A Mighty Intelligent Analysis…

PoliticalChic

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…of how Liberalism went wrong.



1.While I read it, I don’t generally quote from the Jewish publication, The Tablet….too liberal for me…but this week, the essay “It’s the Liberalism, Stupid,” [It’s the Liberalism, Stupid] is spot on.

It takes us on an erudite journey from the Enlightenment, through the woke outlook, and back to the roots of what made Western Civilization the apotheosis, the high point, of social development.

I present the journey in five posts.




2. Our guide, the author of the essay, Mr. Leibovitz, begins with I might construe as an attack on my beliefs:

“…the history of the past 30 or so years in America goes something like this: Once upon a time, back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, America was great, because Americans all observed a shared creed called liberalism. This relaxed civil religion nurtured our individual liberties and kept us honest, hardworking, and good. It gave us civil rights and gay marriage, Tom Hanks and Sesame Street, bipartisanship and Teach for America. And it would have bloomed eternal if the barbarians hadn’t shown up one day to sack our glittering Rome.

Who, exactly, are those modern-day wreckers of civilization? Again, many of our intellectual betters are certain they have the answer: The barbarians are Marxists, extreme leftist agitators here to replace our sacred liberal order with a pagan religion of their own, complete with a set of rituals (taking a knee) and articles of faith (gender is fluid). Our mission, therefore, is to resist these savages at every turn, and do whatever we can to turn the clock back and reinstall liberalism as our exclusive and infallible operating system.

It’s a compelling story, complete with deliciously malicious bad guys and wonderfully virtuous sheriffs counting the minutes to High Noon. It’s also, alas, entirely wrong.”

I’m chagrinned!!!




3. While it is exactly my belief that Leibovitz says is wrong, what the author claims is all wrong, it is exactly the sort of response I have always hoped to find when I post my views….when he admits to that ‘creed.’ Central to both my conservative beliefs, and Leibovitz’s pure liberalism is this statement of America’s Creed, which is the opposite of what I see in the current Democrat/woke philosophy:



…the creed embodies “the political principles of liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property.”
Samuel P. Huntington’s Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, p.46


And Leibovitz sees how far Liberals have strayed from that shared belief in the creed.




4. If Liberals today were as Mr. Leibovitz describes an earlier version, there would hardly be an argument between the sides. I don’t call myself a Liberal…I’m a conservative…but I am far more liberal than any Leftist today because I’m an American, with American values, and those values are about individual liberty and freedom and the American ethic and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the privileges bestowed by God, not by the state. The other side views everything as bestowed by the power of the state because, in their mind, they were responsible for the death of God long ago.



5. Our author admits to the infirmities of today’s Liberalism:

“…let us catch a glimpse of its vices as well. The world into which Rousseau and the other founding fathers of the Enlightenment emerged was one governed by a simple philosophical proposition, cultivated for centuries by religions of all sorts. It was this: Man is capable of both great good and great evil (see under: Cain and Abel), which is why we, poor souls, are constantly in need of moral instruction to help keep us on the up and up. “Moral instruction” being the sort of medicine that can, if administered imprudently, do more damage than good, it is therefore a good idea to entrust its development and application to the cautious wisdom of the ages. Enter tradition, a way of life that allows for gradual change but holds that, when faced with a thorny new problem, first look to your grandmother for advice, because there is nothing all that new under the sun.”



I am disarmed by his openness, his honesty. This is where the two sides find common ground. Sadly, for Democrat voters, they see a very different reality: No shared values, no longer an American party…they oppose free speech, individualism, the second amendment, and the free practice of one’s religion.

But Mr. Leibovitz sees a light at the end of this tunnel.

And I agree!
 
6. Our paths diverge:

“The world into which Rousseau and the other founding fathers of the Enlightenment….”
Liberal love Rousseau....not conservatives, those who love liberty.
Rousseau was the origin of every totalitarian doctrine in the modern world: he hated private property, and therefore, capitalism. He wanted all children brought up by the state. He did not see human life as sacred (see the French Revolution).



Leibovitz:

“… we, poor souls, are constantly in need of moral instruction to help keep us on the up and up. “Moral instruction” being the sort of medicine that can, if administered imprudently, do more damage than good, it is therefore a good idea to entrust its development and application to the cautious wisdom of the ages. Enter tradition, a way of life that allows for gradual change but holds that, when faced with a thorny new problem, first look to your grandmother for advice, because there is nothing all that new under the sun.”

Excellent….but this is not Liberalism, it is conservatism.



I wrote some time ago: Conservatives believe that custom and tradition result in individuals living in peace. Law is custom and precedent. Liberals are destroyers of custom and convention. To a conservative, change should be gradual, as the new society is often inferior to the old. We build on the ideas and experience of our ancestors. The species is wiser than the individual (Burke).

And that ‘moral instruction’??? How possible when the Liberal believe today is that they have replaced and become God….



Melanie Phillips summarizes what Progressives/Democrats have done to society.

