As quoted by Steven Hayward in The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: 1964-1980, political philosopher Michael Oakeshott once wrote that “politics is an activity unsuited to the young,” because:
Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands—unless it be a cricket bat. … Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own.
Perhaps that’s one explanation why so many liberals, as they get up in years, have both a surprising nostalgia for the past, and a “you kids get off my lawn” crankiness about contemporary society. This, despite that fact that liberalism, or progressivism, or simply the left, has been the dominant political philosophy – at least in Washington, academia and the media – for the last 75 years or so. Here are but a few examples we’ve rounded up of this trend in action. Back in November, a brief profile of a then-new biography of Kurt Vonnegut at NPR was titled, “Kurt Vonnegut Was Not A Happy Man. ‘So It Goes:’”
Vonnegut’s public persona was often at odds with the actual man. “He read the signs of what was happening in the country,” Shields says, “and he realized that he was going to have to be a lot hipper than a nearly 50-year-old dad in a rumpled cardigan to be a good match with what he was writing about.”
As a former public relations man for General Electric, Vonnegut knew how to construct an image, a public version of himself who readers could believe had written books like Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions.
“I don’t mean to persuade anybody that Kurt was a cynic,” Shields says. “Just the opposite.” But Vonnegut was more of a reactionary than a radical, someone who showed up for a meeting with the band Jefferson Airplane dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit and wingtip shoes. Someone who was deeply scarred by his experiences, and longed for the older, gentler America of his pre-war childhood.
As Kyle Smith noted at the time:
I think when you’re famous people call you “irascible,” but if not, you’re just a jerk. Also in the new biography of him: Vonnegut carefully constructed his hip image, using lessons he learned as a PR man for G.E. (Did Vonnegut and Reagan overlap there at all? Seems like they must have.)
In addition to the professional similarity with the Gipper, the late Vonnegut shared a love of American nostalgia with a much more unlikely source – someone, like Vonnegut, also deeply unhappy with contemporary America:
Back in 2006, when he was writing The Conscience of a Liberal, [Paul] Krugman found himself searching for a way to describe his own political Eden, his vision of America before the Fall. He knew the moment that he wanted to describe: the fifties and early sixties, when prosperity was not only broad but broadly shared. Wells, looking over a draft, thought his account was too numerical, too cold. She suggested that he describe his own childhood, in the middle-class suburb of Merrick, Long Island. And so Krugman began writing with an almost choking nostalgia, the sort of feeling that he usually despises: “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional moment in our nation’s history …”
Krugman remembers Merrick in these terms, as a place that provoked in him “amazingly little alienation.” “All the mothers waiting to pick up the fathers at the train station in the evening,” he says, remembering. “You were in an area where there were a lot of quiet streets, and it was possible to take bike rides all over Long Island. We used to ride up to Sagamore Hill, the old Teddy Roosevelt estate.” The Krugmans lived in a less lush part of Merrick, full of small ranch houses each containing the promise of social ascent. “I remember there was often a typical conversational thing about how well the plumbers—basically the unionized blue-collar occupations—were doing, as opposed to white-collar middle managers like my father.”
In his review of Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, Bruce Bawer noted perceptively that the Woodman, like Krugman is also another New York arch-liberal at odds with contemporary society:
While Allen likes to think of himself as a standard-issue Manhattan liberal, the sensibility of his films (whether he realizes it or not) is largely conservative. Over and over he makes it clear that he despises pretty much everything that came out of the 1960s, and one after another of his films is an exercise in cultural nostalgia for the pre-Sixties world. His pictures’ musical scores testify to his obsession with the Great American Songbook. (Recall, for example, the sequence in Hannah and Her Sisters in which Dianne Wiest takes him to see a punk rock band that he hates, joking that “after they sing, they’re gonna take hostages” – after which, in order to give her a taste of “something nice,” he takes her to the Carlyle to hear Bobby Short perform Cole Porter.) Just as The Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days are love letters to the 1930s and 40s – and both very charming ones, at that – Midnight in Paris is a love letter to the 1920s.
Nostalgia for the mid-century past isn’t just rooted to liberals on this side of the Atlantic, of course. “London is no longer an English city, says John Cleese. Is he right?” Ed West (no relation) of the Telegraph asked last year:
Cleese also spoke about the shift in British attitudes away from a “middle-class culture” and the emergence of a “yob culture”.
He said: “There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture. Now it’s a yob culture. The values are so strange.”
He added that he preferred living in Bath to London because the capital no longer felt “English”.
“London is no longer an English city which is why I love Bath,” he said. “That’s how they sold it for the Olympics, not as the capital of England but as the cosmopolitan city. I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.”
More after the page break.
You are on to something with this.
Yes, Ed, you are onto something. For we can see a way back home to sanity for those cranks on the left. For if you go down the block and take a left turn, and then another, and then another, you are back where you began and can start over.
You see, the leftist cranks want to *conserve* the morals, the values, the zeitgeist and the joi de vivre of their youth, when there actually was a clear morality, when America was exceptional for her smarts and prudence, and her ideology in the world. Do they remember? We would go to the ends of the earth to stanch the flow of tyranny and injustice, and promote the flickering light of democracy. It was a world in which a charismatic President proclaimed: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” [Note: Kennedy would be kicked out of the Democrat party at a moment's notice now, but would be welcome in the Republican party forthwith!]
If they want that path, all it takes is repentance, and a step anew in the right direction. Do that, and step on the righteous path, where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin (or where their skin tingles).
It is time to begin again. True progress begins with only with a true rendering of history.
“…a true rendering of history.” No one believes that is possible any longer. But I tried to recall my own evolution from unconscious racist to anti-racist here: http://clarespark.com/2012/01/21/the-persistence-of-white-racism/. The movements of the 1960s that so vastly enlarged the welfare state were managed by older progressives, who masterfully co-opted both the counter-culture and the cultural nationalism of women, blacks, browns, and everyone else. And their nostalgia for the 1920s (take Woody Allen) was a longing for the primitive.See http://clarespark.com/2010/04/08/racism-modernity-modernism/.Ernest Hemingway continues to dominate the search terms used to find my website.
