Shelby Steele: The Exhaustion of American Liberalism

White guilt gave us a mock politics based on the pretense of moral authority. --The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism. --All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?

A subscription is required to read the full article The Exhaustion Of American Liberalism, published March 5, 2017 by Wall Street Journal. Read More......

What Liberals Get Wrong About the Family

Conservatives are wrong to accuse the liberals of relativism. They are not relativists, but have fanatical attachment to certain ideals, which conservatives often fail to understand. One such ideal is autonomy, which guides their entire sexual agenda. As I argue in “The Obligations of Family Life: A Response to Modern Liberalism,” the Left’s understanding of autonomy does much damage to marriage and family life.
Read more at the Daily Signal Read More......

Unfair, Unjust, Privileged, Politically Incorrect Bedtime Stories

From time to time, a news story will pop up somewhere that perfectly illustrates the demonstrable damage that political correctness (and the liberal definition of equality) has caused to conventional wisdom and society as a whole. Such a story presented itself this week when a man named Adam Swift, a British academic and described philosopher, offered his thoughts on the societal unfairness created when parents read bedtime stories to their children.
Yes, bedtime stories.


Read more at BernardGoldberg.com Read More......

How Obama is Turning Liberalism Into an Instrument of Coercion

Liberals just aren't very liberal these days. The word "liberal" comes from the Latin word meaning freedom, and in the 19th century, liberals in this country and abroad stood for free speech, free exercise of religion, free markets, free trade -- for minimal state interference in people's lives.  In the 20th-century, New Dealers revised this definition by arguing that people had a right not only to free speech and freedom of religion but also, as Franklin Roosevelt said in his 1941 Four Freedoms speech, freedom from fear and from want.

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The states with the most segregated public schools are epicenters of liberalism

The state with the most segregated public schools is New York.  Other states with exceptionally segregated schools include California, Illinois and Michigan.  These findings come from a longitudinal study of enrollment figures conducted by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles, The Associated Press reports. The period studied was 1998 through 2010. New York, California, Illinois and Michigan are traditionally among the most reliably Democratic states in the union, as an interactive 2012 map created by Slate shows.

Read more at the Daily Caller Read More......

Conservatives: Not Completely Delusional

Ezra Klein makes the argument in writing that I have heard many progressives and moderates make in conversation: That Republican politicians have continuously moved to the right over the past 20 or so years, and Democrats have expanded their range of promoted policies to the right to occupy the policy space abandoned by the increasingly extreme Republicans. As Klein put it: “President Obama’s record makes him look like a moderate Republicans from the late-90s.” Andrew Sullivan supports this view, and has called Ross Douthat “delusional” for not agreeing with him. You might disagree with Douthat on a given issue, or even on most issues, but when you start calling somebody that level-headed “delusional,” you might want to slow down and consider your own premises for a minute.

Read more at National Review Read More......

A Conservative finds clues from a Liberal to fight Liberalism

This 2009 article from blogger, A Goy and his Blog, with video and graphs is interesting. Essentially, the conservative's job is education not compromise. Find out why (fairly long piece but valuable).  He starts with this question, "Why do leftist ideologues persist with each new decade in clinging to a perennially discredited Utopian fantasy?"

Compromising with Moral Adolescence: A Losing Strategy Read More......

Barack Obama has awakened a sleeping nation

ASPEN TIMES WEEKLY (via email/hat tip: Linda Weimer) by Gary Hubbell - Barack Obama is the best thing that has happened to America in the last 100 years. Truly, he is the savior of America's future. He is the best thing ever. ∴ Despite the fact that he has some of the lowest approval ratings among recent presidents, history will see Barack Obama as the source of America's resurrection. Barack Obama has plunged the country into levels of debt that we could not have previously imagined; his efforts to nationalize health care have been met with fierce resistance nationwide; TARP bailouts and stimulus spending have shown little positive effect on the national economy; unemployment is unacceptably high and looks to remain that way for most of a decade; legacy entitlement programs have ballooned to unsustainable levels, and there is a seething anger in the populace. ∴ That's why Barack Obama is such a good thing for America.

