John C. Wright, Science Fiction author and convert from atheism to Catholicism, is on fire:
Something rotten, very rotten has happened to the Left just in my lifetime.
They used to be champions of free speech; and now they are its most vehement opponents.
They use to be able to give some sort of argument or logical reason for their position, even if an incorrect argument; now they have no argument, none of them, aside from wild and insincere accusations delivered in a mechanical fashion without any hope of being believed, phony as a three-dollar bill.
They used to be firmly on the side of the workingman; now they hate the workingman as a white racist oppressor.
They used to be in favor of free love and the sexual liberation; now they object to rocket scientists wearing shirts with cartoon women printed on them, they object to science fiction magazines showing a scantily clad warrior princess slaying a monster, and they call all sex rape, and demand strict segregation of women and men. On the same day as these protests, they appear in front of the Pope, writhing on the ground naked with crosses and crucifixes inserted into their vaginas. So the Puritan rules apply arbitrarily, without sense or order, to anyone or no one.
They used to be in favor of Blacks and other minorities; now their disgust for all the impoverished and dispossessed is plain to see. All they want is to keep the Blacks on the plantation, addicted to welfare, addicted to crack, their children aborted, their parents unwed.
They used to be in favor of the Jews, and other minorities; now they kneel to Islamic Jihad at every opportunity, vowing that those who slander the prophet of Islam will no be in the future, and ergo the Left now curse the Jews, and pray daily for the destruction of Israel, and a new Holocaust in the warhead of a Muslim nuke.
What? You say that his the not what the Left says? That they say they are creatures of purity, goodness, and sweetness, who live only to help others out of the depth of their hearts and the depth of your wallet? No, that was the old Left, back when the Left still had some scraps of sanity and intelligence.
They serve Sauron and have forgotten their own names.
Go here to read the rest. Contemporary American liberalism is a prime example of what happens when any political movement largely succeeds in one era and then lingers on beyond its time. It is instructive to compare Franklin Delano Roosevelt with Barack Obama. Roosevelt was cheery and optimistic, and, whatever else could be said about him, an American patriot. He headed a movement that basically ran America until 1980, almost a half century after he became President. Obama will never be accused of being cheery and optimistic and his allegiances, whatever they are, will never come under the rubric of American patriotism. He leaves his party weaker than it was the first time that Roosevelt ran for President. Roosevelt’s New Deal, for all its disastrous long term consequences, was originally a good hearted attempt to enlist government to improve the lot of the American people. Obama, who was hailed as Roosevelt II by some sycophants in the news media in 2008, wanted to squeeze the American people for the well being of a bloated welfare state. Succeed strongly enough in politics and all movements end up as parodies, often strikingly like the entrenched forces they originally opposed.
He makes such very good points. “They make common cause with Jihadists.”
” Every time some Leftist says “But not all Muslims are terrorists” he is accusing you, Christian man or woman…”
I should love to know when the Left were the “champions of free speech” or of any other “bourgeois” freedom.
Thus, we had Alain Badiou, who for so long held the chair of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure: “If you say A – equality, human rights and freedoms – you should not shirk from its consequences and gather the courage to say B – the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.”
For him and most of the Hard Left, it has always been axiomatic that “Materialist dialectics assumes, without particular joy, that, till now, no political subject was able to arrive at the eternity of the truth it was deploying without moments of terror. Since, as Saint-Just asked: ‘What do those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?’ His answer is well-known: they want corruption – another name for the subject’s defeat.” (Logiques des mondes, Paris: Seuil 2006)
That other grand old man of the Left, Eric Hazan also used to quote Saint-Just: “That which produces the general good is always terrible,” adding, “These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the temptation to impose violently the general good onto a society, but, on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed.”
The Dems serve Sauron and the GOP is filled with Boromirs. https://web.archive.org/web/20081211193028/http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1207
Roosevelt’s New Deal, for all its disastrous long term consequences, was originally a good hearted attempt to enlist government to improve the lot of the American people.