Well said, linked, and collated. Bravo!! Run off some carbons immediately!
That is,
if it’s not illegal to do so yet.
(…the dreaded c-word.)
But don’t be disheartened- I’ve just gotten word the mimeograph machine is up and running again!!
We can test the students on it!
And idiot Krugman has spent his whole frikkin’ life selling ideas and strategies that ensure the ultimate destruction of the wonderful civic and economic world we had while he was growing up. The EPA, OSHA, ADA, Unions, Affirmative Action, easy divorce (a misnomer if ever there was one), welfare, Medicare and Medicaid, SSI; which of these things would he now regard as couterproductive, at the very least? Some economist! How can anyone think he’s got even one working brain cell if he cannot see that as plain as day?
If anyone is thinking of sending me a Nobel prize, please don’t bother. It’s obviously more akin to a dunce hat than a great honor, and I’m already too foolish for my own good.
The irony is that when Krugman describes that period in time — he’s exactly right. Most of the boomers’ formative years were indeed exceptional, aren’t coming back, and CANnot come back — unless the non-totalitarian world is once again bombed back so close to the Stone Age that once again a single nation utterly dominates civilian manufacture.
The tragedy of Krugman is that he is unable to apply his intellectual credentials to a dispassionate examination of the question “why?” He’s the victim of a decades-long amygdala hijack. And, consequently, the nostalgia of which the OP is about.
Russ,
A lot of folks (myself included) have tried to point that out to Krugman–that America’s industrial dominance and even her favored status in Bretton-Woods came from her having emerged virtually intact from her victory World War II. (Britain won too, but Britain was devastated by air raids.)
But every time we point this out, Krugman just ignores it. Evidently as a liberal, he can’t accept the fact that America became great from war. Liberals don’t believe that anything good can come from war (cf. “Human Smoke” by Chris Hedges).
The EPA is something that makes us better, safer and more civilized.
OSHA too, “easy divorce” is a matter of freedom – something that is always better than the alternative. Medicare and Medicaid and SSI save so many lives in every sense one would have to be Satan himself to prefer that we stop cooperating and make elderly strangers die in the streets.
Yes I will one day be nostalgic, but it will be for an America that sees the common humanity in its citizens and can cooperate to give old people a dignified life, keep our workplaces safe, our air and water clean, our children safe from poison, and can preserve our freedom even though some would prefer that we replace it with Leviticus.
Excellent analysis. I enjoyed reading it.
I concur
Nostalgia-wise, someone a long time ago may have said it best. By your fruits you shall be known. Great article.
I’m surprised you didn’t reference David Mamet. Good essay, as always.
With all due respect, that guy who shot up his daughter’s laptop wasn’t “being daddy,” he was being a violent thug. Lesson learned, I’m sure — his daughter will fear him (and probably all men) the rest of her life. I guess that makes a certain contingent of he-men feel a thrill run up their leg to their shriveled family jewels — “Ha ha! Take that, feminized America!” I mean really, life isn’t a movie. It’s not cute when real people really take violent revenge on a child for mouthing off. There’s no laugh track or cute resolution at the end.
PS: my father was not perfect, but he was a real father, who treated me like a person, not an extension of his own ego. And he would *never* have destroyed my belongings to punish me for any reason.
Let me get this straight: he’s a violent thug for destroying an inanimate object, that he as the father bought and paid for, and which his underage daughter was using to misbehave? The most charitable interpretation I can make of this is that you somehow got the vapors because he used a .45 to do the job. Ooooo, a gun, scary! Newsflash: millions of Americans keep and bear arms legally and morally, for self-protection or sport. Many of them shoot at inanimate objects without incident. Hardly any of them are violent thugs for doing so.
Apart from the gun, this is no different than if he had flushed her stash of drugs down the toilet, or disciplined her in front of her friends causing her to lose face.
Sometimes you have to be the parent.
Don’t provoke a pampered brat. They just whine even more.
I am grateful that Andrea Harris gets to be a mother if she chooses and you don’t.
The ONLY thing wrong with shooting the laptop was that afterwards he couldn’t sell it and split the money with his wife.
Yes, craig, he was a violent thug for taking a gun and using it to shoot up his daughter’s computer. People who destroy others’ belongings are following textbook abuser behavior. It’s not normal to react so violently to insignificant situations — and yes, a teenager whining on to her friends about her parents, on Facebook or anywhere, is an insignificant situation. Teenagers complain about their parents all the time, it’s part of life. Obviously it’s not good behavior, but it’s not worth outsize, over-the-top reactions like filming yourself shooting up something that belongs to your kid. Do you know what that communicated to the girl? No, you seem singularly lacking in the ability to empathize with anyone outside of your narcissistic hero fantasies, so I’ll tell you: what that father told the girl with his act was not that he loved her and was hurt by her disrespect, but that any further sign of anything but complete obedience and admiration will result in violence. He also told her that as far as he is concerned she is his property, as well as everything that he has “given” her, and that he can do anything he wants to her. If my father had ever done anything like that to me I’d have never spoken to him again. I sure hope you don’t have any daughters. And that goes for the rest of you alpha males beating your chests over this.
Well said.
As the son of an abusive father, I salute you for laying it on the line.
cheers
eon
Andrea, I mostly agree with you. My first reaction to that video was that the jerk should quit smoking. He lost some of my respect right then and there.