" When morality became privatized, the questions “what is right” became “what is right for me.”
Feelings... became the arbiters of behavior. Rather than traditional taboos, only religiously based moral judgment was deemed taboo.
This is the Liberalism of today.


How does Leibovitz align the two views?
 
7. In so many ways, Liberals trace the origin of their views to the Enlightenment. And, it did represent a departure from “tradition, a way of life that allows for gradual change.”



“…the Enlightenment offered a radical countervision. Man, it argued, was born good; it was only the oppressions of coercive institutions that drove him to contemplate and commit evil deeds.

How, then, to keep civil society from making us ungood? Enter the social contract, liberalism’s mighty engine. Willingly sign away a host of your innate rights, and in return the authorities—the king, the president, a majority of your peers, whatever—will protect you and safeguard all of your other rights.”
The Tablet, Op. Cit.


And to this day the promise of the Left/Democrats, is that if you give up your rights, such as free speech and the right to practice your religion, and turn over half of your income.....

.....they will cosset and protect you from cradle to grave.




BTW......here is a Democrat hard at work in Democrat America:




 
…of how Liberalism went wrong.



1.While I read it, I don’t generally quote from the Jewish publication, The Tablet….too liberal for me…but this week, the essay “It’s the Liberalism, Stupid,” [It’s the Liberalism, Stupid] is spot on.

It takes us on an erudite journey from the Enlightenment, through the woke outlook, and back to the roots of what made Western Civilization the apotheosis, the high point, of social development.

I present the journey in five posts.




2. Our guide, the author of the essay, Mr. Leibovitz, begins with I might construe as an attack on my beliefs:

“…the history of the past 30 or so years in America goes something like this: Once upon a time, back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, America was great, because Americans all observed a shared creed called liberalism. This relaxed civil religion nurtured our individual liberties and kept us honest, hardworking, and good. It gave us civil rights and gay marriage, Tom Hanks and Sesame Street, bipartisanship and Teach for America. And it would have bloomed eternal if the barbarians hadn’t shown up one day to sack our glittering Rome.

Who, exactly, are those modern-day wreckers of civilization? Again, many of our intellectual betters are certain they have the answer: The barbarians are Marxists, extreme leftist agitators here to replace our sacred liberal order with a pagan religion of their own, complete with a set of rituals (taking a knee) and articles of faith (gender is fluid). Our mission, therefore, is to resist these savages at every turn, and do whatever we can to turn the clock back and reinstall liberalism as our exclusive and infallible operating system.

It’s a compelling story, complete with deliciously malicious bad guys and wonderfully virtuous sheriffs counting the minutes to High Noon. It’s also, alas, entirely wrong.”

I’m chagrinned!!!




3. While it is exactly my belief that Leibovitz says is wrong, what the author claims is all wrong, it is exactly the sort of response I have always hoped to find when I post my views….when he admits to that ‘creed.’ Central to both my conservative beliefs, and Leibovitz’s pure liberalism is this statement of America’s Creed, which is the opposite of what I see in the current Democrat/woke philosophy:



…the creed embodies “the political principles of liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property.”
Samuel P. Huntington’s Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, p.46


And Leibovitz sees how far Liberals have strayed from that shared belief in the creed.




4. If Liberals today were as Mr. Leibovitz describes an earlier version, there would hardly be an argument between the sides. I don’t call myself a Liberal…I’m a conservative…but I am far more liberal than any Leftist today because I’m an American, with American values, and those values are about individual liberty and freedom and the American ethic and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the privileges bestowed by God, not by the state. The other side views everything as bestowed by the power of the state because, in their mind, they were responsible for the death of God long ago.



5. Our author admits to the infirmities of today’s Liberalism:

“…let us catch a glimpse of its vices as well. The world into which Rousseau and the other founding fathers of the Enlightenment emerged was one governed by a simple philosophical proposition, cultivated for centuries by religions of all sorts. It was this: Man is capable of both great good and great evil (see under: Cain and Abel), which is why we, poor souls, are constantly in need of moral instruction to help keep us on the up and up. “Moral instruction” being the sort of medicine that can, if administered imprudently, do more damage than good, it is therefore a good idea to entrust its development and application to the cautious wisdom of the ages. Enter tradition, a way of life that allows for gradual change but holds that, when faced with a thorny new problem, first look to your grandmother for advice, because there is nothing all that new under the sun.”



I am disarmed by his openness, his honesty. This is where the two sides find common ground. Sadly, for Democrat voters, they see a very different reality: No shared values, no longer an American party…they oppose free speech, individualism, the second amendment, and the free practice of one’s religion.

But Mr. Leibovitz sees a light at the end of this tunnel.

And I agree!
I don’t call myself a Liberal…I’m a conservative

I call myself an agorist Agorism - Wikipedia, but that's neither here nor there.

