The Death of Liberalism

[Guest shiloh357]

Liberalism is a dirty word in today’s left. You hear it most often as an insult, neoliberalism, hurled by the hard left against anyone accused of insufficient hostility to free enterprise and other open systems. If you trust the free market and individual judgement over state regulation, you might just be a neoliberal.

And neoliberals are the biggest enemies of the left.

Liberal has become a slur on the illiberal left which is intolerant of open and tolerant systems. The defining symbol of the illiberal left is the campus safe space where no free speech is allowed. Safe spaces take the college, once the symbol of a liberal commitment to the free exchange of ideas, and invert it into a space that is safe from the free exchange of ideas under a warm and fuzzy name.

The safe space isn’t a campus eccentricity. As the riots from Berkeley to Boston show, using violence to silence free speech isn’t just something overzealous college kids do. It’s what the left does now. And sympathetic lefty mayors of cities put on the same show of helplessness as university administrators.

When the New York Times runs multiple editorials attacking the very idea of speech, one such op-ed claimed that some forms of speech were stressful and therefore a form of violence, it’s not college kids.

It’s the illiberal left.

After Trump’s win, the left reacted by finding fault with an excessively open society. The media blamed “Fake News” spread on social media for his victory and pressured Facebook, Twitter and Google into agreeing to its let its fact checkers decide what was and wasn’t legitimate. It wasn’t censorship, they insisted. It was social responsibility. And social responsibility is how censors justify what they do.

Meanwhile the latest wave of blacklists seeks to shut down organizations and silence individuals.

The post-election paranoia over Fake News and Russia, and the blacklisting surge have a common underlying theme. Our society is too open. Something has to be done to securely shut it down.

Free speech has the same problem as free enterprise. It assumes that we should trust people.

And why would we want to do that? People are stupid, racist, selfish and greedy. If you give them a chance they’ll sell large sodas, buy salty foods, shout racist slurs, watch FOX News and vote for Trump.

The illiberal left’s contempt for the individual has even bigger implications for the justice system.

There was a time when “Innocent until proven guilty” was the gold standard in criminal justice. These days it’s as extinct as “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Instead, certain kinds of people are always innocent and other kinds of people are always guilty.  The Baltimore drug dealer has a presumption of innocence from here to eternity, but the police officer who arrests him needs to be locked up now. Campus rape cases should begin with guilty until proven innocent, but the same rape case in an urban area should begin with a presumption of innocence.

The illiberal left’s panics over certain types of crimes, police brutality or campus rapes, and the call for ruthless crackdowns, are indistinguishable from the sort of crime panics that it used to condemn.

But the old liberal view of the justice system was balanced on the fulcrum of individual rights. And the illiberal left only believes in group rights. Why bother deciding if Bob did it? Individuals don’t matter. What does matter is doing the intersectional math to see who is being oppressed here. 

If Bob is a drug dealer in the ghetto, he’s a victim. If he’s a white Lacrosse player at Duke, hang him.

The left thrilled when the ACLU defended Islamic terrorists “on principle”, but was furious when it defended Neo-Nazis “on principle”. Principles are only meant to protect the bad people the left likes.

It’s not just court cases. All rights on the left proceed from the same denial of equality in the name of equality. Some people are entitled to free speech and a fair trial. A whole lot of others aren’t.

The old liberal view was that the blatantly guilty deserved as fair of a trial as the innocent. And that the most repugnant of cretins had the same right to free speech as the best of us. Rights don’t protect the best of us or even the rest of us. They protect all of us because a fair system is a free system.

That’s where the left breaks utterly with liberalism. It doesn’t believe that a free system is a fair one. Only a system where the outcome is predetermined to favor oppressed peoples is fair and just.

The left isn’t just picking winners and losers in business. It picks winners and losers when it comes to who gets to speak, who gets to practice their religion (Muslim judges are welcome, Catholic judges aren’t) and who gets a fair trial and who gets a kangaroo court backed by a howling internet lynch mob.

There are two basic views of how to make the world a better place. The first is an open system that will let everyone decide what they want to do. The second is to have the right people running everything.

