What is liberalism?
“I first remember “liberal” becoming an epithet back in 1988 when Republican presidential nominee George H. W. Bush mocked his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis for being a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” Over the next few years, Republicans made a habit of treating “liberal” as an insult. But that’s nothing compared with what’s happened in more recent years, and especially since the right-populist turn with Trump, when conservative intellectuals began to distance themselves (and the Republican future) from even the classical liberal tradition that anchored the conservative movement from the 1950s on down through to the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. …
Defining liberalism is notoriously difficult because it can take and has taken different forms in different times and places. That isn’t true about other theories of politics. A monarchy is a monarchy. The trappings of communism change somewhat in different contexts, but when instituted at the scale of a nation-state, it invariably becomes a totalitarian form of tyranny. …
In reality, until the middle of the previous decade, both of America’s parties were primarily liberal, with each emphasizing certain aspects of the country’s liberal inheritance, pushing back against other aspects, and aiming to make relatively minor adjustment to the liberal status quo. But with the populist turn that hit American politics full force in 2016, a large faction of the Republican Party (led by the man who would become its standard bearer that year and then president) began hitting the longstanding liberalism of both parties from the right, while the somewhat smaller (but still quite influential) progressive and socialist factions of the Democratic Party did something analogous from the left. …”
In the United States in 2023, a “liberal” is someone who is defined by their uncritical embrace, defense and celebration of recent fads and trends. “Liberalism” is best understood as a vessel for various fads and trends that have washed over the college-educated population over the last century or so.
What do I mean by this?
After years of studying and thinking about this issue, I think it is a mistake to try to explain contemporary liberalism by trying to trace it back to John Locke or John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith or the American Founders. “Liberalism” as it existed in the late 17th, 18th and 19th centuries differed in all kinds of key ways from “liberalism” as it exists in our times. It is not even really the same tradition. In our times, a “liberal” is more likely to be someone who wants to crush free speech, who condemns the Constitution on the grounds of “white supremacy” and who topples statues of Thomas Jefferson.
Globalism – In the early 20th century, “liberals” who were under the influence of H.G. Wells and who were stung by the World Wars began to reject nationalism in favor of globalism. Previously, liberalism and nationalism had been strongly associated and had traveled together since the French Revolution, but after World War II and down to our times liberalism has been opposed to nationalism.
Progressivism – In the early 20th century, “liberals” reversed their traditional skeptical position of concentrated power, which was seen as a menace to individual liberty and is reflected in the American Constitution, and began to advocate for a strong, centralized, consolidated state that would empower “experts” and technocrats guided by social science to regulate the economy and society. “Liberals” are people who believe that those who have education and expertise should rule.
Antiracism – In the early 20th century, antiracism was absorbed into liberalism and has become one of the core animating forces of modern liberalism in a way that wasn’t true in the past. Previously, liberalism had coexisted and flourished and advanced alongside race realism and “white supremacy,” particularly in the British Empire. This older Victorian era version of liberalism which was coupled with Darwinism and classical free market economics was rejected in the 1920s and 1930s though.
Modernism – In the early 20th century, “liberals” rebelled against Victorianism and embraced a modernist sensibility after World War I. In the 19th century, “liberals” had been champions of free market economics and individual rights and a more prudish morality, but “liberalism” became focused on its current project of liberating the (White) individuals from their traditional culture after World War I. Exotic non-White cultures, however, should be celebrated and preserved because they stimulate and enrich the bland Western culture which liberals are bent on dismantling and hollowing out. This impulse to subvert and tear down traditional European cultural norms ultimately comes from the avant-garde, not from liberal theory, but now it is as central to liberal practice as antiracism and cosmopolitanism.
Cosmopolitanism – Also in the early 20th century, there was a cosmopolitan turn among liberal elites who developed a habit of disdaining their own people and celebrating everything foreign, which was part of a wider turn away from Romanticism. It is one of the reasons why the electorate has sorted itself on this basis with one party being composed of people psychologically predisposed to favor social stability and the familiar and the other to favor novelty and radical social change.
Atheism – From the early 20th century down to our own times, liberals gradually rejected Christianity in favor of atheism and in doing so accelerated their decoupling from traditional Christian morality. Liberals are now overwhelmingly secular and irreligious.