His complaints directed toward his daughter indicate that he lost her a long time ago. I don’t blame him for his frustration, however. To watch your kid being pulled into the cesspool known as today’s popular culture can be heartbreaking. It was disappointing to see him use a firearm so irresponsibly. He should have locked the computer in the his gun safe and told her that it wasn’t coming out until the two of them had spent some quality time together. All of this in cooperation with her mother. Then he should have retrieved a lesser caliber rifle or pistol (I would prefer a .22 rifle for safety reasons) and taken his daughter to the range. He could have made a video of this for future use on YouTube. I have had that experience with a friend’s two young granddaughters. These were girls who were afraid of guns and had never pulled the trigger on a firearm in their lives. They were in the company of grown men. When it was all over they had loved every minute of it and started bugging their parents to “let us do that again”. Do that. Not what the jackass did in the video. Oh, another thing. Buy the girl a membership in the NRA and take her with you to range often. Then get the computer back out of the gun safe after a couple of weeks. Then post the range experience video on YouTube. Much better than the other nutty bullshit.
She’s a minor – she owns NOTHING!!! She didn’t work for it, she didn’t pay for it. End of story. Period. As for your “thug” nonsense, the daughter is apparantly fine with this action and had a good laugh about it with her dad after they sat on the porch and had a “good talk.” He then let her read all the comments from boobs like you and she got a good chuckle from it.
Dad also told her there was going to be no way they were going to profit from this and also pointed out how one act on You Tube could color and change your whole life. He also said he learned (himself) that when he says something to his daughter he MUST stick to his guns (so to speak). He will NOT be replacing her computer and if she wants one she can go out and get a job.
So yes – lesson learned by the whole family and it was a GOOD lesson.
Andrea,
So you had beta male for a father. Betas are what you know. Not all alpha guys are chest beaters and thugs; of course you wouldn’t know that. They just have a backbone and tend to cut to the chase. They aren’t like girls….not much for drama and hysterics.
They tend to have honor, the heart of a warrior, and strong desire to protect the castle. If you were raised by a beta, this may be foreign to you, but alphas tend to be really fun and honorable. I just don’t prefer squishy men.
“He also told her that as far as he is concerned she is his property, as well as everything that he has “given” her, and that he can do anything he wants to her”
Did your father ever take anything away from you as punishment? I have four daughters and while I have never shot any electronics (they have never acted like the girl referenced) I have taken away cell phones, eReaders etc. Believe me, if one of them had shown the level of disrespect sh did it wouldn’t come back. What exactly is the difference? All that he showed her is that he will not allow her to use the fruits of his labor to disrespect him. If she gets a job and buys her own laptop she could say whatever she wanted, and then probably find a new place to live which would a bigger shock to her than this!!!
So, Andrea, do you agree with the follow-up paragraph to the discussion of this video? “Being Daddy, no matter what people say, is not primarily a matter of telling people what not to do, nor is it a matter, in my opinion, of scaring them with the consequences of poor behavior. Family leaders rather model, proclaim and support the way people behave when they treat themselves like people instead of meat puppets: i.e. when they make their flesh serve their dignity, love and joy, which sometimes means delaying and even denying more immediate and strictly physical pleasures.”
As a contrast to this video, we now have living with us a nephew and his son. Our grand-nephew was kicked out of his low-income mother’s house for chronic hostile behavior. One of the things that got him kicked out was destroying the laptop his grandmother gave him because he was angry at his mother. Threw it on the ground and then crushed it. Things aren’t perfect here, but after a couple of alpha-male confrontations with his Dad, who is having to do some growing up himself, along with some modeling by his Great Uncle, he is acting far more responsible.
I think the popularity of this video does reflect a hunger for someone to be Daddy, even though the one in the video seemed over-the-top in his reaction. We’re getting conditioned to respond to “over-the-top” in entertainment, etc. Hard to put the steady work of modeling correct behavior into a memorable, short video.
Can’t take it? Grow some, Andrea. Whiny effing liberal.
Liked the video and what the father did a lot more than I disliked it. I wouldn’t have destroyed several hundred dollars worth of property to make my point the way he did, but I can certainly empathize with him. Would it have been as effective for him to record himself giving the laptop to Goodwill — and then show his daughter and her friends how to use it as a deduction to offset his income tax? Probably not — and it wouldn’t have made him famous.
@Andrea Harris
1. I believe the father bought the computer for his daughter to use. A minor but very important distinction. Traditionally, children use household property at the discretion of their parents. A child may have his own room in the family house, but it is understood that the parents own the house and thus own the child’s room. Since this father did not technically destroy another person’s property, your assertion that he necessarily demonstrated the tendencies of an abuser is false. Such a violent act–out of context and in a general sense–may be indicative of abusive behavior, but the merits of the specific incident must be considered.
2. You assert that it is an insignificant event for a child to publicly post a diatribe against his parents. You are wrong on at least two levels. First, such vilification amounts to libel, which is an act punishable by law. Second, it is the job of the child to respect and honor the parent. Flaming your parents on Facebook is extremely disrespectful and warrants a severe punishment. If I must clarify either of these two points, then stop reading because you are not going to get what I am trying to tell you.
3. I think you have misinterpreted the father’s message to his daughter. It was simple: our house, our rules. One reason the father had to resort to his video was that his daughter had painted such a negatively biased, half-true picture of her home-life. Taking her Facebook rant as the truth, you might think that she was an unwilling slave in her own home. In reality, she is not a slave. She receives many, many benefits as a member of her household. The father was simply saying that in order to benefit from its privileges, you must take on the responsibilities of the household. You cannot simultaneously defame the one who is providing you with the means of defaming him.
4. If you read the commentary the father provides elsewhere concerning how his family has dealt with the fallout, you will see that his treatment of his daughter did not begin or end with the bullet to the screen. You seem to think that the father casually walked into his daughter’s bedroom, shot her computer, and walked out without a word. Far from it–these parents have spent a lot of energy helping their daughter absorb this lesson. Indeed, I see a passionate, compassionate father using every parenting tool at his disposal to guide his daughter to responsible adulthood.