The liberal element of the left is almost dead. The leftists who believed that open systems plus organizing, activism and education would lead naturally to the triumph of their ideas are a dying breed. Today’s leftists don’t strive to build open systems, only closed ones. They don’t educate about the value of free speech, the marketplace of ideas and the presumption of innocence. Instead they warn about the dangers of these things and call on corporations and colleges to take action and stamp them out.

Open systems are a challenge to be met with closed systems from campus safe spaces to internet censorship. Hate groups shouldn’t be debated; they should be beaten and stamped out. If the last couple of elections haven’t gone your way, use the judicial activism of unelected officials to block the policies of elected officials. If people don’t believe what they read in your papers and on your sites, watch and hear on your stations, pressure corporate internet monopolies to censor the competition.

The illiberal left uses crises and panics to build its closed system. There are always emergencies like Trump’s election, for media censorship, Ferguson, for bypassing legal norms to go after police, and campus microaggressions, for replacing free speech with safe spaces.  Totalitarians always justify shortcutting civil rights by citing an urgent emergency that requires immediate action.

Do it now. No time to think. We can’t breathe. Look at my mattress. Trump is the new Hitler.

After 9/11, the left lectured Americans that the mere murder of thousands, attacks on the Pentagon and the White House, didn’t justify abrogating any civil rights. Today the left insists that politically incorrect Halloween costumes and their uncle’s Facebook posts are crises that justify any abrogation.

The same system that could handle a major terrorist insurgency is utterly incapable of handling fake news on Facebook. No Islamic terrorist was too dangerous to justify abrogating his civil rights, but a drunken frat boy is too great a threat for the same justice system to be allowed to take its course.  

The left leaps through a series of crises that require urgent abuses, swift penalties and closed systems.

There are too many people saying the wrong things, buying the wrong things, dressing the wrong way, reading the wrong things and voting the wrong way. It’s an emergency. And the solution is illiberalism.

The embryonic stage in which leftists thought that illiberal utopian ends could be accomplished through liberal means is ending. The illiberal only adhere to liberal means as long as they believe that people are basically “good” and when properly educated will agree with them,. When they are disillusioned by setbacks or divided by identity politics into “us” and “them”, they revert to their illiberal premise.

The theme of the illiberal left is that people are bad and must be berated or beaten out of their badness. They must be forced to undergo reeducation courses at colleges and corporations; they must be shamed, censored, threatened and assaulted. And if you disagree, you might just be the last liberal.

 

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267836/death-liberalism-daniel-greenfield

[MorningGlory]

I'd be willing to pay for the funeral. 

[Guest shiloh357]

1 hour ago, MorningGlory said:

I'd be willing to pay for the funeral. 

And I will pay for the cremation.

[SavedByGrace1981]

The present day Left - as the author describes it - is anything but liberal.  I'm not sure when the label 'liberal' became a bad word (Bush vs. Dukakis maybe?), but being a classic liberal was not a bad thing.

Thomas Jefferson was what I would call a classic liberal.  The whole concept of government of the people, by the people and for the people is a liberal one. Would that we HAD liberals in today's government - we don't.

Ideologies such as liberalism and conservatism have little to do with how the government runs or who controls is.  Schumer and Pelosi are not really liberals - they are simply apparatchiks.  They have no ideology beyond staying in power and fleecing the taxpayers.  One can say the same for those faux conservatives on the 'other side' like McCain, Ryan and McConnell.  

Trump certainly is not a ideologue (even his army of critics admit that).

The present day left - while its more extreme elements do promote chaos and anarchy - has about as much relevance in the greater scheme of things as the present day right.  And the labels only serve the purposes of the uni-party to keep us divided and bickering at one another.

Blessings,

-Ed

 

[Guest shiloh357]

6 minutes ago, SavedByGrace1981 said:

The present day Left - as the author describes it - is anything but liberal.  I'm not sure when the label 'liberal' became a bad word (Bush vs. Dukakis maybe?), but being a classic liberal was not a bad thing.

Thomas Jefferson was what I would call a classic liberal.  The whole concept of government of the people, by the people and for the people is a liberal one. Would that we HAD liberals in today's government - we don't.