Freudianism – In the early 20th century, liberals began to lose their religion and Christian morals and gradually over time replaced morality itself with a laundry list of -isms and -phobias which are derived from Freudian psychology. The seven deadly sins of liberalism are racism, sexism, nativism, white supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. No one who lived over a century ago would have been familiar with this way of thinking.
Feminism – In the early 20th century, the feminist was known as the “New Woman” or the “Modern” woman and was just emerging in our culture (Victorians had “separate spheres” for the sexes), but a century later feminism and its assumptions about men and the family are now at the core of liberalism. Abortion has been elevated to the status of a sacrament.
Postmodernism – As with the modernist aesthetic which centers the Self and elevates the pursuit of lifestyles above morality, postmodernism became trendy among educated liberal elites in the late 20th century and was another Intellectual fad that was fully incorporated into liberalism, which now holds as dogma that race and sex are social constructs with no biological basis.
LGBTQIAP – In the span of a century, educated liberal elites have rejected Victorian era religion and morality in favor of gay marriage, PRIDE Month and the LGBTQ cult, which is one of the most remarkable transformations that has occurred over this period. It is a total 180 from 19th century liberalism.
Political Correctness / DEI – Cultural Marxism swept over American academia in the 1980s and 1990s and spread from there into the wider culture.
Wokeism and Trans – As we have established, liberals are just people who adopt the latest fads and trends and the explosion of gender dysphoria over the last decade and the craze for toppling states is just the latest example of how “liberalism” has evolved over time. There is no grand theory connecting any of this into an intelligible whole. It didn’t all spring from the hand of John Locke.
In 2023, a good liberal is someone who is hip and who just goes with the flow and who follows the crowd and who always embraces the Current Thing. A good liberal shouts all the correct slogans and shouts down the wrong people in Two Minute Hates on Twitter. Liberalism is nothing more than the sum of recent fads and trends which clung to the vessel like barnacles but which now define its image in the public mind.
“But this really isn’t tenable anymore, is it?”
>there is a move now by powerful LGBT wokesters to cancel David French
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/david-french-not-woke-enough-for-the-times/
“Liberals are people who embrace the latest fads and trends”
They are the most led by the nose people I have ever met or heard of.
Their gullibility is something to be taken very seriously, because it will continue to be an imminent danger to us all.
Because we cannot change these people, we must lawfully go after those systems of manipulation that so successfully target them.
Liberalism has always been a destructive ideology. The strand of liberalism we see today is the logical conclusion of pre-existing forms of liberalism, all the way back to Locke. From the very beginning it was an assault on European Christian civilization in favor of a freemasonic secular egalitarian dystopia. During the French Revolution, the radical liberal Jacobins tried to get rid of Christianity in favor of a “Cult of Reason” while sending clergymen and political dissidents to the guillotine. Many of the founding fathers during the American Revolution were also freemasons who rejected Christianity, the creator they spoke of being the masonic “Grand Architect of the Universe” and not the Holy Trinity.
Liberalism when it is not the ruling ideology will cynically deconstruct existing power structures in favor of openness, but once they actually ascend to power any and all openness is thrown out the window. Liberalism itself is the problem, no matter how classic it is, just like how all feminism and all capitalism is bad, not just their modern iterations.
The salient theme of “liberalism” is Decadence, and the fetishization of neurotic transgressivism. Transgression against any standard/norm/expectation, and the denial of all virtue.
This
Turns out a dude I know who I had thought was fairly “conservative” is flying a Ukrainian flag, but no American flag in sight. Found out he also fell for the “religion of peace” mantra, and still believes it. These people have defective brains…can’t think for themselves. The big problem is that most of them consider those that don’t go along with them to be evil and irredeemable. It is analogous to religion. There is no thinking, just belief in what the “authority” figures tell you, and non-believers are condemned “sinners”.
We can summarize that liberals are garbage.
“Liberalism” as it stands today, in my mind, can be summed up as doctrine of complete lack of self awareness (or more precisely, self criticality).