5. One more thing about violence. Humans adapt to stimuli. The more violent the stimuli, the more sudden and lasting the adaptation. If my son or daughter were heading for the wall socket with a metal fork, I am not going to say from my comfy chair across the room, “Um, honey, do you think that maybe you ought not to stick that fork in the socket?” No, I am going for the tackle first, and then the chat about death and whatnot later. My reaction, forceful and memorable, would instill within them an appreciation for the harmful consequences to their actions. Sure, the guy did not have to waste a perfectly good computer, but he was willing to sacrifice his own resources to do what was necessary to bring about a necessary and immediate behavioral correction.
“My reaction, forceful and memorable, would instill within them an appreciation for the harmful consequences to their actions.”
The experience will be memorable alright. She will remember for the rest of her life how her dad reacted to her behavior. She can remember how her father responded in a sensible fashion by relieving her of the computer and basing its return to her on her display of willingness to learn responsible behavior and devoting time for a quality relationship with her no-nonsense father. (See my previous post). Or, she can remember that he acted in a manner not far removed from he own childish behavior. People that use guns to destroy expensive personal property while in a state of frustration and/or anger are at best stupid or may be actually dangerous. Responsible but firm no-nonsense adult or irresponsible jerk? He had the opportunity to leave a lasting impression of the first example but chose the latter. The father missed the opportunity teach his daughter the meaning of respect. Respect for the handling and use (as well as enjoyment) of firearms and most of all respect for her mother and dad. A kid who respects her family would not have demeaned them by posting atrocious stories about them on the internet. Hopefully she will just laugh this whole thing off and remember her dad is an irresponsible gun-owning redneck. I hope my kids think better of me. I want to think of me as a responsible gun-owning redneck.
I am all for responsible gun-ownership. Where in his follow-up writings prompted by the subsequent media frenzy do you get the impression that he is not a responsible gun-owner? Or does the single act of shooting a computer satisfy your criterion for irresponsibility?
More importantly, time will tell whether or not he made the right parenting decision. You are correct in that he could have chosen different courses of action. For all we know, he may have already tried them. We are summing up his parenting credentials based on one action. According to his post-viral-video writings, he and his daughter apparently have seized the opportunity resulting from this incident to deepen their familial bond. He rolled the dice and won, I’d say.
Concerning the value of the computer, what of it? The man correctly identified the object that was causing a rift to form within their household. He sacrificed a material possession–easily replaced–so that he might retain something not so easily recovered. What a small price to pay to teach his daughter that nothing of this earth is worth more to him than having a healthy relationship with her! Go back and listen to what he is saying in the video! If I saw a chasm forming between me and one of my children, I would drive my car off a cliff if I thought it would very likely get his attention and could clear the way for a productive, healing line of communication. A gamble, without a doubt, but one worth taking.
“He also told her that as far as he is concerned she is his property, as well as everything that he has “given” her, and that he can do anything he wants to her.”
To an extent, he’s right. The clothing that child has on her back, the food she ungratefully shovels into her mouth come directly from her father’s efforts. I am not advocating or supporting the treatment of children as chattel but within the family unit there is a pecking order and she is a minor child with no special rights within the family structure other than those given to her. Parents have the responsibility to provide for their children, to teach, love, correct and raise them to be constructive members of society. Children have the responsibility to contribute to the family, mind their manners and keep their grades up.
The fact that she even had this laptop, and that her father had gone out of his way to spend extra to upgrade the system and maintain it says he cared very much for her and took into account her needs. Laptops are not $20.00 Etch-a Sketches. They cost real money! That she misused the machine to spend her time bad-mouthing her family instead of doing her homework and contributing to the family unit says to me she was an ungrateful whelp.
I think you might be over-reaching in terms of the father’s perceived violence. Listen to the father’s dialogue instead of watching the video; it’s quite telling. He clearly states that his frustration with his daughter’s behavior has been ongoing – there’s a history here of her disrespect and disobedience. I get the sense that Dad had tried to make an effort to treat his daughter as ‘a person’. And for that he probably got a bunch of sass and endless refusals to do what had been asked of her.
And for the record – I am a daughter whose father would probably have done the same exact thing.
Ed, thank you. I am sending this article to many people. Your clarity has has taken what I have vaguely perceived and made me feel less crazy!
What strikes me most about these leftist nostaligia romps is their complete self-oblivousness. They haven’t a clue that their hostility to bourgeois attitudes and values destroyed the very society they look back on so fondly.
What did they expect?
And these jerks think themselves the fittest to run our society today.
And that’s the key to the whole business.
The left has never been about “liberty, equality, fraternity”, no matter what they claim going back to the French Revolution. From their beginnings with Plato’s Republic, their message has always been a very simple one;
“The world should be ruled by the smart people- namely, US.”
Throughout its history, whether it was called “leftism”, “progressivism”, “liberalism”, or whatever, the left has always operated on the principle that there is nothing wrong with an authoritarian form of government- unless it’s being run by somebody other than themselves.
They have no use for democracy, except as a tool with which to seize power, after which they ignore the law and do as they damned well please. And what they damned well please invariably brings ruin to everyone else. With the leftists preening themselves over how wonderful everything is. (Those who disagree are of course reactionaries in desperate need of self-criticism and re-education.)
It’s not that they don’t see the harm they do, they simply do not define it as harm. This is where concepts like “criminals are victims of society” and “we must accept lower standards of living to save Holy Mother Gaia” come from. To the true leftist, humans are a problem at all times- but when under his thumb, they make tolerable slaves. (Barely.)
Modern-day “progressivism” is probably the most blatantly anti-human form of leftism yet conceived. It seeks to impoverish, and hopefully eventually cull, the human race as a whole (other than the progressives themselves) in the pursuit of goals it cannot even prove exist. Reversing “global warming”, abolishing the concept of unsupportable national debt, and uniting the world in a single, non-political (but highly politicized) universal state are not only very probably impractical, but two out of the three are based on the idea that physics and mathematics are false constructs.
