a hatred for “right-wing redneck neocon America”. Take into account so very many bent to the left posting on the BBC, Guardian etc. and it’s easy to assume, in the UK most have no desire to be our friend.
While I know there are wonderful individual Brits, 70 years of marinating in socialism has reduced the lot of them to ungrateful, pathetic louses. Sad, really, to see our kith and kin humiliate their heritage like this.
This is so true. I lived in London for three years. My wife and I had a wonderful couple as friends that were pro-American coservatives. They are there, they just don’t get any press. I do weep for the UK. They are, as you say, our brothers and sisters.
Hawkeye Pierce became Frank Burns, and the stick up his hindquarters seems even bigger then it was back in the day.
Excellent analogy. Speaking of Hawkeye Pierce, I may be the only one but I can’t even watch the reruns of those hip programs of yesteryear. When once they were so interesting and timely, now they are just vapid and meaningless. Same goes for the music of the sixties with a few exceptions. I watched liberalism turn into far leftism and by the late seventies I got off the train.
You guys are so right. I mean correct. Or something… LOL. Those shows just leave me cold now a days and the current crop tend toward disgusting. How can people who claim to care about people so much, watch these shows with no empathy for the victims?
As far as rock goes, I still stick with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes, Jethro Tull, that sort of stuff. Expertise NEVER goes out of style as far as I’m concerned.
Or try Neal Morse: a brilliant, independent, talented, Christian art-rocker. (His old band Spock’s Beard is brilliant too).
Don’t give up on music entirely. It is civilization.
I’m with you. Great music is always great music.
Not giving up on music just have changed formats. Now I’m back to my roots with bluegrass and traditional played by real musicians, not the coffee house kind. I have also come to appreciate classical music more as well.
Excellent! And VERY excellent!
I’ve always loved classical. In fact, that’s what got me into ELP and Yes: they were formatted like the classical I knew.
Hawkeye Pierce was ALWAYS Frank Burns. He was just as self-righteous and arrogant – he just got away with it because he was talented and (occasionally) funny.
Hawkey and Trapper were successful, well-to-do, golf-playing, country-club-joining, cadillac-driving, martini-swilling, secretary-chasing east coast surgeons. Their antics (in the book at least) were not about fighting The Man or speaking truth to power. They resented being ripped away from their cushy lives by the Army, and they were acting out their resentment by reverting to petulant, frat-boy behavior. It took Larry Gelbart to turn them into hippies.
Not that they’re bad people. They punish Frank for (among other things) for his treatment of Pvt. Boone, help the Painless Pole with his…problem, and do surgery at Melay Marston’s free clinic. But they’re not hippies.
Fair point. My reference was to Hawkeye as portrayed by Alan Alda, not Donald Sutherland.
On a not-really-related point, I once heard Alda, during a discussion of the Equal Rights Amendment, tell the audience that they didn’t really need to know what was in it but should support it anyway.
On a completely UNrelated point, I heard Norman Mailer suggest that the solution to the public paranoia about secret government agencies (it was the early seventies) was to establish a people’s private secret police (or something like that) which would spy on all the people who were allegedly spying on us for the government. Apparantly, the cure for paranoia is to give people something else to be be paranoid about.
Andrew X I have to say that in all the years I have enjoyed PJM comments, “Hawkeye Pierce became Frank Burns” is the most elegant, poignant, yet compact comment I have ever read here.
Just a fantastic phrase, worthy of a PJM post in itself.
An often-overlooked contributing factor to the Left’s descent into madness was the “UFO contactee” movement of the 1950s.
That movement was born of a combination of two things;
1. The “Flying Saucer” mania that swept the world beginning with the Kenneth Arnold sighting near Mt. Rainier in late June 1947; and
2. The realization that the A-bomb had changed the nature of warfare.
In the first case, people were confronted with what they believed might be an alien civilization “scoping us out” for some unknown (but probably unpleasant) purpose. (Remember, this was less than two years after VJ Day.) In the second, the weapon that had brought about VJ Day could, in the wrong hands (think; the Soviets) wipe out entire civilian populations from the air. (This factor became important after the first Soviet A-bomb test shot in 1949.) Suddenly, war was something that could not be relied upon to only kill people in uniforms, or nameless groundlings in faraway lands; it threatened those at home who considered themselves “too enlightened” to become involved.
Put together, the two factors caused a lot of fairly neurotic people to become extremely neurotic. And then they began to imagine that the mysterious UFOs were flown by superior, enlightened aliens here to save us from the evils of first the A-bomb, and then everything that had led up to it, namely technological civilization, democracy, free enterprise, you name it.
I have a large collection of “contactee” literature going back to the early Fifties. And in it, with the likes of George Adamski, Truman Betherum, etc., holding forth, the same themes are repeated constantly;
1. Humanity has fallen from grace.
2. The A-bomb will destroy the world, and possibly other worlds as well.
3. To save itself, humanity must reject its existing institutions, and reject “evil” technology.
4. Only a socialist one-world state, operating at primitive agrarian levels, can “save” mankind.
5. Those bringing this message (the contactees) are the vanguard of a new, enlightened class who will rule on behalf of the even more enlightened “Space Brothers” (think; technological angels), who stand by to help us, once we prove ourselves worthy- by accepting and living by statements 1 through 4.