Every passing whim becomes a revelation. Every taboo, something to be broken. Every tradition is an artifact of racial hatred. Every institution exists only to oppress.
Yet, it runs deeper than this. Orwell was spot on. Everything good is opposite. In our current Orwellian nightmare, ignorance is virtuous.
Just last night I was at my son’s practice, and had a conversation with a middle aged Gen-X lady and a much younger “Zoomer” aged 20something girl. We were discussing the problems of the world, and being from a red-state area, there was no surprise that both women were in agreement about the state of things.
The crazy part was, when the subject took a particular turn about the malice of
our government, and I mentioned the historical precedence of our much esteemed “Democracy” sending in tanks to blow up and set fire to a building full of Christian women and children in Waco, Texas, and the Zoomer girl had no idea what I was talking about. She wasn’t surprised that our “values” were burning children alive for the crime of being Christians who wanted to opt out of secularism, but nevertheless she had ever heard of Branch Davidians.
This is what modern “liberalism” wants. It needs us to all be stupid, uneducated rubes who only care about what the Kardashians are up to, or the latest Netflix garbage. Having opinions on anything controversial…nope.
“Netflix bought the rights to all of Dahl’s books from the Dahl family for $686 million in 2021.”
https://www.unz.com/isteve/roald-dahls-childrens-novels-are-being-rewritten-by-censors/
Come on Damon, liberals are adherents and follows of the Moshiach, lets call a spade a spade shall we not Jewboy?
https://theweek.com/articles/883809/turns-im-jewish-after-all
Now the problem for you is keeping a lid on the truth, for once all these Irish retards and irreligious blacks come realize they are playing on team anti-Christ, it is game over.
Wow. Zinger of a response with that link.
Damon is undoubtedly a Crypto-Hibernian as well as born again jew.
What do they want and why can’t they tell us? They have all our judges and politics, the have money and businesses and power and still they are not happy? So what do they want? THEY WANT MOSHIACH. And they are too fuzxcking blind to realize they nailed THEIR Moshiach to a cross.
“In the early 20th century, ‘liberals’ reversed their traditional skeptical position of concentrated power, which was seen as a menace to individual liberty and is reflected in the American Constitution, and began to advocate for a strong, centralized, consolidated state that would empower ‘experts’ and technocrats guided by social science to regulate the economy and society.”
Am certainly no expert on this subject but will guess a manifestation of that change in thinking is “Philip Dru: Administrator,” which must be the least-romantically-named utopian novel in history. Its putative author was Edward M. House, known as Colonel House, who became, it seems, Woodrow Wilson’s right-hand man.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Dru:_Administrator …
“Historian Paul Johnson wrote: ‘Oddly enough, in 1911 [House] had published a political novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, in which a benevolent dictator imposed a corporate income tax, abolished the protective tariff, and broke up the “credit trust”—a remarkable adumbration of Woodrow Wilson and his first term.’
“Billie Jensen, a historian from the University of Kansas noted that ‘Philip Dru was obviously an expression both of House’s ambition and his political dreams and it was an expression of the ideas of the man who had an impressive amount of influence on Woodrow Wilson. Seldom have the elements of a utopia been implemented so soon as the reforms of Philip Dru were; seldom has a utopian reformer been as influential as House was. For these reasons, Philip Dru is a significant political document.'”
The Texas-born House was the son of “an emigrant from England by way of New Orleans, who became a prominent Houston businessman, with a large role in developing the city and served a term as its mayor. [House’s] father sent ships laden with cotton to evade the Union blockade in the Gulf of Mexico during the American Civil War. He traded Texas cotton through Matamoros, Mexico, in exchange for equipment and ammunition.”
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_M._House#Early_years
Text of the novel is at the following:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6711/pg6711-images.html
more on ‘Philip Dru’:
https://mailstar.net/house-schiff.html
also influenced Wilson:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Samuel_Untermyer
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/woodrow-wilson-was-a-hero-to-jews
I find it somewhat curious and humorous about what has happened to the Communist Party of the United States. (CPUSA) They are all over You Tube and need not ever fear being thrown off or being de-platformed. But they are undergoing a schism itself between those who still favor Class Struggle and no compromise with the system or Capitalism and the majority of the party who feels it can achieve its goals better by backing democratic politicians and working through the system. In other words, they have become Social Democrats like their European counterparts. Watching their podcasts are funny because with a few notable exceptions its presenters are not photogenic and look profoundly unhealthy. They too seem to have been corrupted by modern liberalism which has severely dulled their revolutionary aspect. They are all about LGBTQ empowerment now. How in the H*ll does that involve Class Struggle?
