CRY HAVOC AND LET SLIP THE DOGS OF ABORTION!  “As It Prepares For War, Planned Parenthood Is Training A Political Army,” Think “Progress,” breathlessly reports.

Ahh, progressivism, where time and ideas stand still. Philosopher William James coined the phrase “the moral equivalent of war” at the dawn of the 20th century; the concept immediately spread like wildfire amongst his fellow “Progressives” as way to organize Americans and end-run their pesky notions of freedom and individuality, as Jonah Goldberg noted in his 2012 book, The Tyranny of Clichés:

And creating a moral equivalent of war was just the perfect way to get this organic cooperative life off the page and into American hearts and minds. Although the idea began as just the moral equivalent, when the opportunity for a real war loomed on the horizon, the progressives leaped at it with both feet. John Dewey, James’s heir as the foremost practitioner of philosophical pragmatism, championed going to nonmetaphorical war, on the grounds that it would help do all of the things that James wanted from a moral equivalent of war. In less than a decade the optimistic and individualistic possibilities of pragmatism had now evolved into “social possibilities,” specifically what Dewey called the “social possibilities of war.” He complained that opponents of entering World War I failed to recognize the “immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war” and implored them not to let the crisis go to waste.

After the war (covered extensively in my book Liberal Fascism), progressives returned to the Jamesian argument about the moral equivalent of war, now claiming that World War I proved that planning and social control had worked under Woodrow Wilson’s war socialism. Therefore, the same techniques — command and control economics (i.e., “war socialism”), censorship, propaganda, etc. — should be applied in peacetime. “We planned in war” became the mantra of the intellectuals, furious with the Republican-led “return to normalcy” of the 1920s. And liberalism has never recovered. The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.

From Jimmy Carter declaring the moral equivalent of war in 1977 in a futile effort to solve that decade energy “crisis,” to Obama issuing Thomas Friedman-inspired “Sputnik Moments” seemingly every year at his State of the Union addresses, to Planned Parent’s battle cry (to be fair, they’ve long been in the killing business), the moral equivalent of war continues to endlessly pop up on the left, often in the strangest places.