Except for (5), this is a precise description of modern “liberal/progressive” dogma.
It got into liberal politics through the back door in the Sixties, when the “contactee” philosophy became common coin with the “youth culture” of the day. A lot of the contactee types drifted into social activism in that decade, notably after the JFK assassination. In the Seventies, the “philosophy” really took off with the “environmental” movement, with its romance with primitivism and hatred of civilization in all forms.
(Google “Donald M. Ware” for a real eye-opener on this subject; he started out as a “contactee” believer, and ended up running a “progressive” think-tank. Ware is known today mainly for being able to jam more progressive buzzwords into a single paragraph than even Joe Biden- which causes people not to notice that like Biden, he is usually spouting gibberish.)
Since then, those who buy into this scam have attained heights of power and influence that Adamski & Co. could only dream of. But you may have noticed that they haven’t managed to “save humanity” from anything. In fact, they have only succeeded in making things worse.
That’s what happens when you follow philosophies conceived by people suffering from what can only be described as a serious personality disorder.
clear ether
eon
The type of millienalist thinking you’ve described has been with us for some time. Harmless, for the most part when it was confined to nutbars who would gather at some predetermined point and look up at the sky expecting God or flying saucers to come down and relieve them of their few remaining responsibilities.
In modern times, this sort of immanentism has formed one of the pillars of Marxist orthodoxy. The New Man, the new world, perfect communism – whatever, is always just around the corner if we could only get rid of those who are in the way.
Trouble is, those who are desperate to immanentize the eschaton – the wishful thinkers, the coercive utopians, the mentally lazy – are easily hijacked or otherwise co-opted by will-to-power driven monsters. Hence the gulags and the mass graves we’ve seen over the last 100 years or so. Unfortunately for us all, the very same ideas that have animated history’s worst mass murderers now have a happy home in the White House.
Interesting connection. Explains a lot if it’s true. The behavior of many of today’s AGW proponents reminds me of the behavior of members of a doomsday cult. Also reminds me of another 50s artifact – the movie “When Worlds Collide.” Planetary crisis forces humanity to act as one – with “the world’s top scientists” in the lead, of course – deciding who gets a seat on the “ark” rocket ship and who gets to die in a planetary collision. It’s sort of a hymn to Science, but also to political Progressivism. Collective action guided by credentialed experts is our best hope for survival.
George Pal’s “When Worlds Collide” was a decent movie (if you disregard the crazy way they launched the Ark). But frankly, his earlier “Destination Moon” was better. (It’s hard to go wrong with a story by Robert Heinlein- unless you count “The Puppet Masters” with Donald Sutherland, that is.)
As for apocalyptic visions, the “contactees” pretty much cornered the market on them in the Fifties. Whether it was climate change (they were the first to talk about “nuclear winter”, long before Sagan), overpopulation, financial meltdown, the polar ice caps melting (another of their favorite dooms), or “Polar Flip Disaster” (somehow, nuclear bomb tests were going to cause the Earth’s magnetic poles to shift, thereby causing the crust to do an aleman left and do-si-do on the mantle, and thus causing The End Of The World As We Know It), the “contactees” were right there- telling us that only they and the “Space Brothers” could save us. All we had to do was Follow The Instructions.
Oh, and all that stuff about the Mayan Doomsday Scenario in 2012? That came from them, too, notably from a gent named W. Raymond Drake, who was into the “Ancient Astronauts” thing twenty years before Erich von Daniken hit the pop culture/financial mother lode with it. Over the years, Drake and his “disciples” progressively moved the “Due Date” from 1971 to 1988, 1999, and in the early Seventies finally settled on 2012. Like Max Headroom (or fusion power, for that matter), it always ended up “20 Minutes Into The Future”.
Having grown up around people who believed this stuff wholeheartedly, I guess I was at least somewhat inoculated when the “enlightened elite’” began calling it “New Age Wisdom” and basing “progressive” policies on it.
The trouble with “old wine in new bottles” is, if it’s corked, it’s still corked.
cheers
eon
Very interesting. I spent some time looking at the influence of the UFO contactee/abductee literature on the left during the 1970′s. I hadn’t really thought about the notion of contact much before that – it didn’t seem particularly prominent in the literature.
Your google suggestion has given me another stack of reading material. Thank you!
You’re welcome.
For a real laugh riot, Google “Giant Rock Space Convention(s)” and/or “George Van Tassel”. Van Tassel was a “contactee” who hosted a series of “saucer believer” get-togethers at Giant Rock Airport in the Mojave Desert from 1954 to 1959. These believer gatherings were at least as “far out” as Roswell’s yearly UFO-fest today, with overtones of Burning Man, both of which they predated by about three decades. One reason the “contactees” all seemed to have the same “talking points” was that they exchanged tales of their meetings with tall, blond, blue-eyed Venusians* or Martians at Giant Rock. Not to mention selling books, models, T-shirts, and you-name-it. (Oh, for a time machine and a couple of hundred bucks in pre-1954 U.S. currency…)
(* Yes, I know the correct term would be “Cytherians”- but they didn’t.)