Ideologies such as liberalism and conservatism have little to do with how the government runs or who controls is.  Schumer and Pelosi are not really liberals - they are simply apparatchiks.  They have no ideology beyond staying in power and fleecing the taxpayers.  One can say the same for those faux conservatives on the 'other side' like McCain, Ryan and McConnell.  

Trump certainly is not a ideologue (even his army of critics admit that).

The present day left - while its more extreme elements do promote chaos and anarchy - has about as much relevance in the greater scheme of things as the present day right.  And the labels only serve the purposes of the uni-party to keep us divided and bickering at one another.

Blessings,

-Ed

 

We take for granted that "liberal"  today is not what historical liberals were in Jefferson's day or even in JFK's day.  JFK would never get nominated in today's Democrat party.   He is actually too conservative for modern liberals.  Jefferson would not get the nomination either.   Today's Democrat part is sooo far left, that decent Democrats like JFK or Truman would look like far right fundamentalists by comparison.

[SavedByGrace1981]

52 minutes ago, shiloh357 said:

We take for granted that "liberal"  today is not what historical liberals were in Jefferson's day or even in JFK's day.  JFK would never get nominated in today's Democrat party.   He is actually too conservative for modern liberals.  Jefferson would not get the nomination either.   Today's Democrat part is sooo far left, that decent Democrats like JFK or Truman would look like far right fundamentalists by comparison.

All that may be true, and I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise since word meanings change over time.  But the larger point I'm making is for the most part ideology does not matter.

Think about it - if I'm a peasant living under a totalitarian system, does it matter to me whether the regime calls itself a fascist or a Marxist one?  Each have elements like secret police and thought crimes.  Each are the antithesis of what our gov't purports to be, yet it is the direction to which our gov't is going.

For years we've been under the illusion that there is a schism between left and right - liberal vs. conservative.  It makes for exciting TV and newsworthy political conventions. We get to cheer for 'our side' and say we'll get 'utopia' when 'our side' prevails.  

But it's Lucy, Charlie Brown,  and the football. - perfection is 'just that close', but somehow it never arrives.  We're being played for fools.  The 'two sides' are really joined at the hip.

I contend most politicians are not ideologues (previous POTUS excepted).  Best case - they are shill politicians or bureaucrats; worst case they are tyrants and thugs.

But they all share a lust for power and self promotion.  Not statesmanship.

Blessings,

-Ed

[MorningGlory]

On 9/17/2017 at 1:12 PM, shiloh357 said:

And I will pay for the cremation.

[SavedByGrace1981]

13 hours ago, Cobalt1959 said:

I would disagree with you on two points.  I contend that most politicians start out as ideologues, but they do not remain that way past one or two terms.  I believe they start out with the best of intentions.  They want to do good things and make changes that will benefit people but once they are just a cog in the Big Machine they realize they cannot really do anything but go along with the status quo.  So they do exactly that, or drop out.  If they stay in, as they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely and they remain for the power, the control and the perks that political office provides like flowing wine.

 

I don't have the stats in front of me, but I've always understood that most of the people who go into politics are lawyers.  The most influential ones are the products of the most 'prestigious' law schools, the Harvards', Yales', etc.  Given the ideology of those institutions, it is not hard to discern the political ideology of their graduates. It is an open question however as to whether or not ideology motivates them.

Regardless of whether or not ideology is the driving force, I will agree that after a period of time it gives way to pragmatism.

That is where corners are cut, values are compromised, and corruption begins.

13 hours ago, Cobalt1959 said:

I do not believe the Right has some kind of idealist "Utopia" that they want to fulfill beyond turning the political dial back a few decades to a period like that of Reagan or Eisenhower.  But they lack the spine, or the desire to oppose anyone in any meaningful way for the same problem as above:  Scared of losing power and control even though, at this point in time they actually hold none because they pretty much allow the Left to still do what they want by proxy, they choose to do nothing that will rock the boat.  So America will never go back to being that far Right again.  The Leftist cancer has metastasized and the prognosis is terminal.  Chemo will prolong it's life for a time but the patient will die no matter what.  The disease went 8 years untreated.