As I’ve pointed out before, the left has never really believed in tolerance, free speech and opposition to war and the military. These were useful positions only when the the left could benefit from them and were soon discarded when they are not, as we’re witnessing right now. Folks like Jonathan Cook, Caitlin Johnstone and others are being exceedingly naïve when they say “the real left would not do this!” Yes it would and always has as the situation demanded.
Of course course it could be argued the right has not always been consistent either. But the left has always had the stage and the microphone and therefore controls the narrative. Secondly the right is not so sanctimonious and holier than thou — I remember the songs, signs, bumper stickers et al during Nam— where are they now? The silence is deafening.
I, too, am struck by the difference—from the Vietnam time, that is. In those days, as you’ve just indicated, the left was constantly kicking up dust, constantly throwing up one or another of several arguments against America’s military mission in that country. Said arguments were virtually never a statement of the true leftist position, i.e., that North Vietnam, as an element of the World Communist Front, deserved to triumph. The argument was almost always something else, something that, as you say, was merely rhetorical: Ho Chi Minh is a nationalist, not a Communist; Ho Chi Minh is an agrarian reformer, not a Communist; the people of Vietnam have a right to choose their own system, communist or not; all war is wrong; violence never solves anything; violence only breeds more violence; the U.S. shouldn’t be the world’s policeman; the U.S. has no right to be the world’s policeman; America’s real purpose is to protect petroleum interests—or some such thing—in Southeast Asia; communism is good and capitalism bad, even though the USSR is not supporting the North Vietnamese in any way.
This is why I always find it odd that “boomers” are thought to have a specific political mentality. The antiwar protesters, with their non-stop utterance of those antiwar positions, the non-stop clamor and cacophony of it all, seemed to me to represent only a very-small portion of America’s then-young.
“I remember the songs, signs, bumper stickers ….”
I remember them, too. I remember the flavor-label on one of the containers behind the glass-fronted counter of an ice-cream shop near the University of Pennsylvania: Ho Chi Mint. The hippie-type handling the scooping was the very model of mellowness.
@John…
Sir, I just said to my wife last night : ‘One war after another, Honey-Pie, millions and millions of displaced and dead, and where are all these old flower-child war-protesters of old?
But, Ivan,’ she said, ‘they’re too old.’.
”Oh, c’mon, Honey-Pie,’ was my reply. ‘Ye don’t really believe they couldn’t speak out from their beds, do ye?’
Yes—I think you have their number, Ivan.
Thank you, Dear John!
‘liberal’ is passé, they so blackened that word they have moved on to ‘progressive’, so they can ruin more of language, as they did ‘gay’.
Liberalism meant and to many still means freedom from coercion, especially from state coercion.
It means small government.
Throughout the centuries different liberals emphasized different liberties, social, economic, political, religious, but what they all had in common is, they valued liberty.
In the late 20th and early 21st century you could find plenty of liberals on both sides of the aisle, right and left, but today only the mainstream right seems to retain any respect for liberty, the mainstream left no longer does, yet they go on calling themselves liberals.
If you ask your average ‘liberal’ what they think of liberty, small government, individual rights, they’d say something like ‘they’re a symptom, product or manifestation of white supremacy’, or something mentally retarded like that.
Now both sides are extremely, corrupt, more loyal to the bigs, big business, big brother, big pharma and the military) than they are to the people or any principle, but I guess at least the right still seems to value liberty kinda sorta, whereas the left has no use for it.
So if ‘liberals’ no longer believe in liberty, what do they believe?
Well they believe in all those things you mentioned, globalism, cosmopolitanism, ‘progressivism’, but if I had to sum it up, they believe in a government by and for women and minorities rather than the majority, which’s funny because they also call themselves ‘democrats’, but they don’t really believe in democracy, or majority rule, because the majority are these white working class hooligans who go down to pub for a beer to watch the game who harbor all sorts of ‘antiquated’ sociopolitical and religious views, and they hate those people.