Incidentally, Giant Rock had a very noticeable effect on U.S. pop culture as well. One of the attendees two years running was an LAPD motorcycle officer and then budding TV scriptwriter, mainly known then for writing Westerns under pen-names like “Robert Wesley” (to avoid being hauled before the Chief for moonlighting). But his first love was science fiction.
His real name? You guessed it-Eugene Wesley “Gene” Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek”.
cheers
eon
There will always be a far left in this country. All of the communists from the 1930s to the 1950s were in the Democratic Party, but they were never the majority. Americans in those days still had a lot of common sense and even though there were loads of progressives in the party (especially with Roosevelt in the 1930s), Democrats still were way more conservative than what’s in the party today. Conservative values, such as a strong defense and a strong foreign policy, were still part of the Democratic party. John Kennedy and Harry Truman were great examples of that. Yet those two men probably couldn’t even get nominated in the Democratic Party today. Democrats today are basically socialists. The “Blue Dogs” are nothing but socialist light (just look at how they voted on Obamacare if you don’t believe that; they still didn’t mind spending a trillion dollars on a program they knew was bad, unless they got something for it, like the “Cornhusker Kickback” or the “Louisiana Purchase”). Then you have the Pelosi-Reid-Obama far left, your standard socialists.
But the far left, with all their rage and wild government spending, may be doomed. Simple math is what killed them. We have spent ourselves into oblivion and if we don’t do something about it NOW, we will look like Greece in about two years. We are broke and MORE spending will not save us. That’s why I’m so disappointed in this upcoming “tax package.” It is so larded up with more pork that it makes the deal, to me at least, worthless. They say the pork in it adds up to more than $50 billion, more money we don’t have and we will simply have to borrow from the Chinese. Members of Congress should be ashamed at that and this will be the major reason a third party could be created in 2012. The new Congress has a chance to stop this spending, which will drive the left insane, but if we don’t do it, we are finished as a country. And most clear-thinking Americans can see that now.
Ah, but despite your considering the Clinton /s the “moderate” wing of the “liberal/democratic” machine, who “wuz robbed” by the Obama wing in 2008, don’t be surprised to find that you are as gulled as others who believe this myth.
Myth created and propagated by their shills in Media and ivory towers. As was the myth of Camelot in 1960s. NEVER have the Clintons been moderate. They are BOTH just better at disguising their agenda, which is EXACTLY that of Barack Obama and his thugs : destruction of the USA as Constitutional Republic and replacement with their NEW WORLD ORDER. They cut their political teeth on the NEW AGE, which began PUBLICLY if you look closely, in the first election in the USA after the appearance of the New Star in the East, Sputnik. Policies that followed that election pitted citizen against citizen. A scenario that continues to plague the USA today…
The USA at that time the richest, most powerful, free-est nation in the world, despite faults. Too juicy a prey for hyenas to ignore.
The Clintons have been in the game of dissembling their true motives since they first entered center stage as Kennedy clones, after the last surviving Kennedy ceded the crown to Camelot. The undeniable character flaws evidenced in Chappaquiddick WHICH COULD NOT be edited out, as were those of his brothers, from public information. Even “democrats” knew the American electorate would not accept him as CEO. So they searched and found a look-a-like in Clinton. But erred in not recognising that Hillary was no Jackie.
It would be wise I believe to distrust the Clintons as much if not even more than Obama. Obama and his team are thugs. The Clintons work far more subtly in their sabotage and undermining the American Republic. Just WHAT IS this NEW WORLD ORDER anyhoo?
that the Clintons have made sure never to reference in public statements?
Watch what the Clintons do, NOT what they say. They are neither poor widdle fings.
Great post! The Clintons are toxic-waste. It’s easy to wish for a lesser Lefty…but is there really such a thing?
I’m not sure why liberalism morphed into anti-Americanism but it’s a shame. There are liberal causes I could support. But like the old Beatles tune, “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow…” or something like that.
The rage springs from the loss of cachet. While leftists could ignore the worst failures of their ideology (the Castros, the Kims), they cannot ignore the literal national bankruptcies that are blocking their redistributionist projects. They know that their game is moribund and that their very personal claim to coolness will no longer be accepted. An individual immature enough to have based his politics on a search for cachet is immature enough to become enraged when that search becomes fruitless.
Dead on!
We grew a garden of weeds and we ask why the flowers are gone.
Anger, is all the rage. Jeremiah Wright showed us. Michael Pfleger showed us. Spencer Ackerman showed us. Bill Ayers showed us. Ward Churchill showed us. Michael Moore showed us. Keith Olbermann showed us. Lawrence O’Donnell showed us. The Che T-shirts showed us. Sean Penn showed us.
Marxism is about revolution. Revolution is about rage.
It comes in two flavors. In your face, throw you through a plate glass window, plot to murder you with nail guns, dream of killing 25 million of you, frothing, raging, screaming, hating.