Steven Dutch, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, relates a conversation he had with a trendily progressive sociology professor there. Said prof stated that he could conceive of a future society in which the Periodic Table of the elements would no longer be “valid”, having been replaced by a less Eurocentric, less patriarchal construct. And that the world would be run better as a result.
Dutch replied that he, being a historian (specialty; history of the physical sciences), could visualize a world in which Germany and her allies had won World War Two and that in such a world, Marxism would be a dead letter, being such a “Eurocentric, patriarchal” construct. Said sociology prof bristled at this, stating it could never happen because Marxism was an expression of fixed, immutable facts.
Can anybody spot the two disconnects in logic, here? (Hint; neither one is Professor Dutch’s doing.)
(Warning; Godwin’s Law violation inbound.)
When you factor in the modern-day left’s romance with primitivism, their hatred of technological, Western civilization, their obsession with collectivism, their love affair with mysticism (the whole New Age thing plus their fascination with Eastern belief systems), and their seemingly limitless determination to enshrine “politically correct” discrimination in the law- plus their abject hatred of Israel (and let’s not kid ourselves that that elephant isn’t in their living room), it’s very plain that the modern “progressive” left has uncritically adopted all the worst attributes of the two most disastrous 20th Century forms of totalitarianism. Namely, nationalist socialism (fascism) and internationalist communism.
Yet they continue to maintain that they are smarter than everybody else put together. And that they can “make it work” where everyone else has failed, for that reason.
Unfortunately, the historical record and the law of averages is not on their side.
clear ether
eon
What the He??? on the periodic table? It’s one of the great imaginative leaps in human history. Mendeleev was near mystic. Russian, too. If the Periodic Table can’t survive???
It is one of the most beautiful constructions in humanity. It’s a tone poem to the order and beauty of the universe created by a loving god. It’s awesome enough in it’s beauty that even atheists enjoy it’s order. There are books about it, emotional books, tours of the classes of chemicals…..
I’m speechless. I think this shocks me more than anything I’ve ever read about ignorant libtards.
I’m not even a chemist. I’m not even a college graduate. One semester of high school chemistry, and I know it is one of the most beautiful creations, on the order of the rose windows in cathedrals.
Then you should love this;
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19445/19445-h/19445-h.htm
“Omnilingual” by H. Beam Piper.
It points out the inherent logical fallacy in the Sociology prof’s delusion. And it was written over half-a-century ago.
As they say in “Highlander”, “There can be only one.”
cheers
eon
This is why academics should not be allowed to govern.
This is the Lefty Paradox, part of their “sounds great, doesn’t work” dream-meets-reality legacy. Self-destruction is what they do best (see abortion, gay marriage, welfare, entitlements, lack-of budgets, and Obama).
extremely incisive comment. says it all. how did “their hostility to bourgeois attitudes and values” get started? They were manipulated into this mind-set. By whom,when,how,why? It is all traceable isn’t it? Not out of thin air.
Actually, they manipulated themselves, with no help from anyone else.
If you look at the lives of the Left’s “gurus”, from the Fabians through Marx to Lenin and right down to the present crop, they came almost exclusively from middle-to-upper-class backgrounds. Yes, the “bourgeoisie” they resent so much. The sole exception? Mussolini; his father was a farmer. (And yes, he was a socialist before he almost single-handedly invented Fascism.)
The prime motivator seems to be nothing but ego. The average leftist is utterly convinced of his own innate superiority, to a degree that would probably make Reynhardt Heydrich blush. He cannot conceive of himself, or his dogmas, as being anything less than perfect. Ergo, he believes that everyone else should be bowing, scraping, and deferring to him.
For an example of this mindset in action, forget Obama; look at Ted Kennedy’s record over his lifetime. Teddy was the most arrogant of all the clan, including his father Old Joe, and had the least to be arrogant about. Only Ted could answer the question, “What makes you think socialism can succeed here when it has failed everywhere it’s ever been tried?” with, “It failed because they didn’t have ME to run it.” (Yes, this was an actual exchange on the Senate floor.)
From this egotistical starting point, the leftists go on to demand what they see as their “right”- that being to “rule without let or hindrance”, to quote Monty Python re the Spanish Inquisition. When they are told “no”, they become incensed, or even enraged, and lash out, on the “I will FORCE you to give me my due!” principle.
When they are in power, and their grand plans fail, they hunt for scapegoats. Because to them, it is logically impossible that they could ever be wrong about anything.
This is also why they casually break the law when it is convenient to do so- or just because they feel like it. Since they are so perfect, laws cannot be allowed to shackle their genius. Also, laws are the product of the society they despise (ours), and so breaking them proves their innate superiority. Plus, they love to see those they hate gnashing their teeth in frustration, because they cannot stop them by legal means. (No, the contradiction in terms here never dawns on them. Neither does their hypocrisy.)
Another factor is that leftists like to associate with others who think like themselves. This is a common human trait, but they carry it to extremes. Try to find a non-leftist on a typical college PoliSci faculty sometime. Just try. And since they never associate with anyone with an opinion different from their own (except for the pleasure of shouting them down- or beating them up), there is no chance of self-correction. Like the song “Home on the Range” says, they live in a place “where never is heard a discouraging word”.
There is no form of delusion stronger than a self-induced one. Leftists are the sort of people who look in a mirror and see perfection.
And they have no one to blame but themselves.
clear ether
eon
Living in NYC really lets me see the liberal mindset at first hand. Mainly it is about people who don’t see much in religion but have a real need to see themselves as activists and they love to be at crochety politcal meetings yelling about this and that cracked sidewalk, this nonresponsive agency,etc. They are afraid of any change. Talk about adding something to the neighborhood to bring in cafes, etc. they will scream about crime, traffic patterns what have you. They are sad and suspicious and if they hadn’t grown up during the post war world ii era wouldn’t have a dime to their names. Instead they are wealthy (though they don’t think so).
The hipness of the liberal is something added by media because otherwise these angry cranks (both young and old) are rather unappealing and rather sterile. You can’t see liberalism with actual liberals only idealized, hip and caring fictional figures.