I think it's important here to draw a distinction between those IN government and those activists whose role it is to simply support those in government. While I believe there are few actual ideologues IN government, the same does not hold true for those of us on the sidelines.  We saw the examples of the present day "Left" pointed out in the OP.  While I disagreed that the new Left is liberal in the classic sense, I think it is correct to say the ideology of Marxism - in some cases totalitarianism - is driving it.  We see it in the riots, the crackdown on free speech, and the general anarchy it seems to promote.

When and if it doesn't get its way, it turns on a dime on the government apparatchiks like the Pelosis and Schumers who are ostensibly on its side.

On the flip side of the new 'Left' is, of course, the new 'Right.'

As a member of said group (for the sake of this discussion; I don't align with all things 'right'), I can only speak for myself when I say I never expected a utopia to arrive here on this earth (until The Lord returns, anyway).  I probably took some literary excess using the term utopia.

But when voting for a candidate I usually bought the argument that we have to vote a certain way - if only to get 'our justices' on the courts. The 'golden ring' was of course the Supreme Court.

Some of us live long enough to have a 'lightbulb moment'.  Mine came in June of 2012 when John Roberts - a 'good' 'conservative' 'originalist' justice; appointed by 'conservative' George W. Bush no less; went ahead and upheld the Unconstitutional train wreck a.k.a. Obamacare.

It was then that I knew for certain the fix was in.  My eyes were, as they say, opened.

The new 'Right' shares one thing with its counterpart - the propensity to turn on those gov't officials who it feels 'betrays' them.  That's why we see the hatred directed at the Ryans and the McConnells who are supposed to be on 'our' side.  Even though these men are no more ideological than Pelosi or Schumer.

Which brings me to the other wild card in this discussion - one that hasn't been mentioned yet. It relates to a metaphor I've used in the past.  I call it 'water in my basement'.

Having water in my basement is the default condition.  If I do nothing, I'm going to have water in my basement.  There may be perhaps 100 ways for water to get in my basement.  If I only correct 99 of them, guess what - I'm going to have water in my basement.

Likewise, 'liberalism' (not the classic; the statist) is the default condition of government.  It is the one that takes no courage, no values.  It is the easiest.  Government, when left to its own devices, will grow, become corrupt, and devolve toward totalitarianism.  

Fighting statism/liberalism is an uphill battle - one that is replete with slings and arrows.  It is just simply too tough for most and, like the water in my basement, fighting it successfully requires getting 100 out of 100 correct.

That brings me back to my point about ideologues in government (the few there are.)

They are rare, but over the last half century we've had what I would call two ideological presidents - Reagan (from the Right) and Obama (Left).  

While Reagan was generally adored by conservatives, he was hated by the establishment of that time.  Therefore, his accomplishments - while notable - were limited.  His greatest - a part in ending the 'cold war' - has been overshadowed by an endless ill-defined 'war against terror'.  So even that accomplishment has been reduced.

In short, Reagan's ideology did not mesh with the ideology of raw power and control of the global uni-party/establishment. Over time it's been chipped away at and, as a result, he truly does not have a lasting legacy.  The Reagan presidency has turned out to be just a speed bump on the road to the all powerful global government the elites desire.

Obama's Marxist ideology and its goals, on the other hand, does agree and dovetail with the goals of the global establishment.  To close the loop on the metaphor - Reagan was bailing water from the basement; Obama was manning the hose, filling it.

Blessings,

-Ed

 

 

 

[Running Gator]

15 minutes ago, SavedByGrace1981 said:

I don't have the stats in front of me, but I've always understood that most of the people who go into politics are lawyers.  The most influential ones are the products of the most 'prestigious' law schools, the Harvards', Yales', etc.  Given the ideology of those institutions, it is not hard to discern the political ideology of their graduates. It is an open question however as to whether or not ideology motivates them.

Regardless of whether or not ideology is the driving force, I will agree that after a period of time it gives way to pragmatism.

That is where corners are cut, values are compromised, and corruption begins.

