Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 9:26pm

Liberals and Leftists

An interesting video distinguishing between Liberals and Leftists.  Classic Liberalism of the 19th century variety has much in common with variants of modern American Conservatism.  Liberalism in the twentieth century is a long tale of the interaction between it and its heresy, Leftism.  Today that heresy tends to be swallowing up contemporary Liberalism, as Liberalism continues its long trek to the Left.  My Conservatism owes much to Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers, and those luminaries tend not to find much favor among either contemporary Leftists and Liberals as they become increasingly obsessed with issues of race and sex and demand a State strong enough to allow them to build the utopias they seek.  Soon any distinction between Liberals and Leftists will become a matter of mere names, as old Liberals depart this vale of tears, at least until events lead to a revival of Liberalism in the unknown future.

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Art Deco
Art Deco
Thursday, September 6, AD 2018 6:55am

Soon any distinction between Liberals and Leftists will become a matter of mere names, as old Liberals depart this vale of tears, at least until events lead to a revival of Liberalism in the unknown future.

I think the old portside generally. Irving Howe, Michael Walzer, Sheldon Wolin, &c. didn’t think of themselves as figures on the conventional political spectrum (Howe, for example, having been a Trotskyist until 1954). Howe recalled (a decade afterward) meeting with some members of the Students of a Democratic Society around 1965 and being quite disconcerted by them, thinking that in a certain set of circumstances, Tom Hayden would have had him shot. Nat Hentoff, Alan Dershowitz, Jerilyn Merritt have been notable in recent years for how out of place they are in the political matrix of our time.

I think it’s two things: (1) professional-managerial people (especially in certain occupational guilds) are increasingly disoriented, increasingly given to drawing their sense of self from something other than the day-to-day conduct of their lives, and increasingly unable to appreciate the interests and perspectives of people unlike them and (2) people who have emotional problems are giving expression to them in political language as opposed to the idioms in use 40 years ago.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, September 6, AD 2018 11:37am

One recalls Lady Bracknell
Lady Bracknell: “What are your polities?”
Jack: “Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.”
Lady Bracknell. “Oh, they count as Tories. They dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate.”

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Thursday, September 6, AD 2018 1:18pm

“[P]rofessional-managerial people (especially in certain occupational guilds) are increasingly disoriented, increasingly given to drawing their sense of self from something other than the day-to-day conduct of their lives, and increasingly unable to appreciate the interests and perspectives of people unlike them[.]”

Christopher Lasch made a career writing about them.

Mary De Voe
Thursday, September 6, AD 2018 7:10pm

Thank you. I will use these definitions at my comments.
In the meantime:

The penumbra of un-enumerated rights, human rights and civil rights in our Founding Principles; our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence, are the innate human rights endowed by “their Creator” (Declaration) to the sovereign person at the beginning of his existence.

Innate human rights become our civil rights when the sovereign person is given birth and becomes a citizen. Innate human rights are unalienable, infused by an infinite “Creator” who can only endow unalienable, innate human rights. Therefore, innate and unalienable human rights endowed by our “Creator” may be un-enumerated in our Founding Principles.

Innate, unalienable, un-enumerated, human rights become our civil rights at the birth of the sovereign person into citizenship.

Sovereign personhood defines the perimeters of un-enumerated human rights in the legal term “penumbra”.

“The rights the state gives, the state can take away.” Thomas Jefferson

Mary De Voe
Thursday, September 6, AD 2018 7:20pm

“Patriotism” is irrational; one’s primary duty is to humanity, not a nation.”
Patriotism is good will for the common good. The sovereign nation is instituted by the sovereignty of the person who becomes a citizen when given birth. Eliminate the sovereign nation and eradicate the sovereign personhood of the citizen. Who is humanity? Whoever they say he is or is not. To redefine humanity is not left to any human being. Humanity is every single person ever created,… except those whom the left leaves out. Our ancestors, all generations of future Posterity and “We, the people”. Here we have humanity.
Is the Left willing to take responsibility for humanity as it is?

Mary De Voe
Friday, September 7, AD 2018 3:09am

more on penumbras:
Justice Anthony Kennedy went off the rails when he used human dignity to justify unnatural behavior in Obergefell v. Hodges. Trying to assimilate sodomy with the marital act, homosexual behavior with heterosexual behavior, the vice of lust with the virtue of love, Obergefell v. Hodges violates “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” (Declaration of Independence)
Sodomy is the disordered act of assault and battery of the human body. Man cannot give consent, fully informed consent, to an unnatural, disordered act. To pretend that an unnatural, disordered act can elevate the sovereign person and his transcendent soul is delusion.
Under the penumbra of un-enumerated rights Obergefell v. Hodges violates the original innocence, the moral and legal innocence, of our Constitutional Posterity, the standard of Justice for our nation brought to “We, the people” through the newly begotten sovereign personhood inherent in his transcendent, rational soul, the principle of life in mankind.
The illusion of normalcy violates our legacy to our Constitutional Posterity

Mary De Voe
Friday, September 7, AD 2018 2:49pm

and Roe v. Wade:
Roe v. Wade overrides the enumerated right to life of the sovereign person. The penumbra of un-enumerated human rights includes the enumerated human rights in our Founding Principles. Separating the innate, enumerated human rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness from the penumbra of un-enumerated human rights is miscarriage of Justice.

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