Obama is the symbol of a creeping liberalism that has infected our society like a cancer for the last 100 years. Just as Hitler is the face of fascism, Obama will go down in history as the face of unchecked liberalism. The cancer metastasized to the point where it could no longer be ignored.

Average Americans who have quietly gone about their lives, earning a paycheck, contributing to their favorite charities, going to high school football games on Friday night, spending their weekends at the beach or on hunting trips - they've gotten off the fence. They've woken up. There is a level of political activism in this country that we haven't seen since the American Revolution, and Barack Obama has been the catalyst that has sparked a restructuring of the American political and social consciousness.

Think of the crap we've slowly learned to tolerate over the past 50 years as liberalism sought to re-structure the America that was the symbol of freedom and liberty to all the people of the world. Immigration laws were ignored on the basis of compassion. Welfare policies encouraged irresponsibility, the fracturing of families, and a cycle of generations of dependency. Debt was regarded as a tonic to lubricate the economy. Our children left school having been taught that they are exceptional and special, while great numbers of them cannot perform basic functions of mathematics and literacy. Legislators decided that people could not be trusted to defend their own homes, and stripped citizens of their rights to own firearms. Productive members of society have been penalized with a heavy burden of taxes in order to support legions of do-nothings who loll around, reveling in their addictions, obesity, indolence, ignorance and "disabilities." Criminals have been arrested and re-arrested, coddled and set free to pillage the citizenry yet again. Lawyers routinely extort fortunes from doctors, contractors and business people with dubious torts.

We slowly learned to tolerate these outrages, shaking our heads in disbelief, and we went on with our lives.

But Barack Obama has ripped the lid off a seething cauldron of dissatisfaction and unrest.

In the time of Barack Obama, Black Panther members stand outside polling places in black commando uniforms, slapping truncheons into their palms. ACORN - a taxpayer-supported organization - is given a role in taking the census, even after its members were caught on tape offering advice to set up child prostitution rings. A former Communist is given a paid government position in the White House as an advisor to the president. Auto companies are taken over by the government, and the auto workers' union - whose contracts are completely insupportable in any economic sense - is rewarded with a stake in the company. Government bails out Wall Street investment bankers and insurance companies, who pay their executives outrageous bonuses as thanks for the public support. Terrorists are read their Miranda rights and given free lawyers. And, despite overwhelming public disapproval, Barack Obama has pushed forward with a health care plan that would re-structure one-sixth of the American economy.

I don't know about you, but the other day I was at the courthouse doing some business, and I stepped into the court clerk's office and changed my voter affiliation from "Independent" to "Republican." I am under no illusion that the Republican party is perfect, but at least they're starting to awaken to the fact that we cannot sustain massive levels of debt; we cannot afford to hand out billions of dollars in corporate subsidies; we have to somehow trim our massive entitlement programs; we can no longer be the world's policeman and dole out billions in aid to countries whose citizens seek to harm us.

Literally millions of Americans have had enough. They're organizing, they're studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, they're reading history and case law, they're showing up at rallies and meetings, and a slew of conservative candidates are throwing their hats into the ring. Is there a revolution brewing? Yes, in the sense that there is a keen awareness that our priorities and sensibilities must be radically re-structured. Will it be a violent revolution? No. It will be done through the interpretation of the original document that has guided us for 220 years - the Constitution. Just as the pendulum swung to embrace political correctness and liberalism, there will be a backlash, a complete repudiation of a hundred years of nonsense. A hundred years from now, history will perceive the year 2010 as the time when America got back on the right track. And for that, we can thank Barack Hussein Obama. Read More......

Roots of Liberalism

FORBES.COM by Peter Robinson - The movement may be 100 years old, but conservative ideas are even more deeply rooted in America's history. ∴ A near quadrupling of the federal deficit in 2009 alone. The nationalization of the Detroit automakers. The reduction of the biggest banks in the country to mere factotums. Plans to force legislation through Congress this very summer that would amount to a government takeover of health care, which makes up one-seventh of the entire economy. ∴ May I ask a question? Where does President Barack Obama's agenda come from? Read Robinson's answer at Forbes... Read More......