I think it's important here to draw a distinction between those IN government and those activists whose role it is to simply support those in government. While I believe there are few actual ideologues IN government, the same does not hold true for those of us on the sidelines.  We saw the examples of the present day "Left" pointed out in the OP.  While I disagreed that the new Left is liberal in the classic sense, I think it is correct to say the ideology of Marxism - in some cases totalitarianism - is driving it.  We see it in the riots, the crackdown on free speech, and the general anarchy it seems to promote.

When and if it doesn't get its way, it turns on a dime on the government apparatchiks like the Pelosis and Schumers who are ostensibly on its side.

On the flip side of the new 'Left' is, of course, the new 'Right.'

As a member of said group (for the sake of this discussion; I don't align with all things 'right'), I can only speak for myself when I say I never expected a utopia to arrive here on this earth (until The Lord returns, anyway).  I probably took some literary excess using the term utopia.

But when voting for a candidate I usually bought the argument that we have to vote a certain way - if only to get 'our justices' on the courts. The 'golden ring' was of course the Supreme Court.

Some of us live long enough to have a 'lightbulb moment'.  Mine came in June of 2012 when John Roberts - a 'good' 'conservative' 'originalist' justice; appointed by 'conservative' George W. Bush no less; went ahead and upheld the Unconstitutional train wreck a.k.a. Obamacare.

It was then that I knew for certain the fix was in.  My eyes were, as they say, opened.

The new 'Right' shares one thing with its counterpart - the propensity to turn on those gov't officials who it feels 'betrays' them.  That's why we see the hatred directed at the Ryans and the McConnells who are supposed to be on 'our' side.  Even though these men are no more ideological than Pelosi or Schumer.

The other wild card in this discussion - one that hasn't been mentioned yet - relates to a metaphor I've used in the past.  I call it 'water in my basement'.

Having water in my basement is the default condition.  If I do nothing, I'm going to have water in my basement.  There may be perhaps 100 ways for water to get in my basement.  If I only correct 99 of them, guess what - I'm going to have water in my basement.

Likewise, 'liberalism' (not the classic; the statist) is the default condition of government.  It is the one that takes no courage, no values.  It is the easiest.  Government, when left to its own devices, will grow, become corrupt, and devolve toward totalitarianism.  

Fighting statism/liberalism is an uphill battle - one that is replete with slings and arrows.  It is just simply too tough for most and, like the water in my basement, fighting it successfully requires getting 100 out of 100 correct.

That brings me back to my point about ideologues in government (the few there are.)

They are rare, but over the last half century we've had what I would call two ideological presidents - Reagan (from the Right) and Obama (Left).  

While Reagan was generally adored by conservatives, he was hated by the establishment of that time.  Therefore, his accomplishments - while notable - were limited.  His greatest - a part in ending the 'cold war' - has been overshadowed by an endless ill-defined 'war against terror'.  So even that accomplishment has been reduced.

In short, Reagan's ideology did not mesh with the ideology of raw power and control of the global uni-party/establishment. Over time it's been chipped away at and, as a result, he truly does not have a lasting legacy.  The Reagan presidency has turned out to be just a speed bump on the road to the all powerful global government the elites desire.

Obama's Marxist ideology and its goals, on the other hand, does agree and dovetail with the goals of the global establishment.  To close the loop on the metaphor - Reagan was bailing water from the basement; Obama was manning the hose, filling it.

Blessings,

-Ed

 

 

 

Good post, cannot disagree with much of it at all.

I will say I am always amused/confused as to why Reagan is so admired by conservatives.  I was an adult for most of the Reagan presidency and at the time was a far right Conservative and thought Reagan was the cat's meow.  But as I have aged and looked back upon his term, I see very few conservative actions.   He never met a tax hike he did not like, he is still the only POTUS to ever double (and in his case almost triple) the deficit as compared to all other presidents before him and while you say he was a "speed bump" in the road to an all powerful government, I say he was a driving force behind such a thing.  

[SavedByGrace1981]

15 hours ago, Cobalt1959 said:

Since 2008, I sometimes feel as if I woke up one morning, and the country had turned into something I didn't recognize anymore overnight.

Maybe that was YOUR lightbulb moment.

Blessings,

-Ed