So yea, a government by and for women and minorities, and who’re the minorities?
The minorities can be divided into two groups, first are ‘the oppressed’ (BIPOC, LGBTP and children (because they can’t consent to things like euthanasia and sex with adults), criminals, migrants and vagrants, the second group of minorities are people with college and university degrees, especially in things like climatology, virology, psychiatry, sociology, basically in the enviornment, medicine and the soft sciences/humanities.
So to further simplify, they believe in matriarchy, minoritarianism and technocracy.
Oh, and these values and policies are to be imposed on the whole world for its own good whether it likes it or not in a sort of neocolonialism where good whites rescue bad whites and nonwhites from their barbarity.
It’s a form of universalism and so, not podermodernism really, which was critical of all univeralisms, especially on the right but they were sometimes critical of the left’s universalisms too.
The contemporary left only borrows from postmodernism to critique the right’s constructs, but actual postmodernism was a critique of all constructs and ‘metanarratives’ to quote Jean-Francois Lyotard, even those on the left.
As far as socialism and communism go, I don’t think they’re central to what the left is anymore, they are comfortable with capitalism so long as there’s what they see as ample state sponsored protection for women and said minorities.
If it’s a socialism, it’s one that’s increasingly women, minority, underclass/chronically unemployed, and technocrat centered, rather than populist and working class centered.
The left is comfortable with capitalism because today’s left is far more upper class and college educated than ever before.
Basically this generation of the west’s bourgeois completely ditched traditional values and religion, but not capitalism.
They just want a more managed capitalism, one they can tinker and toy with for various ‘humanitarian’ and technocratic ends, they don’t want workers to organize grass roots as in syndicalism or to overthrow capitalism because capitalism is who they are, they’re the ones with most of the capital, they want a capitalism where they can feel good about themselves, where they get to ‘help’ some of the people who’ve fallen through the cracks but only on their terms, very narcissistic.
Some of these things can be grouped together.
What do progressivism, modernism, atheism and Freudianism have in common, along with climate and covid alarmism?
They’re all either part of, or at least adjacent to, a scientific world view.
Progressivism is the idea that (social) scientists should run things, not kings, popes, nor the people.
Modernism or the modern world is in large part a (by)product of science.
Science has sought to explain things ‘naturally’ without God/the supernatural, so even though atheism isn’t scientific, you could say science paved the way for or lends credence to atheism.
While Freudianism isn’t scientific, it was an early attempt at making psychology scientific, and while many of his ideas were later discredited by more empirical scientists, some of them remain a part of psychology to this day.
All of his key ideas at least had a large impact and influence on clinical psychology’s development.
Whether we agree with them or not, climate change appears to be the scientific consensus, and while the safety and efficacy of lockdowns, masking, social distancing and vaxxing were grossly exaggerated, still these are things many scientists in key positions of power in academia, media and government continue promote, or peddle rather.
And so all this stuff you mentioned either is science, or at least is stuff a lot of (social) scientists believe in however (un)scientific they are.
The same could be said of anti-racism, feminism and LGBT activism/advocacy along with criminal justice and immigration reform.
So yea, it’s either all science, or at least scientism, not science but stuff adjacent to science a lot of (social) scientists, insofar as the humanities/soft sciences can be scientific, believe.
LGBT is not a disorder or illness according to mainstream psychiatry.
Feminism is in part a product of modernity, of industry and tech scientists had a role in creating, and of mass urbanization, same with globalization bringing once disparate ethnicities and races together.
As for socialism, communism and anarchism, while you can find western academics who identify with these radical ideologies, they aren’t the consensus, the consensus seems to be social democracy, a more ‘humane’ to borrow their language, capitalism.
Social democracy isn’t that radical, it’s the contemporary left’s sociocultural and political stuff that’s radical, not so much their fiscal stuff, and so this is a different and less working class more bourgeois and educated left than the one our parents and grandparents knew, and that we knew in our youth.
