Or did liberalism simply fade away, like the Roman empire, finally extinguished by a final assault of barbarian hordes.
To be sure, it died from within. In the early twentieth century, people of many, perhaps most political persuasions considered themselves liberals. Economists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek, social Darwinists like Herbert Spenser and William Sumner and even capitalists like John D Rockefeller.
Liberalism’s enemy was rigid, unchanging orthodoxy and rhetoric frozen in time. To be liberal was to be a thinker and a doer. They fought against the Catholic hierarchy, not the bible. They attacked Royals and dynastic capitalism, not the industries where people worked.
But, as is now obvious, liberalism was not killed by conservatism, it died from within. It was hijacked by political warriors who used it as a weapon against a political foe. It was exposed as a lie, which is what it became.
I will admit, openly, I hate the very word “progressive.” The whole idea of progressivism can best be seen in the Hillary Clinton’s description of her political enemies. They are “deplorables,” (a word she invented) basement dwelling losers and people who (if they had a brain) would have given her a 50-point margin of victory.
Progressivism is a movement based on sexuality, an idea that we have progressed past sex being a reproductive process. In today’s evolutionary theory, we don’t adapt, we go through “personal growth”. We choose our gender since, as they continually tell us, gender is an identity. Men and woman may have been designed by natural selection to advance “selfish genes” in the past, but that’s no longer the case. Today, we create with our minds. Our beliefs create our reality. We are pure thought.
It’s an idea straight out of a gay bar in a Hindu shopping mall.
It’s a movement of people whose minds are so frozen in untestable beliefs, loony science, community college level understanding and suburban ‘the customer is always right’ mentalities that one cannot even talk to them.
When I tell my progressive friends that I don’t vote, was in south America for the six months surrounding the last election, could give a flying shit about American politics and don’t own a TV, because I don’t scream anti Trump slogans and talk about SNL, I’m a Trump loving hick. (Lord, why did I ever leave Medellin)
There is no middle ground with progressives. You either agree with every single word they say, march in their parades and give to their causes or you are a stupid, deplorable that lives in your mother’s basement.
Although I don’t own a TV and never will, I do see TV in the morning when I stop for a coffee at Tim Hortons, a national coffee chain that has the station on all day and all night. The show I typically see has an African American host and typically, three or four guests.
CNN is the only news channel I’ve ever watched where you know what they’re saying with sound off, as it is at Tim Hortons at 5am. The “guests” and so stereotypical, it’s like they’re cartoon characters. It’s as if they strive to have their viewers preset opinions aped back to them in perfect form. I imagine the CNN viewer to be a suburban housewife standing in Walmart in the pasta section screaming because there’s no penne. “I want my penne! Give it to me, NOW!!!
Besides CNN, which has an abysmally small audience, progressives get their news from such bastions of journalism as Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central. In fact, Barack Obama once went on Comedy Central to be interviewed about the terror threat and immigration! Welcome to the new normal.
Today, it’s not important that you understand anything or can even make reasoned arguments. You are the customer and as such, always right. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the totally moronic fight against “global climate change.”
In a nutshell, even if you had definitive proof that the globe is warming and it’s being caused by human activity, the arguments being made are still insane. It would be obvious to a plastic pink lawn pelican that you can’t limit CO2 emission AND have 7 to 10% third world GDP growth and debt financed free trade.
Are “progressives” aware that Keystone is pretty much the only pipeline Barack Obama didn’t approve? There was more oil and gas pipeline built under Obama than any president in history as well as the biggest increase in oil production in history. There were more oil and gas wells drilled than under any president.
Under our twenty first century progressive we had an explosion of debt fueled, worldwide GDP growth and a massive ramp up of unrestricted free trade, the very policies that were attacked viciously by liberals in the past. Even if the globe isn’t warming, the worldwide explosion in deficit fueled air and water pollution has turned much of the third world into a certified shit hole. China and India have been transformed into millions is square kilometers of Love Canal, all by people who fashion themselves “environmentalists.”
The only thing that’s “progressed” in the last 8 years is the level of hypocrisy among progressives, hypocrisy so thick you’d need a chain saw to cut through it.
It is my untested theory that one reason progressives are so violent is Freudian. They aren’t screaming because they think they’re right but because they know they aren’t. Deep down inside, where this ugly little intuition humans have that we refer to as logic resides, is a voice and that always demands to be heard.
But there’s a more somber, threatening side to this, especially for liberals like me. Aside from thanking progressives for changing their name so I don’t have to belong to their club anymore, they are a minority movement looking for allies, and like the west that allied itself with Stalinist Russia. there is a price progressives will pay.
To be sure, although the average Muslim is not anywhere near as violent as they are portrayed in the media, the religion is extreme in its middle age paternalism. It is also vociferously and often violently opposed to sodomy. This is not something the progressives are going to educate out of them. As much as nobody wants to talk about it, the average middle eastern refugee has an IQ 15 points below the average American and probably 30 points below the average gay progressive.
Any student of history or culture will tell you that it doesn’t take a majority to sway opinion. In fact, gays do it with less than 2% of the population. As to women’s rights, it’s worse. Middle eastern leaders love to lecture us on how progressive they are because of the things they “let their women do.” Rights aren’t things given you by leaders. They’re things you’re born with. The star of the Christian bible is a guy with no father and no children. The star of the Koran is a guy who married his first cousin and lived to a ripe old and well recorded age. The bible is a book of suggestions. No one is arrested for coveting thy neighbor’s house. The Koran is a book of enforceable laws.
In short, this alliance between Muslim refugees and progressives will work until it stops working, just like the alliance between the west and the Soviet Union. When it does the war starts and I guarantee, it won’t be a cold war.
Liberals of the past attacked the leaders of the church and dogma, but were careful to le ave Christian traditions which they knew they could not replace. Today’s progressives attacked the people, destroyed their culture and have created a world, oddly, similar to what the Ku Klux Klan predicted they’d create. It’s what I like to refer to as “I got a great idea” culture, best epitomized by a sign in East Berlin after the Berlin wall fell.
On a poster was a picture of Karl Marx. Under it were the words, “Sorry chaps, it was just a theory.”
As well, progressivism is just a theory and not a particularly scientific one. Time will tell how much damage it does.
Paul Schwartzmeyer, Author 39 Down, Joseph Schneider, Traitor-Patriot, violume one.