Best concept on Reagan: “George Will’s equally serviceable formula was “He does not want to return to the past; he wants to return to the past’s way of facing the future.”
We conservatives don’t want to go back to the past: we want to go forward with the verve and risk previous generations took to get us here instead of letting an overarching, failed and bankrupt Federal government run our lives in the name of making everything from flying to eating “safe.”
CS Lewis wrote about this very thing in the “Men Without Chests” section of The Abolition of Man.
The search feature on the Eastman Kodak Co. (EKDKQ.PK) board is non-functional.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm
“And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
In part, the liberal’s problem goes back to George Santayana’s definition of a fanatic being a person “redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim”.
The left is not going to stop believing what they’re doing is right, even as all evidence shows their economic and social engineering plans aren’t creating their utopia. So they look backwards towards a time when they could believe that their future ideas would work, in part to bolster their own determination to keep trying, while at the same time railing at all the little things they have no control over, even when some of those urban annoyances that are a creation of their own rules.
The most retrograde, reactionary force in all of politics is environmentalism. These questions should have been asked when the reds broke bread with the greens 50 years ago.
Exactly. Environmentalism killed the Left’s former belief in industrial progress. Instead, they now worship some idyllic past “living in balance with nature” which never really existed. (The “balance” was maintained by epidemics, predation, and famine.)
Hoover Dam used to be a showpiece of the FDR Administration. Now dams are hated by the Left as damaging to the environment.
So Krugman thinks if we just go back to the 50′s, when a large portion of the population was oppressed and treated unequally under the law, all will be well.
Scratch a liberal and find a racist authoritarian.
awww…go back to Gore Vidal’s happiest day picture. It’s a half dozen white guys and a black maid in a uniform. Classic.
I think there is less here than meets the eye.
The essence of a liberal is, imho, a yearning to make the world better than it appears to be now. Its a critique arising out of not only dissatisfaction at one’s position, and limitations in life, but from an unmet narcissism and attention gathering.
The end of this critique is not a finished vision of the world, a utopia, whose tradeoffs and downsides can then be critiqued. Instead the liberal turns their attention to the here, the now, the immediate situation, that could be either done “better”, or a “better result”, or whatever, on the basis of criterea both real, and unreal, both articulated, and not spoken.
So lacking a utopia on principles, the liberal looks, instead for a utopia airbrushed from memory. The 50′s, the early 60′s, before it turned ugly.
As Yogi Berra said long ago “nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Living in a
dreamland past doesn’t make it real. The Left is still mad at Reagan for
killing their pagan god, Karl Marx. So now they believe in the sun and the moon,
the oceans and the trees. So did the German National Socialists.
Interesting quote out of a new thread up at PJ:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/blacks-enslaved-by-the-left-argues-new-film/
Think about that for a minute. Two opposing sides, both promising to restore paradise lost.
Mr. Driscoll, your thesis is confirmed.
Andrea:
Andrew Klavan said: “And yet the nation hungers for just such behavior. Witness the recent YouTube video of a father punishing his spoiled daughter for a snarky Facebook post by plugging her laptop with a .45. The thing went viral to the tune of tens of millions of viewers. Why? Because it was wonderful to see someone finally step up and be Daddy.”
In the next paragraph Andrew says: “Being Daddy, no matter what people say, is not primarily a matter of telling people what not to do, nor is it a matter, in my opinion, of scaring them with the consequences of poor behavior. Family leaders rather model, proclaim and support the way people behave when they treat themselves like people instead of meat puppets”
I read that as Andrew understanding the reaction of the father but being actually critical of the way the father handled it. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it.
I first noticed the rise of the Nostalgic Progessive during the McGovern presidential race. “Liberals” (i.e., tax-happy State-fellating coercion-junkies) used to always focus on the future, toward that Utopia that was always down the road if you could just find the right people to administer their stupid policies, or better still, the right wizard to wave a magic wand and suspend the laws of economics. You’ll recall that McGovern’s campaign slogan was “Come home, America.” I didn’t know what “home” he and his followers were referring tol; it’s not like the US had some Socialist Golden Era in its history. I knew a McGovernite who claimed he came up with that slogan and from the hippy-dippy flower child he had once been he had aged into a cranky sourpuss who hated pretty much everything in contemporary American society. The defeat of McGovern and the rise of Reagan certainly added to his disgruntlement. I asked him about “Come home, America,” and apparently he felt America had gone down hill ever since the Pilgrims gave up their primitive form of communism.
“So Krugman thinks if we just go back to the 50′s, when a large portion of the population was oppressed and treated unequally under the law, all will be well.
Scratch a liberal and find a racist authoritarian.”
That’s WHY society was cohesive and safe. But obviously, Krugman’s not alone in his cognitive dissonance. I’m glad that you think government-enforced equality by any means is worth the hollowing out of everything worthwhile in society. Enjoy your smug satisfaction and vibrant diversity. In three generations, what’s left of the white race will surely thank you for your self-righteousness as they huddle in their militarized enclaves. And speaking of authoritarianism, I suspect that you, as with most “anti-racists,” are simply suffering from an anxiety disorder. Please believe me, no authority figures are checking Internet posts for obsequience to PC norms. Not yet anyway. So no gold star for you.
Ben apparently had a less idyllic childhood than I did. Some families had considerably less money than others did, yes, but otherwise, as far as I knew, no one “was oppressed and treated unequally under the law” anywhere close to where I lived.
Someone asked a friend’s younger brother Ben what it was like to grow up where we did in the ’70s. He said, “We didn’t have the 70s. We had the 60s twice.” When I go back to my hometown, it still feels a lot like the ’50s to me — except that all the stores around the town square have closed and there’s no one there. It may not have been a robust economy in the ’40s and’ 50s, but at least there were people somewhere other than in their homes. Ah, well.