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A complaint here: you’re conflating injuries inflicted by the New Deal with injuries inflicted by congeries of officials who came of age or had their professional debut during the years running from 1933 to 1947. There was an incipient disaster in the National Industrial Recovery Act, but the courts strangled that one in the crib. There was another nexus of injuries inflicted by federal labor law which had some similar sources: efforts to enforce a high minimum wage and promotion of Gompers style business-unionism. I think these did have real-time effects. The manipulation of the farm sector also had real-time effects (though most of the trouble was manifest downstream).
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Ronald Reagan supposedly one said that his task was not the repeal of the New Deal, but of the Great Society.
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1. Detroit is a disaster, but that does not have much to do with the New Deal per se, but with the confluence of three or four different streams of poison, only one of which had a New Deal origin.
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2.The catastrophic decline of public order in American inner cities after 1958 was a disaster, but that’s the loopiness of the social work industry influencing the legal profession. That’s not a New Deal disaster. To a degree, it was an Earl Warren disaster later compounded by an odd alignment of black particularists and suburban voters.
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3. Another mess was collective bargaining for public employees, something no less a personage than Fiorello LaGuardia regarded with reservation and skepticism. You have Gaylord Nelson, Robert Wagner II, and John Kennedy to blame for that, among others.
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4. Another mess has been the chronic incapacity of the political class to put Social Security on an actuarially sound footing. The main perpetrator here was Tip O’Neill, who showed Democratic officialdom how to win votes by rousing the geezer rabble. O’Neill was a junior state legislator during the New Deal.
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5. And, of course, you have several sets of injuries done to primary and secondary schooling (some of which were manifest already in the 1930s, some of which appeared ca. 1955, and some of which appeared after 1965. Discrete policy measures promoting many of these were Johnson Administration initiatives, not New Deal era. The New Deal era problems were circumstantial, having to do with the effect on secondary schools of large numbers of youths the labor market could not absorb and with the early influence of child-centered education.
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6. And then there is the mess that is higher education. You have the GI Bills and the Johnson era higher education subsidies to thank for much of that.
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7. And, of course, what civil rights law had decayed into, for which courts and administrative agency rulings are most to blame. There was little of it during the New Deal. That also derives from Johnson Administration initiatives, though some of the most acutely awful court decisions were during the Nixon Administration.
I forgot rent control. That actually was a New Deal-era notion, but it’s ill effects were pretty confined to New York City. Yes, public housing as well…
I agree with MPS’s comment.
For what happens to tyrants who use terror to impose what is “good” for us all, google the death of Robespierre – his Reign of Terror came back to bite him. Curiously he tried also to impose a new state religion on France after the extirpation of Catholicism. Guy McClung, San Antonio
No surprise the left and Islam would be aligned. Both complain about persecution when out of power; and then carry it out with a vengeance once in power.
I agree with MPS’s comment.
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I’m pleased someone can make sense of it.
I hope everyone is starting to figure out that left and right are the wrong labels. Who has been manipulating the left for the past 80 years through Hollywood, the press, and liberal fronts. Who has control of the right at this point it time and is promoting the “right” to support war in the middle east. What you are seeing is the shadows of puppets on the cave wall, to borrow Plato’s allegory. There is more to the story. Get out of the cave and shake these labels that you are clinging to.
“Get out of the cave and shake these labels that you are clinging to.”
I personally blame the Elvis impersonating cattle mutilators who are in a secret alliance with the Trilateralist gnomes of Zurich.
I personally blame the Elvis impersonating cattle mutilators who are in a secret alliance with the Trilateralist gnomes of Zurich.
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Soon to be subject to a 10,000 word treatment by Ron Unz, just as soon as he finishes with his latest installment about the Jewish cabal at Harvard.
Personally, I think you give the New Dealers too much credit.
Over generosity with opponents has ever been a weakness for me. 🙂