And, scheming, plotting, hiding, secreting, stealthy, filled with populist words and phrases.
Rocky Road vs. Cherry Garcia.
Instant revolution vs. incremental revolution.
We allowed these weeds to grow for forty years or more. In academia, in our information stream, in Hollywood. We have sown the seeds of self-destruction. Unchecked, rampant leftism became all the rage. And it is spiraling further and further into its own orbit. Liberals are dead, the leftists ate them.
There are no more liberals.
There are only frothing, raging, unhinged leftists. Fighting furiously not about whether to start the revolution, but when…and how. Many feel they had it in their grasp and Obama hesitated…and the chance was missed. Ergo, the sound and the fury.
I think you got it. And the people you mentioned, Plus Bill Maher and others, unashamedly belief that a socialist-marxist state will work this time, if only they are in charge. Each day, week, they are getting louder and louder. No shame, no understanding of how they are perceived. Quite the contrary, Obama speaks from the left with absolute authority that he KNOWS that what he says is agreed to by everyone.
Let us hope this movement fully implodes and does not continue to creep through the sewer it’s in waiting for the next manhole cover to open. Sadly it most likely will find one open. These people aren’t going away nor their movement. Tust in that and you won’t get blind sided.
Let us hope this movement fully implodes…
They always do. It’s the ‘collateral damage’ that they do on the way down: millions dead. Atrocity, slavery and misery for the rest.
There is usually only one way to stop them.
What you are witnessing is the mask coming off. Anyone who has spent time converting from socialism (like me), or has studied it in depth, would know that its adherents are totalitarian in nature and are the exact opposite whom they claim to be: selfish, greedy, and narcissistic – they very qualities they accuse (classical) liberals of being.
Progressives? How about regressives?
Truth in labeling.
Is the subtext here, “we know that the right has been angry for a long time, and now the left is too. What the hell is happening?
Go peddle the moral equivalence fallacy elsewhere. No one’s buying what you’re selling.
Well said…Thanks to you and to the author of this article.
Rage is a luxury I cannot afford. I get up, go to work, and am devoted to my family, career, and friends. I pay taxes, give generously to charities, and live within my means. Why are the liberals so angry? Heck if I can figure it out. Immaturity? Too much time on their hands? Eaten up with the green eyed monster? Hoping their air of superiority covers their feelings of inferiority? Never heard the word “no” as a child? Still convinced the “sex crazed poodle” would have been a better president than Dubya?
Rage on, liberals. Your entertainment value, while considerable, just isn’t enough to keep us grown ups coming back for more.
Some of it… most of it, perhaps… comes from the fact that they thought that with The One in the Oval Office and solid Dem majorities in both chambers of Congress, that they could at last implement their Utopia Plan, and afterwards everything would be just perfect, the Middle East would be peaceful, terrorists wouldn’t be attacking us anymore, unemployment would be low, the gubment would have lots of moolah to spend, lions and lambs would lie down together, there’d be rainbows in every back yard, unicorns would frolic in city parks… you get the idea.
They tried it… and it’s blowing up in their faces… so they have absolutely no idea what to do now. So they react emotionally.
Hence, rage.
Yeah, but, that vaunted “Utopia” had a price-tag and now that that is spent and meaninglessly wasted we are in ‘fire-sale’ mode.
The liberal initial reverence toward their candidates reminds me of the MRI brain scan study done of liberals’ and conservatives’ brains when a photo of their respective presidential candidate is presented to them. The conservative’s brain reacts in much the same way as the brain does when seeing a friendly face across the street. The liberal’s brain fires in the same way as when one is gazing on a beautiful sunset.
These are two fundamentally different types of brains. If evolution keeps up this way, we won’t even be able to mate with one another anymore.
Is this posted somewhere? Can you provide a net address so we can see for ourselves? I’d love to see it and pass it on to some of my former co-workers.
http://www.freedomworks.org/news/study-measures-brain-activity-of-republicans-democ
I couldn’t find direct reference in Daxypoo’s link, but this one includes it (though both reference a UCLA study–don’t know if they’re the same):
http://www.livescience.com/health/brain_politics_041029.html
yeah, mine was a quick search-cut-and paste…
So the left can still used the “L” word when they describe themselves: Luddites. From their cunning attempts to “regulate” the internet, to their “environmental” strategies and everything else in between, they are nothing more than a group of reactionaries wailing and railing against the “progress” they allegedly champion. They want to take us back to a neo-colonialism, or a even better, a medieval world of serfs, vassals, and lords. Isn’t it funny how the root word of “liberal” is liberty and yet…the more power they manage to connive, the bigger our chains. The more the individual breaks free of their orbit, the more desperate and rage filled they become. They are a danger to our way of life and should come with a set of warning labels. HAZ MAT sounds about right.
looking for reason where there isn’t any.
these progressives/lefty/marxists are messed up. their whole lives have been predicated by lies. they cannot get to grips with the duplicity so they act out.. …it is very similar to suicide bombers and islamic terrorists.
they can not win an argument with logic and reason ..so they lash out with violence and hate.
