Gagdad Bob at One Cosmos has a great post: Announcing a New 12-Step Program for the Left: Apparatchiks Anonymous.
I self-identify as a conservative for convenience’ sake, but believe it or not, in political tests like this one for Politopia, I come out as a classical liberal every time. Liberalism just isn’t what it used to be. Literally. I try to remember to differentiate between “the left” and “liberals” for that reason, and the truth is that the gap between those groups is growing as large as the gap between Christians and the Phelps family. The left has been increasingly anti-liberal for quite a while now. As Gagdad Bob says,
My own journey to so-called “conservatism” hasn’t been a journey at all. In reality, I am more or less the same liberal I have always been. It’s just that, over the past 30-40 years, liberalism has been hijacked by the Left, thereby becoming an illiberal movement. To cite just one example, when I was in college in the 1970’s, being liberal meant being tolerant toward homosexuals. To me this is a given. I cannot imagine otherwise. But for the Left, if you merely “tolerate” homosexuality, you are a bigot, something called a “homophobe.” No, you must celebrate and even encourage it. You must never suggest to children that certain sexual arrangements are better than others. If my son wants to marry a man or a woman, it should make no difference to me — just flip a coin, as it were.
Needless to say, I regard such “thinking” as not only devoid of wisdom, but frankly abusive, narcissistic, and unscientific, completely at odds with what we know about both psychosexual development and the soul of man.
He notes that not only does the left refuse to learn, but they also get a free pass for such closed minded behavior, mainly because they are the gatekeepers of the organizations that govern information – education and the media. Whatever else you can say about Antonio Gramsci, on this he was a visionary. He has been proved correct, to the detriment of us all.
One of the most salient characteristics of the Left is that it is peculiarly incapable of learning. In my lifetime, it has been ridiculously wrong about virtually everything, but it is as if facts and reality don’t matter. The same people who were trying to convince us of manmade global cooling in the 1970’s are now trying to convince us of manmade global warming. The same people who argued for our unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1970’s and 1980’s are now telling us that it didn’t matter that Saddam would have undoubtedly acquired nukes or that Iran and other terrorists are on the brink of doing so. The same people who successfully curtailed nuclear power plants in America are now insisting that we must be “energy independent” and that we are only in Iraq for the oil. The same people who argued that Reagan’s tax breaks would destroy the economy have, like everyone else, enjoyed the unprecedented economic growth of the past 25 years, and yet, still want to raise taxes. The same Democratic party that accommodated southern racists for decades continues to argue that race is all-important and that government should be engaged in the task of dividing people by race and gender and giving special privileges to some. And of course, the Democratic part is now the main repository and champion of mankind’s most ancient and vile prejudice, anti-Semitism.
Again, this is “the Left” as opposed to “liberals” – a distinction that is difficult to remember to make. Well, the twelve step program that Gagdad Bob has provided is entertaining, and would be extremely helpful if anyone ever decided to make use of it. That’s not likely, but one can hope.
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