United In Hate, Parts 1 & 2

Jamie Glazof, Front Page contributor and author of United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror, discusses leftist psychology and how it aligns with brutal totalitarian regimes at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, May 14, 2009, in Los Angeles, California.

United in Hate, Part 1 (20:50)


United in Hate, Part 2 (20:10)

Hat tip: Maggie's Farm Read More......

Email: Interesting Quote

Norman Matton Thomas (November 20, 1884 - December 19, 1968) was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1911. As a candidate for President of the U. S. , Norman Thomas said, in a 1944 epoch speech: "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of "liberalism", they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." He went on to say: "I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform."

(H/t: Lou Copes) Read More......

Conservative Debate Handbook (Introduction)

EYE OF THE GODS - Posting excerpts from the introduction to the "Conservative Debate Handbook" in response to the previous post regarding the 'annonomous donor
Synopsis: The natural advantage of Conservatism in defense of what has been found valid in past experience versus wishful/windborne values of modern "Liberalism"; questions which must be answered to put any proposed change into context of reality; unproven assumptions that underlie all Collectivist movements.

Purpose: Learn how to confront and dismantle the intellectual pretensions of any Collectivist "Liberal," anywhere, any time.

Natural Advantages of the Conservative Position

• Logical Position (The general course of any human social development will reflect the nature of those developing it.)
  
• FORCES OF REALITY
  • Conservatives are those who by instinct appreciate what is valuable in the historic struggle and achievements of their society.
    
  • We are thus the heirs to a vast amount of mental effort, soul searching, [as witness to] trial and error over many generations, by those intent to find the best course, based upon all past experience, on which to navigate the future.
    
  • We are the heirs to the layers of foundations and the builders of civilizations.
    
  • Grounded on past experience

Modern “Liberal” Position – No Natural Advantages

• Wishful Thinking/airborne
  • Attacker
    
  • Despoiler
• Defines Issues/confuses issues
  
• Sets parameters of debate
  
• In the throes of an airborne philosophy, the "Liberal" shows concern, but never respect, for the objects of his attention. It is easy to patronize; respect requires understanding.

Example subject: Property rights/ Civil rights in America

Conservative: People own property, not property people. Property rights are the rights to the fruit of your and your forebears' labor. They are your most important rights, for they enable you to have the privacy and independence to exercise all other rights.

Modern Liberal: The "windborne" may try to confuse an issue by suggesting that "human rights" are more important than "property rights," or that "States Rights" in America must give way to new Federal pronouncements of "Civil Rights." But all they can establish is their own confusion.

FYI: The author(s) offer valuable information. See the Conservative Debate Handbook (Introduction) here, which includes links to additional posts, studies, letters, etc. Read More......

Punitive Liberalism

What Reagan vanquished.
REPOSTED, 2006, 2009
(Written shortly after the June 5, 2004 death of President Ronald Reagan)
The Weekly Standard, June 28, 2004 - James Piereson wrote,

WE HAVE HEARD a great deal in recent days about how Ronald Reagan brought a spirit of optimism to Washington after his election in 1980 and thereby renewed the nation's belief in itself after a period of self-doubt, pessimism, and "malaise." President Reagan said America's best days were still ahead, and he thus renewed our belief in progress and a better future for generations yet unborn. In this sense, he did for the nation in the 1980s what had been done in the 1930s by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

This narrative about Ronald Reagan is completely accurate, so far as it goes. The problem is that it does not go far enough. Why had Americans become so pessimistic about their country during the 1970s? Why had they been overcome by a sense of "malaise," as Jimmy Carter described it? There was, of course, the long ordeal of Vietnam, followed by Watergate, and then a sluggish economy--reasons enough for Americans to feel some sense of doubt and disappointment. But why was Ronald Reagan able to reverse these doubts when Jimmy Carter could not?