like children who were never denied and never got past the fact that the universe does not revolve around them. they are very dangerous people and our coddling system called education is making more and more of them every day.
you se it in some of the trolls that comment here. they cannot give a reason argument. Bush did do this one.
correction ..bush did not do this one
This situation is becoming more and more apparent every day. I have a brother in law who is a left wing democrat and who constantly disrupts family gatherings where most of the other members are conservative republicans. He cannot restrain himself from injecting any hate comment he picked up on CNN or MSNBC into every conversation. It is all about hate and Bush did this and Bush did that no matter what the family is discussing. It has come to the point that we avoid mentioning any about politics in his presences but he persists in making everything political. It has reached the point where we no longer care to engage him in any conversation and have to strain to remain polite and civil. This is what the democrat party has done to the American society which once could discuss differences in a civil way.
“Power is going to have to shift from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, from the state to society and from qualified experts and licensed professionals to the population at large.”
There is nothing new about this. To me this is always true. Look at the great age of the Dutch Republic or Venetian Republic. Vibrant trading societies creating wealth. Look at the great arch of the English empire. At the start we have entrepreneurial time of Queen Elisabeth and the end comes when England is choked with bureaucrats in the 20th century.
Just look at the rage on the left over the current tax issue. Really, when you consider it, the argument is whether or not top rates will be 39.6% or 35% – that’s it. I can understand being for or against either position – but is that 4% difference something to generate such rage??? The rage comes from the fact that they anticipated ‘sticking’ it to the ‘wealth’, and now can’t stand the thought that they won’t be able to.
It’s all political theatre.
It’s clear to anyone with a brain that the left has made it’s greatest advance in US history in the last 2 years. Now Obama has snookered the Republicans on the tax deal. It’s not as bad as Krauthammer portrays it, but it’s still an awesome sleight of hand.
If anybody on the left is really mad, it’s because, like teenagers, they are easily persuaded. And who might they be persuaded by? By leftists who know the true lay of the land, but who are setting the groundwork for 2012. Now Obama is the great Centrist, hated by radicals on the left and by radicals on the right. He has picked up at least a million votes this week; probably many more.
And speaking of teenagers, 90% of the conservative media, including most of the regulars on PJM bought the ruse hook line and sinker. There is starting to be some peal-back now, as more and more commentators realize how awesomely gullible they have been. Personally, I’ve had about half a dozen posts banned in the last few days because I’ve been saying it right along. We’ll see if this post stands.
indeed the republicans got shafted. the full extent is not obvious to most.
one of the biggest issues that is not being addressed is the progressives are allowed to control the language and the conservatives always on the defensive.
the conservatives (and that usually leaves out half of the elected republicans) need to go on the offensive.
What bothers me about this topic the most is that I see increasing rancor on the right as well. Many posters on the right have descended into the morass of name calling and hate just as the Left Posters have done. It’s difficult to tell them apart sometimes.
Really? Then…it seems to me that there’s only one solution available:
1) Let them take all you own and have worked for,
Or
2) Fight back…ferociously. Leave no prisoners.
Deny the radical parasites exactly what they want most. You all know I’m not kidding. When will we admit it?
Option 2, if we wish to preserve Western civilization. With all that it implies.
“We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.”
–Heinrich Heine
The more government you have the more opportunity you have to argue, the more important it becomes, in different ways to different types of people.
What government is now is a vehicle for the release of the innate aggressions of the frustrated, the haters who have moved from potentiality to the real. It gives these misfits the excuses and reasons to inflame and direct their worst selves onto the Normal People.
It also gives them the means, the federal government being their surrogate lawman and avenger.
“Force these people into controlled health care, who cares what they want or have”. Nice, and a prime example.
This is a wonderful article and what I expect from the brilliant Mr. Driscoll. Irony upon irony, what we Leftists of the late Sixties and early Seventies held closely as revealed truth was that the citizenry suffered greatly from the “cult of experts” and had the duty to take back the citizens’ power of decision from the experts. Now, the Left constantly screams the superiority of experts, especially the environmental Left. By the way, Jimmy Carter did more than anyone to convert Leftists into something else.
Obama’s original pimps thought they had a good deal. They had a clean, articulate black, a blank slate, who would be the leading figurehead in the destruction of the middle class in America. All the loony left, i.e., media, academics, Hollywood, high school losers and union thugs, bought in. But, Obama, the Kenyan, is so inept, so shiftless and lazy, that he simply adopted most of the Bush policies and practices. The loony left, used to howling at these policies, can’t now because of their beloved Kenyan.
BTW, with Willie back in the White and taking over, there is a question that I always had during his eight years elected service: he was banging Dee Dee Myers, wasn’t he?
If a recent effort of “attempting to turn the clock back on freedom, entrepreneurship, and in many cases, technology itself” consists of the proposals at the UN FCCC Cancun conference, then we’re now fighting the burgeoning power of paleo-progressives!