The Left’s nostalgia goes way back. Rousseau pined for the days of the noble savage. And Marx’s chief complaint against the bourgeousie was that they brought about change:
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
Despite its pretensions, the Left has always been an enemy of the future as well as the present.
Thank you! I’ve been saying for YEARS that the left isn’t interested in anything new – they are interested in the very OLD (i.e. lord and serf) way of doing things. They HATE that people are self sufficient enough that they don’t envy the rich. I mean, what good is it being rich if you can’t rub it in the faces of the peons?
Marx is pretty clear that he’s not a fan of feudalism or other pre-Capitalist systems. He does harbor some fondness for trades and the guild system because he’s writing about a time in which factories are replacing skilled labor with unskilled workers. He and Ayn Rand romanticize the worker bees that make everything possible like so many Argonauts that mysteriously appear when needed.
Given the heavy influence of Hegel he just sees Capitalism as a putative but necessary stage of what is to come. Capitalism is lauded for the amazing amount of progress and technological achievement it fosters which ultimately is its undoing. So huzzah for capitalism because it will self destruct is the general attitude.
Overall though he doesn’t alter course for the future even if he doesn’t lay out very clear plans for where it is they’re going. Many here will kindly point out the corpses along the road that this path has strewn.
At any rate, the quotes in context don’t really support your argument.
Marx was a fool. He made castles in the sky that ended up killing 100,000,000 people last century. I wouldn’t put much stock in a crazy old coot.
Where’s all those solid middle class manufacturing jobs that were so prevalent before OSHA, the EPA, title IV, the rise of the feminist mystique,..? Oh, forget it!
All this is neatly explained in The Future and its Enemies. Left vs. right is orthogonal to these issues. It’s really about dynamism vs. stasis. Dynamists are pretty happy with decentralized, trial and error experimentation with private gains and losses, and want to conserve the deep rules (e.g. common law) that allow that evolutionary process to proceed. Stasists come in two flavors, technocrats and reactionaries, both of which hate the unplanned, evolutionary progress of open societies. Stasists want to drastically change the underlying rules in order to freeze society to their blueprint, whether a future utopia or a nostalgic past or some weird hybrid of the two. There are left-dynamists and right-dynamists and left-stasists and right-stasists.
Notice one of the categories this post is filed under.
Agreed. The left is about CONTROL – about NOT allowing society or the economy or even Nature to evolve naturally, but to encompass everything within a “rational” system run by the right kind of people. When complete control is achieved, nothing will be able to change without our permission. Thus we will avoid all unexpected, unpleasant consequences. This is the leftist version of stasis.
“Positive rights” is an Orwellian concept. Progressives want to maximize freedom by maximizing control. They don’t see the contradiction.
The “Woodman” said of the punk band: “After they sing, they’re gonna take hostages.” Classic (and spot-on).
I hate his politics, love his neurosis.
My take on this article is essentially, the left is like spoiled children. Just watch. In the event Conservatives manage to win big this November, the left will whine and complain, demonstrate, perform acts of civil disobedience, and generally disrupt society until they get their “way”. Contrast this to most conservatives. They will just go back to going about their business the best they can.
I keep saying progressive are living in the past.
This article neatly encapsulates the necessity of abandoning the Social Issues to the Democrats. When you have Paul Krugman pining for “what was” then you know you’re on the wrong track.
Just kidding. What it really demonstrates is why Social Values always win at the polls and why the Democrats run like little Krugmans away from them. The Dems know their policies don’t lead to heaven, they just create hell but they’re stuck. Their philosophy is “change for the sake of change”, it’s just a rebellion against their parents and they’ll throw a tantrum if they don’t get their way. But they then find that they really don’t want what they wanted and they can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
The problem most of the SoCons have is that the politicians won’t limit themselves to “the government shouldn’t be involved in abortion, marriage, insurance, health care, etc”. No, they’re determined to use the Federal Government to implement their vision except their vision is also the 1940′s, 1950′s and 1960′s when the government wasn’t involved in your daily life. The true SoCon message should be “GGO – Get Government Out”. It shouldn’t be “replace Liberal Social Programs with Conservative Social Programs”, it should be abolish the Social Programs. If you and your family are to be responsible then you can’t have Big Brother or Big Sis standing beside you, in front of you, behind you, on speed dial, and waiting up at night for you.
That Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t a particularly happy man was well known during his productive years.
He didn’t really try to hide his curmudgeonly nature.
Krugman is an unhappy man, very small in spirit & lacking any of the sardonic humor of Kurt Vonnegut.
I describe today’s Left as desperate authoritarians. Paul Krugman could be the poster child; he couches his own authoritarian impulse in economic theory to lend it legitimacy.
“It has been well said that really up to date liberals don’t care what people do as long as it is compulsory.”
~George Will
“progressive” as destruction of/replacement of principles and beliefs of “the other” is how it should be defined.
AKA ‘Remember the good old days, when sex was dirty and air was clean…’
thanks. good essay.
notice how every modern haircut for women lops hair off just above the neck? about like a 1920′s flapper?
One thing’s for sure. When both sides are promising to return to a better time, “hope and change” is dead. So is “progressivism”.
Absolutely beautiful piece, Ed.
Andrew’s piece was on the money as well. In combination, they are a powerful look into the post-modern leftist mind. I tried to capture some of the reasoning of what happened to “liberals” in my “Inversion Narrative” essay.
The heady days of the 60′s was filled with righteous indignation against institutionalized racism, anti-Semitism, a war that had lost its message (and which the media first helped to erode support and morale), women were fighting against misogyny and pollution was something worth reversing.
Let’s for the moment grant that some of those issues were real and that adjustment, even reversal of the cultural mindset on those issues was a move in a positive direction.
What leftists today have done, is co-opted every single one of those issues in 2012 to try to keep them alive, when in actual fact, they have to fabricate the evidence of their existence. They have to create a fraudulent, phony, hoaxed up, trumped up charge…to keep alive the dream of the protest culture.