As for actual liberal democracy, academia, MSM and the left no longer values it, which has alienated the left from the right, which largely continues to believe in it along with republicanism (rule of law/separation of powers) and traditional values.
Liberalism, democracy, republicanism, conservatism, these’re all anathema to academia/MSM/the left.
Liberalism and republican democracy were sort of neutral ground, something the left and right could both believe in, a place for dialogue, but when only one side believes in them, you can’t have a healthy , functioning democratic republic until the wayward side is crushed.
The left is running away with their stuff, they no longer have any use for conservatism, nor that neutral ground, they want to destroy them, relegate them to history, and the museum.
They now hate individualism as much or more than they hate conservatism and folky beliefs and values, they’re totally into group think.
They want to create a new authoritarian civilization and completely do away with all that came before it.
“The same could be said of anti-racism ….”
Yes. That is why the fundamental position of anti-racism is—must be—that race is not biological. Anti-racism, with that view as its basis, is thus, in the minds of its proponents and adherents, a sort of scientific crusade, like the earlier, successful crusades of heliocentrism and evolutionism. Physical anthropology is “discredited,” as is Ptolemaic astronomy or Creation.
Right, Hunter is right when he says ‘liberalism’ (or leftism rather) is all about following the latest fads and trends, but there’s more to it than that, the fads and trends leftists follow aren’t grassroots phenomena, it’s almost exclusively stuff academics come up with, people working in the humanities/social/soft sciences largely funded by the ruling class, and they’re called soft for a reason, they’re a lot less reliable than say physics, which itself is less reliable than formal logic and mathematics.
It’s a lot of guesswork, opinion, perspective, philosophy, emotivism and value judgments, but nonetheless leftards treat it as irrefutable fact.
Yea they treat it like heliocentrism, they treat ‘men get pregnant’ with all the seriousness rational people treat Copernicanism, it’s insane, these’re all just fanciful language games postmodern sophists come up with.
Sex is nonbinary, yea you can say that about almost anything more or less, existence is nonbinary, google or wiki nondualism for starters.
This is all philosophy, metaphysics, not science, but it’s being treated as such.
Sometimes these academics are informed by the latest science, but what they’re doing is not strictly scientific, often it’s not even close.
Furthermore, the moment you make a value judgment, definitionally you can’t strictly be doing science anymore, for example the climate may very well be changing due to man’s carbon emissions, but even if it is, that we should care about it, or how we should go about dealing with it as a society, that can’t strictly be science, it’s opinion, politics, but nonetheless leftards conflate their value judgments with fact.
And of course science itself, particularly whenever there’s massive amounts of money and power involved, is highly corruptible, but science, technocracy and progressivism is religious dogma for these retards, beyond question, and so above liberal democracy, and above the law.
Consciously or unconsciously they are trying to turn science and adjacent sociopolitical philosophies into a religion, a fundamentalist religion at that, they’re making a cult out of it, and that’s how science becomes scientism, a danger and menace to our society.
These psychos must be brought to heel or they will ruin everything.
A society needs more than science, and academia, it needs church, it needs grassroots thinking and organizing, common sense, intuition, spirituality and tradition, but these retards dismiss all that.
And it needs critical thinking, something anyone with half a brain can learn to do, and need to do, we can’t let one class of people often disconnected from working class and daily life do all our thinking for us in their ivory towers and laboratories, and so this cult must be brought to heel, it is the most dangerous thing to our civilization at this point in time.
Western man is increasingly turning away from traditional religion, but is he becoming more rational, humane and civilized?
No he is just making a religion out of something else that was never intended to be one, a fundamentalist religion and so a cult at that, that tolerates no dissent.
Maybe Oswald Spengler was right.
All these fads and trends from globalism and cosmopolitanism to anti-racism, feminism and LGBT to climate and virus hysteria have at least one thing in common, it’s stuff academics came up with, people working in the humanities/social/soft sciences, sometimes working in conjunction with actual scientists as well as various politicians, oligarchs and NGOs.
Liberalism is a misnomer, it’s leftism, which’s synonymous with modern progressivism/scientism/technocracy, the idea that these’re the people that should be running things, that nothing should hold them back from reorganizing society top-down overnight as they see fit.