Reading other’s comments, I wanted to chime in. I, too, have a very liberal family member who just oozes anger, and can’t resist injecting politics into everything. She goes from 0-60 in a split second, and everyone else walks on eggshells to avoid an all out brawl (figuratively speaking). I used to respond to her angry comments about Palin, Beck, Rush, Fox, Michelle Bachmann, Bush, Cheney, and on and on. But even a gentle response like “xxx seems like a decent person” pushes her off the edge, stomping around, I swear her nostrils flare out, her face gets red, and she sprays spittle as she rants. It isn’t worth it. Sadly, it is my own sister who is like this now, and I try to avoid her if I can. I think there might come a time where we never speak again.
Most of my in-laws and out-laws are Lefties. It’s like having zombies for family members. lol
I’m in the same boat. My own Mom and one of my brothers are liberal.. to the point where I don’t talk with my brother any more and my Mom and I are distant and respectful, but she routinely slips in stuff she’s heard or read. Her whole side of the extended family are liberals. It’s a shame because we used to have a great time at reunions and gatherings, but not since the election of 2000… it’s gotten worse and more coarse and now we don’t talk.
Liberals have become what they always falsely accused, say, Jerry Falwell of being: a narrow fundamentalist who tolerates no difference of thought. That they do not – cannot – see it is as frightening as it is ironic.
Class warfare/sex warfare/gender warfare/ethnicity warfare/religious warfare
It’s really getting old, Lefties.
I think the Neo-Cons struck out, and now it’s the Neo-Progressives’ turn. I guess one of two things can happen – either we’ll fall back on imperfect but workable traditional American solutions or, out of necessity, we’ll invent something totally new based on our current situation. I’m hoping the era of idealism – leftist or rightist – is over, and we can get back to taking care of our everyday business. “Perfect is the enemy of good enough.”
I’m no Democrat, but it’s pathetically counterproductive and sad these ’10%ers’ are destroying their party. Then again, Dennis Miller does say, ‘Liberalism preys upon and devours its host from within’.
How about Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders, a ‘..self proclaimed Democratic Socialist’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders juxtoposing his, ‘..when have you made enough money..’ preaching on the Hill recently? Paraphrasing Lenin and Trotsky-like verbiage.. on our FREE MARKET system??? http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/12/10/sen_bernie_sanders_to_rich_when_is_enough_enough-comments.html
Seriously, who the h ell elects POS like this?
Uh, Vermontians, I believe
Perhaps another product of the Sixties, the Kubler-Ross model, can help our understanding of the mad thrashing about on the Left.
The Left’s reaction to the mid-term election results clearly reflects denial. Presently, they’re hoping to bargain away their worst fears concerning pending tax legislation. One wonders, however, whether a path to acceptance will ever be within reach, since Kubler-Ross subsumes rational thought.
One of the signs of the truly immature mind is that “it can be converted but not convinced.” The traditonal, pragmatic American liberalism of the Cold War has long since given way to the quasi-religious hysteria of the “New Left” of the 1960′s and 1970′s. This Left is impervious to argument and holds a utopian moral purity above all other concerns.
However what has really sealed the deal, in my view, has been the wholesale adoption of a radical enviromentalist perspective. Every socialist from Marx to Gus Hall would at least recognize the virtue of “progress” and the evolution of society into “something better.” The views of Messrs. Marx and Hall on what kind of progress is desirable naturally vary from those of, say, Ronald Reagan. However both sides would agree that there is always hope for improvement of the human condition.
If you buy in to enviromentalism and eco-politics then you necessarily slam the door on this. The eco-facist critique, now part of modern “progressivism, of humanity is that we are all destructive parasitic entities living off the “purity” of Ma Nature. The only way to “save the planet” is by ruthlessly controlling virtually everything. This justifies the Left’s facination with social micro-management since every potential human action “damages” the environment. Not even Marx, in his wildest fantasies of defenestrating the capitalist classes, would have gone that far. In order to preseve the planet everything must stop. (It also explains why so many totalitarian ex-communists have slid so easily into the enviromental camp. It is a movement that promises power.)
I’m not a particularly religious person but the Left’s rejection of traditional religious doctrine, such as the soul and the afterlife, has brought them face to face with the bleak existential reality of death. They also are having fewer and fewer children so that the sense of “living on” through one’s descendants is being lost. Thus the average lefty now feels compelled to campaign for heaven-on-earth here and now and the chief means of achieving this end is through unlimited government.
The reaction of the left to Mr. Obama’s apostacy seems to prove this. Through his deal with the GOP he is giving up on a small part of the utopian dream. Worse, he has betrayed the modern liberals almost Torquemada-like sense of morality and personal virtue. Look for more of these episodes in the future.
Compared to the economic conditions of Marx’s day, I believe Marx would tell most liberals today to quit their stinking whining.
Oh no he would not. He would be up on the barricades with these vermin.
After the 2008 election we were all bombarded with stories of how the Republican party was finished and “We are all socialists now”. It seems as if the magnetic poles have shifted once again and may do so many more time in the near future.
Bertram,
I did a post on that topic not too long ago. Whatever your ideology, you can find pundits saying that your opponents’ worldview is finished. I do think that progressivism/leftism/FDR-style liberalism is getting awfully long in the tooth, but I think that’s different from saying “it’s over.” At least I’ve tried not to jump on that bandwagon.