The race card today is so utterly abused, it has cheapened the itself, hurling epithets at vague and ambiguous interpretations of innocuous words and deeds.
Worse it has hurled itself upon the rocks of hypocrisy by openly advocating for racism in the name of non-neutral applications of our very laws against discrimination that arose from the original intent to cure.
Modern feminism is a cosmic joke. The notion that women didn’t need men, fish or bicycles is so outdated in a Thoroughly Modern Millie way, the issue not only doesn’t resonate, it’s filled with cognitive dissonance. When a leftist acts like a mauling clod upon a woman’s body, even serial offenders, the monkeys at NOW see no evil. It’s a political prop to trot out against conservatives, nothing more.
Pollution control has turned into a climate hoax of biblical proportions. Phony hockey sticks and hide the decline were used to prostitute science for leftist redistribution schemes and the takedown of capitalism in favor of disguised hard leftism, which I call (as a tweak on the nose of Ayers and Obama, …small c communism. Not quite brave enough to come out of the closet like Large C communism, but brave enough to dress up and hold a parade)
As for the hatred of our military, the left hasn’t changed its collective mind, only its tactics. It now pretends to “love” our men and women in uniform, just not the warmongers who send them…wherever, whenever and for whatever reason. This is as phony as the climate hoax. EVERY conflict is compared to Viet Nam. NOT because there is an ounce of similarity, but because when the root for the enemy, they need a phony reason and they need to try to gin up the “protest energy”. Calling the people who mass murdered on our soil “minutemen” and “heroes” is what they want to do.
You have to remember, these same people plotted to kill 19 and 20 year olds in uniform and their innocent dates with nail bombs. That’s a small c communist mindset.
The post modern leftist is not a “liberal”. And the media is not an innocent bystander, reporting events in a sort of cultural awe. The leftists ate the liberals. The small c communists now have conspirators in the mass media, academia and entertainment. In the Workers Party.
The aim is revolution. The overthrow of the free market. The destruction of American exceptionalism, the eroding of Judeo-Christian organized religious guidance, the “rewrite” of the Constitution, the “reset” against our allies and the redistribution of accumulated wealth.
The American Dream, that nostalgia of looking back upon the days of innocence, …all in the gun sights of the neo-communists. They hide out as “liberals”, or maybe even social democrats…but make no mistake. They are gunning for that Dream and they mean to eradicate it.
Fantastic piece that I’m going to be processing for a while. You’ve pulled so many threads together here — kudos.
I, too, grew up in Merrick, so the Krugman connection really hit me — I had no idea. He’s probably a contemporary of my younger brother or sister and probably went to the same high school. Maybe even had some of the same teachers, including a crusty and challenging social studies teacher named Leberson that he may well have ignored or bypassed, as a lefty friend of mine did. Leberson almost certainly was “liberal” by JFK-era reckoning, but he also had a tough, critical mind. No one who believed in the imminence of “The Age of Aquarius” wanted to hear his sharp questions.
The main thing about Merrick in those days is that while it was indeed a pretty good place to grow up, it certainly was not, by any stretch, paradise on earth. If Krugman believes it was, that really says a lot not only about him but about the “progressive” mindset. It’s all about fantasy, about delusion, about creating an alternative reality. Fuel us all up with algae? Sure! Spend and borrow with no limit? Why not?
These people have been trying to turn us into Europe for 45 years now, yet today Europe’s top central banker says: “The party’s over. Europe’s social welfare fantasy is finished,” or words to that effect. But will that reality sink in for the Obamas and Krugmans? No way. Fantasy is so much more appealing.
Note as well that Krugman, Allen, and Vonnegut spent these glorious halcyon days of theirs in the Northeast and Midwest. Places like the South, the Southwest, and the Rockies were sparsely populated, often mired in grinding poverty, and largely bereft of political or cultural influence–just the way their would-be “betters” wish they could become again.
That’s no coincidence. And it’s doubly funny that these archons of the Left are the ones yearning for a bygone era when their less blessed countrymen “knew their place.”
Why does John Cleese have to crap on his forebears by calling them racists and sexists?
Because that’s what “progressives” do.
I would think he says it because it’s true.
An unwillingness to tell the truth would have been a signal of a confused mind or one harboring horrific views.
I’m reminded of trying (unsuccessfully) to cajole a Shiite cleric into criticizing a previous president of Iran Rasanjani for a speech where he said that nuking Israel is a wonderful idea that Iran will do when it can, because it would only take one nuke to destroy Israel and because even if Iran were destroyed in response, there are a billion Muslims and Islam will survive while its enemies will not.
The Cleric refused to criticize that speech, and made excuses like “he refuses to believe Rafsanjani said that” etc.
I also couldn’t quite get him to say that Jews have a right to self defense against Palestinian terrorists. He was happy to try to change the subject ans say they have a right to defend themselves against Syrians or to heap scorn on Al Qaeda (note they’re Sunni so he was happy to attack them).
A refusal to criticize the horrible is a danger signal don’t you think?
For Josh Scholar (misnomer)
Your criticism of the following statement by John J misses his point entirely.
“The EPA, OSHA, ADA, Unions, Affirmative Action, easy divorce (a misnomer if ever there was one), welfare, Medicare and Medicaid, SSI; which of these things would he now regard as couterproductive, at the very least? Some economist!”
As an economist, he should have analyzed the social utility and economic impact of these policies, and the economic impact has been dire. But at least you got in a dig against Christianity on behalf of gays. How progressive of you!
Actually the attack on freedom that I was responding to was one on the right to divorce!!!!
The tea-party oh-so-improved Republican party has leapfrogged over the gay marriage issue and is now preaching the harm that legalized contraception and divorce cause.
Apparently we’re all Catholics now.
The ‘good old days’ phenomenon is one that affects all of us to some extent because as we age we tend to see our past through rose colored glasses. The truth is that we were mainly unconderned then with the things that concern us now.