They see conservatism and actual liberal democracy as their biggest threats to their power.
A big chunk of their ideology is dedicated to undermining traditional institutions and values, to claiming these things are actually harmful to society and oppressive.
They must be swept out of the way so psychiatrists and sociopolitical theorists unencumbered by these things can rewrite the rules.
They’re not just, not conservatives, or not liberals, they’re anti-conservatives and anti-liberals.
There was a time when progressives were content to play a supplementary role in society, but no longer, we can see that mainstream progressivism is gearing up to be the be all and end all, to be to modern society what Christianism was to medieval and early modern society.
Universities and colleges are their temples, uni professors their priests, social theorists like Ibram X Kendi their prophets and tards like George Floyd their martyrs.
The Antfia/BLM ritos were not riots, but Jihad, holy war, resistance to a deeply corrupt, unjust and racist society, the ends justify the means.
I think this is a better post than my last few, I think I really hit the nail on the head this time:
In most ways, leftism is just the opposite of conservativism, or what leftists imagine conservatives believe, the yin or left to conservative’s yang or right.
So if conservatives are ‘racists’, they’re ‘anti-racists’.
If conservatives are ‘misogynists’, they’re misandrists.
If conservatives are for cis straight monogamy, they’re for trans gay polyamory.
If conservatives are for economic and reproductive growth, they’re for degrowth.
If conservatives are meat and potatoes, they’re for anything but, exotic foreign cuisine, vegetarianism, veganism, crickets, mealworms…
If conservatives are into health and fitness, they’re into ‘body positivity’.
If conservatives are hierarchical, they’re egalitarian, at least in theory, in practice they often just establish new hierarchies or strengthen existing ones (in)advertently.
If conservatives are into reason, experience, orthodoxy, pragmatism and common sense, they’re into emotion, theory, heterodoxy, idealism and nonsense.
If conservatives are theists who believe in freewill and worship God, leftists are atheists, determinists and worship human beings, whether it’s themselves, celebritards, ‘victims’ (negros, natives, women, queers…) or activists.
A minority of leftists get into Satanism and the occult, increasingly
their influence can be blatantly seen all over pop culture.
Another minority get into transhumanism, which can be thought of as a form of fake salvation through Ai, cybernetics and genetic engineering.
If conservatives are nationalists, they’re globalists.
If conservatives are capitalists, they’re social democrats.
If conservative are isolations, they’re interventionists and Russophobes.
We can think of Actual liberal democracy, journalism and science as neutral ground, something neither left nor right, but unfortunately leftists have nearly completely taken over mainstream and social media, the soft sciences and even managed to pollute some of the hard like ecology and virology with their ideology.
Of course they’ve also dominated the entertainment industry for decades.
I guess it’s because conservatives have families, churches and communities, so leftists needed places of their own to congregate, and they chose academia, media and entertainment to spread ‘the message’.
It was a mistake for conservatives to let have these takeover these places, we need to take them back and make them at least neutral again, places where freedom of thought/speech/inquiry reign.
When you think about it, it’s pretty stupid to base your whole worldview on just being against whatever another group of people are for, but that’s what leftists have done, and that’s why I think leftist is a better name for these people than liberal or progressive, because they’re simply and stupidly left of whatever the right’s been doing because it’s usually worked out for generations upon generations.
Really these people have no imagination or creativity, ‘I’ll have the opposite of whatever that guy’s having over there just out of sheer spite and because I have no ideas, sense or taste of my own’!
There are even some leftists who oppose math and science because ‘they were created by white men’ and so ‘are racist and sexist’.
…it wasn’t always this way.
There was a time when the left wasn’t just the opposite of convention.
When the left mostly agreed with the right, especially on the fundamentals, when they just wanted to make some adjustments here and there.
…but that was in the past, today’s left isn’t meaningful and thoughtful opposition, it is simply a form of decadent and nihilistic cancer, a manifestation of a civilization’s desire to commit suicide, a sign that western civ may be teetering on the brink, ready to do itself in.
I agree mostly and disagree slightly: Liberalism is the tendency to embrace any COUNTERCULTURAL trends and fads.