Ed I think it is “over” for the Left. Because of the money. Or rather, lack of it. As you’ve pointed out many times, we have a rendezvous with scarcity.
The Financial Times, WSJ, and other business outlets are pointing out that China’s global emergence means:
1. Scarcity of investment capital (as China sucks up enormous sums to fund massive infrastructure designed to keep the Communist Red Princes in power).
2. Matching scarcity of energy (oil, coal, natural gas) and food as incomes rise even marginally in China and India and the rest of the developed world in Asia.
3. Demographically aging societies like the US and Germany must produce ever more from their productive (and older) workers to simply stay in place.
We cannot borrow from the Chinese anymore, besides being a bad risk for repayment they need the money for their own investment. Ditto Brazil, India, etc. We face fairly big resource shocks in food, clothing, energy in fairly short order. And long-term structural constraints.
To me this points towards eventually, trading blocks and protectionism and export restrictions globally on things like food and energy and textiles etc. With the logic that wealth means voting folks “off the island” so you have more of a declining pie.
Its all about the money (it always is) and I think politics will be transformed in ways we cannot even understand now by constant and forever shortages for say, the next hundred years. Since the Left cannot generate wealth even by subtraction (voting off the island the poor and resource-hungry) they will pay a heavy price.
Punitive liberalism depends on ever-increasing money/resources. Our politics have not been defined by scarcity, well ever really. The traditional right is probably doomed too but that’s another issue as well.
This is why the commercial spaceflight industry and exploitation of the moon, asteroids, etc will be a necessity. If our debt is astronomical, then the astronomical environment will serve our resource needs. Side benefit: fewer mountains removed to get at the resource within, and, also raise the world’s standard of living.
Excellent insights, Ed.
But to put it briefly, They think we’re stupid, and they’re not!
I like your insight about the today’s generation as technically savy. They are and they know a con job when they see one. That being 19-20th century progressivism. It’s soon to be another “ism” on the dung heap of history.
A lot of the comments reflect frustration in dealing with rageaholic liberal family and friends. The following is great advice for dealing with such.
A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.-Proverbs 15:1
But for those of a more mischevious heart and borrowing from the above I offer these simple solutions. Never meet anger with anger, it produces a lot of heat but no light. Meet anger with humor, but first be well armed with truth.
When an angry liberal fires off an irrational thought based on feelings I return fire with the facts, and a chuckle. Housing crisis? CRA. Banking crisis/Unemployment- Graham, Leach; NAFTA? Didn’t President Clinton sign those? The idea is to nicely let them know I am laughing, not with them but at them for their ignorance.
Don’t forget good ole condescension. Irrational truther, “I think it was Bush that took down the World Trade Towers.” Me: “Of course you do.”
You want to avoid the worst arguments in family political discussions? Jump to the default position of, “Well American has always had two parties and they have always disagreed; we can still get along, can’t we?”
Of course, half the lefties and righties claim/believe that the other side is un-American, quite possibly traitorous, definitely uninformed, often malicious, blah, blah, blah. And they seem to feel it so deeply too. Strong feeling on one side engender the same in the other side. Been there, done that. Alas, it IS fun, or at least irresistable for many of us to argue.
God bless us every one!
Barret Brown, is that you? I’d recognize that mindless “pox on you both” crap anywhere.
No Barret Brown here, but he sounds as if he might be a wise man.
You know D-White, you have proven that a Picket Fence can hatch a life form.
And the children call him famous,
What the old men call insane.
“…from the binary prism of SUX and ROX?” That’s a pretty cleaver line; is that original? (honestly asking)
“But why has what was once called “liberalism” gone so far off the rails?”
Because liberals have cast off that term and owned up to their true calling: Progressivism. Progressives believe that the common herd are not capable of governing themselves. They (we) need expert managers to call the shots. According to the Progressive faith, the president stands at the apex of expertise and management ability. If he can’t cut it, then “f*** him,” we’ll get someone else.
I can understand one of the early posts about losing friends to Liberalism. It’s sad. I have a friend who I barely speak to any more. He was on the road to Socialism for years but once Obama came along, he drank the kool-aid to the last drop. Then he surrounded himself with people who absolutely WORSHIP Obama. When he’s not telling you how Obama’s really a Conservative and that’s why I should support him, or how the economy is coming back under Obama or how Obama is actually against abortion, he’s repeating over and over the myrmidon mantra of the Left:
Palin’s an idiot.
Bush lied.
Limbaugh spews hate.
Beck is a crazy racist.
Cheney shot a guy on a hunting trip.
Everything – Well, almost everything with this poor man is Obama now. He can do no wrong. And there are few other topics he’ll talk about. Oh, and forget visiting him. If you try, he makes every attempt bring in his new Leftist friends to help educate you during your visit. Suffice to say, no one who he used to associate with has stopped in to visit in quite sometime. Including me.
It’s all very sad. Half the country is like this now. And it’s going to get worse. When Obama fails utterly they will have no one to blame but themselves. But they won’t blame themselves. They’ll blame the Right and everyone else not like them. And then they’ll go to violence.