…but I am far more liberal than any Leftist today because I’m an American, with American values, and those values are about individual liberty and freedom and the American ethic and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the privileges bestowed by God, not by the state.

You're more liberal than leftists because the left was never "liberal", in the strict classical meaning of the word.

The other side views everything as bestowed by the power of the state because, in their mind, they were responsible for the death of God long ago.

They didn't kill God, they made The State their God.....There's a difference.
 
Last edited:
I don’t call myself a Liberal…I’m a conservative

I call myself an agorist Agorism - Wikipedia, but that's neither here nor there.

…but I am far more liberal than any Leftist today because I’m an American, with American values, and those values are about individual liberty and freedom and the American ethic and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the privileges bestowed by God, not by the state.

You're more liberal thatn leftists because the left was never "liberal", in the strict classical meaning of the word.

The other side views everything as bestowed by the power of the state because, in their mind, they were responsible for the death of God long ago.

They didn't kill God, they made The State their God.....There's a difference.


That's an interesting post.
 
8. Leibovitz is the old sort of Liberal…..he tells the truth. And he lists the forces that held back the Enlightenment from becoming what current Liberal/Democrats have become.
Two factors that shaped Western Civilization, and have fallen of late.....


“For a while, the Enlightenment did alright for itself and for us, in no small part because it was never allowed to run rampant. Other, older, sturdier forces—the family, mainly, but also the church—threw around their own familiar weight, reminding us every so often of the limitations of radical individualism and social contract theory.


Until, that is, the church and the family began suddenly and precipitously losing ground. Why that happened is the subject for several weighty tomes, but the numbers don’t lie: Membership in houses of worship this year dipped below 50% for the first time in American history; so has the number of American children who can expect to spend their entire childhood with both biological parents. And they’re the lucky ones, simply by virtue of being born.

Liberalism, left unchecked, has become what it was always angling to be: a social death pact, leaving its adepts without the motivation to reproduce themselves.”



I love this guy!!! And an insightful and honest Liberal!!!!

It is the sort of Liberal/Democrat many of you were tricked into believing was the case with the current party.
 
9. While Liberals/Progressives are known to hate religion and religious folk to the point of marginalizing same, and erasing it from the public arena, they have advanced their own ersatz religion, Militant Secularism to the extent of teaching it in government school.


And our honorable Liberal verifies this:

Talk to liberalism’s defenders—in academia, science, media, the arts, or politics—and they’ll give you some version of the following defense of the faith: Liberalism works because it is a healthily skeptical system that rejects all measures of bullshit and focuses instead only on what can be empirically proved. Everything else, all the juju of those benighted bobos who claim to know what the Big Man in the Sky wants them to think, eat, and do, is all rot. The system’s chief virtue is that it liberates human beings from the shackles of the false and malignant beliefs that religion once foisted on benighted believers.



Except that liberalism, of course, is itself a form of religious belief, and has been from the very first.
1627585379987.png


Call it woke culture if you’d like, but it’s nothing more than the Enlightenment’s apotheosis—and it’s exactly why folks everywhere from Warsaw to Wisconsin are voting for candidates who promise little more than a swift kick in the pants to the liberal order.”
 
10. This guy, Leibovitz, is my kind of Liberal. He provides a solution to what Liberalism has become….and it looks an awful lot like my kind of conservatism:



“….the solution to liberalism isn’t to debate it on its own terms or to ask politely that it be slightly less steely when it cuts us. Because the liberal answer will always be: Too bad for you.

The only way to be free of liberalism’s rules is to find a different place to stand. To posit, and embrace, an alternative—and superior—set of values, which allows to look down from the mountaintop on the legions of miserable, lonely, loony souls, and be infinitely glad that you are not one of them. Too bad for you, pal.



To the incoherent yowls of critical race theory that require public confessions and assign guilt on the basis of 19th-century pseudoscience, we can say that our system of justice, the one rooted in the words of the Hebrew prophets, is better, which is why it—and not some soulless and mindless academic dross—inspired every civil rights leader who mattered, from Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr.



To the ninnies who march around blindly with the banner of equity, we can say that we don’t believe in equity—that’s part of your messed-up belief system. We believe in excellence, the simple idea that allowed minorities in this country, Black and white alike, to smash the ceilings that kept them cowering, and realize the fullness of their own God-given human potential.

To the slicksters who chew our ears off ad infinitum by counting how many millionaire women of color are on the cover of the latest glamour magazine, we say politely that our tradition teaches us to care for the poor, and that, not being rank racists or silly sexists, we don’t much care if the poor are male or female, Black or white, male or female, down the block or across the country. Our religious tradition is better at handling these questions and quibbles if only because it has done so, successfully, for 2,000 years, which is a major leg up on liberalism’s mere three centuries or so.



So what’s wrong with America these days? It’s liberalism, stupid
.
And how do we fix it? By doing exactly what Uncle Sam recommended we do in that 1975 hot dog commercial: Answer to a higher authority.”

Can I get an “Amen!”?
 

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