A scathing indictment of liberalism

[Monkeyleg]

This evening I went, as I do every evening, to Victor David Hanson's website. Tonight, though, instead of there being a column by Hanson, there was a column by Bruce Thornton. I'm not familiar with him, but his column on liberalism was one of the most stinging I've read.

The entire column is quotable, but I thought this was one particularly good line: Reporting on the 2006 mass demonstrations by the French protesting some modest adjustments to hiring and firing restrictions, Leiken wrote of the signs carried by the leftist marchers, “Causes and ideas that were young in nineteenth-century Europe had escaped from their nursing homes in Pyongyang, Havana, and Minsk.”

The rest of the column is here.

[Perd Hapley]

So very true. Second paragraph is extra-double-plus-true.

[MicroBalrog]

It's funny to me that while modern Progressivism clads itself in New Leftist terms, Big Government originates from people who were seeking ways to control private behavior and make it conform to effectively-conservative norms.

[RevDisk]

It's funny to me that while modern Progressivism clads itself in New Leftist terms, Big Government originates from people who were seeking ways to control private behavior and make it conform to effectively-conservative norms.

Now, now, MB, folks don't like it when you hold a mirror up on front of them. 

[tyme]

What mirror?  There's a ZOMBIE on the other side of the window you're holding!  KILL IT KILL IT!

[comparing] political ideologies to religion [insults] traditional faiths, which are [far] more [rational] and honest about their metaphysical assumptions.

Garbage.  I will attempt to construct an analogy.  A bunch of chimpanzees find a computer and its instruction manual in the middle of a jungle and, not being satisfied that it "just works" according to the UI-level instructions, take it apart and start puzzling over it.  Another group of chimps arrives and they loudly complain that the computer was working fine before, and now is broken.  They further complain that the upstarts are disrespecting the holy computer user's manual, and will thus bring about the end of computer-enhanced chimp civilization.  The tinkerers are labelled cultists because they have weird beliefs that are at odds with the instruction manual.  All that the cultists have done so far is break things!  Worthless oxygen-wasters!

[roo_ster]

Note to self: If ever I need a concise, hard-hitting, and pithy analogy, I know who not to call.

tyme:

You quoted one of the best-sourced tidbits of the column.  The Big 3 Abrahamic religions make no secret that their foundation is revelation and that they reason from there (1).  The Big 3, 4, whatever Progressive notions (socialism, communism, fascism, etc.) have their basis in Marx and "scientific materialism."  Toss in the further pseudo-scientific muck some of the progressive notions are based on (phrenology, race theory, etc.).  They are materialist notions that desperately cling to the notion of "science" and "reason" as their basis, but are based on bull****.



(1)  One of the books of the New Testament has the term explicitly in its name.

[Perd Hapley]

Note to self: If ever I need a concise, hard-hitting, and pithy analogy, I know who not to call.

Word. The writer is not attacking unbelievers or skeptics. He is attacking people that cling (bitterly and dogmatically) to sociopolitical instruction manuals that make even less sense than the major religions, despite the new instructions being thoroughly discredited by social and political experimentation over the last couple of centuries.