And then they’ll go to violence.
Let them. It would be mass suicide on their part. The #1 unintended consequence of Obama’s election has been the re-arming of conservative America and re-discovery of the 2nd Amendment. Three years ago I’d never even considered owning a gun. Now I own two. Claire Wolfe’s “awkward stage” is just about over. If the progs go postal, they will be annihilated.
BTW, this is a VERY WELL written article. I really enjoyed it. Kudos to the author.
Come on feel the noize!
It is reassuring to read all the intelligent responses here. I can only wonder why and how so many have not arrived at similar conclusions. How much additional evidence is needed before the TNR crowd has had enough of all of the big benevolent state mishigass?
Is it uncertainty which worries them back into their progressive bunkers? Is uncertainty all that bad for them? Must they have their rose gardens 52 weeks a year?
Actually, China is aging more rapidly than the US thanks to the One Child policy. Our birth rate has remained at the replacement level for several decades now while China’s percentage of the elderly has now passed the US percentage of the elderly. China is on course to begin shrinking in total population within two decades if current demographic trends don’t change.
I understand completely the situation of those who have lost friends to liberal insanity. Been there, done that. However, my feeling is that if they’re stupid enough to buy into that nonsense, they’re too stupid for me to want to have any further dealings with. I had one fellow all hot and bothered about his sympathy for the illegal immigrant class when I pointed out that his position clearly showed his disdain and contempt for the American working class, deeply hurt by such immigration. When his counter was “the stupid fascination Americans have with firearms and the ridiculous Second Amendment,” I realized our friendship was over. I told him goodbye, left his home and do not expect ever to speak to him again.
Long story short, the lefties are insane and not to be trusted at all. If I know a person is leftist, I simply won’t have any dealings with them. If you can’t cut them out of your life totally, it’s better just to watch them carefully so you’re ready when they go full-tilt moonbat crazy…..
The prognosis? Liberalism is dead. d.e.a.d. Sadly, it remains with us like the undead. It is unable to see itself in any mirror and it can’t stand the light of day. It hides in the shadows and sucks the life-blood out of those it comes in contact with.
We are too weak to have the will to put a stake in it’s heart and until we do, it will lurk among us, taking one by one the ones we love.
and like the un-dead the left can never die and will rise time and time again from the crypts when it gets beaten back
although, flashing my pocket-sized u.s. constitution in the face of the zombified left does act like crucifix thrust upon a vampire
The very same could be said about Islam.
Great discussion, better than the good article.
I learned a lot from your discussion and say many comments that I have lived (about lefty friends/family).
For all the Left hates Christianity, they are so into the Messiah concept.
-In the Thirties, it was Mussolini (beloved of FDR and the Left).
-Even though he was their kind of guy, Hitler not so much but they really got behind Hitler’s ally, Stalin. Never understood why everyone hated Hitler for invading Poland but it was OK for Stalin to invade two weeks later. Stalin morphing into “Papa Joe” was FDR’s crowd at their propaganda best.
-Next, Mao. Such a sweet guy who worked to protect his people and only wanted the best for them (except the 50 million or so he murdered).
-Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Arafat, etc. etc. etc. What’s not to like. Great humanitarians all.
-Pattern seems to be, if you put one murderer in prison, you are a fascist (which is funny since the fascists were/are leftists) and deserve being hated, but if you murder a million you are a hero. See Solzhenitsyn on this subject.
In short, as noted in many comments, the Left wants a hero to kill the “bad” people (anyone that disagrees with them) and to set up a “heaven on earth.” Sounds like they read and memorized “Revelations” and ignored the rest of the Bible. Before they criticise the mote in my eye, they need to look to the boulder in their own. I have lost patience with them and don’t see how a house so divided can stand.
the left commits the fatal flaw of replacing religion/faith with secularism which becomes its own cult– so flawed, because it’s foundation lies in the “perfectibility” of man
essentially, psycho-babble mumbo jumbo for the lazy but well-provided for, dime a dozen, common narcissist….
when the left spews their venom about humankind run amok; a pestilence among the purity of nature, they speak from experience as their very existence gorges itself off the wealth, creativity, and life force of the productive
An example of what made me a conservative/libertarian hippy was the song from “Hair” that went:
How can people be so heartless?
How can people be so cruel?
Easy to be hard, Easy to say no…
Especially people who care about strangers,
Who say they care about social injustice.
Do you only care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I learned all about Lefties because of that song even before I knew it was the Lefties the song was talking about.
Left, thy name is rank hypocrisy.
And not a single mention anywhere of outgoing TNR editor Franklin Foer’s part in that whole Scott Thomas Beauchamp mess.
THAT WAS ONLY THREE YEARS AGO!
Oh right, it’s not in Wikipedia, so …
A factor known to Christians but that seems to be ignored by almost all is what C.S. Lewis referred to as the “Lowerarchy” (Screwtape). That is:
(1) there really is an organized anti-human world of demonic entities
(2) they really do mentally and emotionally influence everyone, especially those who are unprotected from them
(3) they are full of rage, and this is visible in their puppets.