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- #101
Proving that you are clueless seems akin to gilding the lily....totally excessive, as you prove it yourself time and again.
For example: ""Liberal" is what founded this country,...."
Of course, that is bogus.
The appellation under which you fly is the name that communist John Dewey substituted for the original name, 'socialism.'
Class is back in session, get your pencil, and take notes:
1. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw government as a necessary evil, of simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didnt want to behave, let alone evolve. Thus progressive reformers saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into compliant social organs.
a. One answer was to get children out of the home as quickly as possible, so that the home could no longer be an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society.
b. John Dewey helped create kindergartens to help shape children for the new society. Dewey, of course, was a favorite of the USSR.
c. This can be seen in Woodrow Wilsons speech as president of Princeton: Our problem is not merely to help students to adjust to themselves to world life [but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can. (Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920, p. 111
2.Classical liberalism....conservatism.
a. The American intellectual class from the mid 19th century onward has disliked [classical]liberalism (which originally referred to individualism, private property, and limits on power) precisely because the liberal society has no overarching goal. http://fff.org/freedom/fd0203c.asp
b. Wilson and the Progressives tried to make war socialism permanent, but the voters didnt agree. They (Progressives) began to agree more and more with Bismarckian top-down socialism, and looked to Russia and Italy where men of action were creating utopias.
Also, John Dewey renamed Progressivism as liberalism, which had referred to political and economic liberty, along the lines of John Locke and Adam Smith: maximum individual freedom under a minimalist state. Dewey changed the meaning to the Prussian meaning: alleviation of material and educational poverty, and the removal of old ideas and faiths. Classical liberals were more like what we call Conservatives.
c. Finally, Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding.
Like Ely and many of his fellow progressive academics, Dewey initially embraced the term "socialism" to describe his social theory. Only after realizing how damaging the name was to the socialist cause did he, like other progressives, begin to avoid it. In the early 1930s, accordingly, Dewey begged the Socialist party, of which he was a longtime member, to change its name. "The greatest handicap from which special measures favored by the Socialists suffer," Dewey declared, "is that they are advanced by the Socialist party as Socialism.
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=OTY0MjA1YzVjNjVkOTViMzM5M2Q5M2Y0ODk0ODc0MmM=
d. DEWEY'S influential 1935 tract, Liberalism and Social Action, should be read in light of this conclusion. In this essay, Dewey purportedly recounts the "history of liberalism." "Liberalism," he suggests, is a social theory defined by a commitment to certain "enduring," fundamental principles, such as liberty and individualism. After defining these principles in the progressives' terms--
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=OTY0MjA1YzVjNjVkOTViMzM5M2Q5M2Y0ODk0ODc0MmM=
3. Progressives interpreted liberty as license, thus destroying the moral rules that make freedom a virtue.
From The World Turned Upside Down, by Melanie Phillips. p.284
Now, what have you learned?
1. Classical Liberals, i.e., conservatives, founded this nation based on individualism, private property, and limits on power.
Note how these ideas are the very antithesis of those advanced by what is called "liberalism" today.
2. Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding
3. And, most particularly....we've learned...proven....that you are an ass.
Ready for the quiz?
Excellent post. Your American leftists should never have been allowed to get away with their highjacking of the word 'liberal'.
(Is not the human mind a very strange thing? That you can talk great sense about political theory and on the same day write reams of nonsense in a doomed attempt to refute evolution?)
Actually it's the right that "hijacked" it. I know you're in Sweden so here's some background -- this goes back to the McCarthy era, when we had a self-absorbed demagogue out for personal headlines running around screaming "communists" every time a leaf fell off a tree. That lasted less than a decade, but while he was in the limelight he and his desperate cohorts, who had been out of the White House for twenty years, pushed this bogus association between the other party (where most of the actual liberals would reside) and these phantom "communists". Not for any particular commonality, just to demonize them. McCarthy and his bullshit tried to change the meaning of liberal -- just as PoliChic and TK and some others do today with this "classical liberal" malarkey. That's there to explain away the inconvenient paradox.
Though McCarthy was eventually discredited and fittingly drank himself to death, the flame of terminology reconstruction didn't extinguish with him. It was trotted out again and again, memorably in the 1988 presidential campaign where George H.W. Bush used it as a slur against his opponent, without ever explaining what a liberal is -- simply pronouncing it with a sneer as if that was enough, egged on by Machiavellian cynics like Lee Atwater.
The casualty in all this was not Dukakis or Democrats, but the state of honest discourse. It amounts to a collective ad hominem, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.
And so it continues today, with superficially-educated wags blaming everything under the sun on this label of "liberal", without so much as a pot to piss in for a clear definition of their own demonology term. It's a form of the Big Lie, and requires a constant fuel of self-delusion. So that's where this demonization of liberal comes from-- a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac drunk who lied his way into the Senate and disgraced himself. This is the example they so slavishly follow like rats after the pied piper.
That's what this thread is-- crying the blues about how social structures have changed, and blaming it, as always, on "liberals". It would be entertaining if it weren't so predictable.
"Though McCarthy was eventually discredited..."
Must you insist on proving what an idiot you are????
1. Arthur Herman, author of "Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator," says that the accuracy of McCarthy's charges "was no longer a matter of debate," that they are "now accepted as fact."
2. And The New York Post's Eric Fettmann has noted: "growing historical evidence underscores that, whatever his rhetorical and investigative excesses - and they were substantial - McCarthy was a lot closer to the truth about Communism than were his foes."
3. McCarthys targets are still defended by the left. Arthur Schlesinger, jr, liberal writer and Pulitzer Prize recipient, bitterly denounced anyone who said Duggan was a spy until the Venona decrypts proved it. (Ronald Radosh, The Book Club, The Cold War: Still a Hot Topic, Slate Magazine, June 24, 1999)