The answer to these questions is that while Americans in general were not down on their country, Jimmy Carter, along with the leaders of the Democratic party and its main constituent groups, certainly was. President Carter could not overcome the "malaise" of the 1970s because he and his fellow Democrats had played a large role in fostering it.

From the time of John Kennedy's assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter's election in 1976, the Democratic party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism. [Emphasis added]

Given this bill of indictment, the Punitive Liberals held that Americans had no right at all to feel pride in their country's history or optimism about its future. Those who expressed such pride were written off as ignorant patriots who could not face up to the sins of the past; and those who looked ahead to a brighter future were dismissed as naive "Pollyannas" who did not understand that the brief American century was now over. The Punitive Liberals felt that the purpose of national policy was to punish the nation for its crimes rather than to build a stronger America and a brighter future for all.

Here the Punitive Liberals parted company from earlier liberal reformers such as FDR, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, who viewed reform as a means of bringing the promise of American life within reach of more of our people. The earlier reformers believed deeply that the American experiment in self-government was inherently good, and that the task of policy was to improve it. But in the troubled years following Kennedy's death, the reform tradition took on a furrowed brow and a punitive visage.

In many ways, Jimmy Carter, and his leading appointees, were the perfect exemplars of Punitive Liberalism. Given their sour outlook, it is no wonder that their leadership generated a sense of "malaise" among the American people.

During the 1970s an impressive network of interest groups was developed to promote and take advantage of this sense of historical guilt. These included the various feminist and civil rights groups who pressed for affirmative action, quotas, and other policies to compensate women and minorities for past mistreatment; the welfare rights organizations who claimed that welfare and various poverty programs were entitlements or, even better, reparations that were owed to the poor as compensation for similar mistreatment; the environmental groups who pressed for ever more stringent regulations on business; and the various human rights and disarmament groups who pressed the government to punish or disassociate the United States from allies who were said to violate human rights. These groups took up influential roles in the Democratic party and in the Congress, and ensconced themselves in university departments from which outposts they promoted and elaborated upon the finer points of Punitive Liberalism.

The punitive aspects of this doctrine were made especially plain in debates over the liberals' favored policies. If one asked whether it was really fair to impose employment quotas for women and minorities, one often heard the answer, "White men imposed quotas on us, and now we're going to do the same to them!" Was busing of school children really an effective means of improving educational opportunities for blacks? A parallel answer was often given: "Whites bused blacks to enforce segregation, and now they deserve to get a taste of their own medicine!" Do we really strengthen our own security by undercutting allied governments in the name of human rights, particularly when they are replaced by openly hostile regimes (as in Iran and Nicaragua)? "This"--the answer was--"is the price we have to pay for coddling dictators." And so it went. Whenever the arguments were pressed, one discovered a punitive motive behind most of their policies.

Naturally, it was somewhat difficult to advance the tenets of Punitive Liberalism in the public arena, and especially tricky to do so in electoral contests. The broader public, after all, is unlikely to take kindly to the idea that it needs to be punished for the sins of past generations. For this reason, Vice President Mondale, an experienced politician, felt that Jimmy Carter had made a serious mistake in calling the American people to task for their "malaise," since it is counter-productive for an elected politician to attack the voters. The Punitive Liberals thus chose instead to advance their causes in the regulatory bodies and in the federal courts--the latter being the perfect arena for leveling blame and exacting punishment. And they did so with considerable success.

Their success, however, was the undoing of the nation. The Punitive Liberals, because they sought to cultivate guilt in order to leverage policy, proved incapable of adopting practical measures to strengthen the economy or to advance American power in the world. Such goals, in any case, would have been contradictory to their deeper longings, which were to dispel American pride, and to shrink American ambitions at home and abroad. The Cold War, in particular, seemed to them a pointless struggle between two flawed empires, "two scorpions in a bottle." While they did not wish to see the Communists win, neither were they prepared to swallow the triumphalism that would accompany a victory by the West. A strong economy, meanwhile, would disproportionately reward the rich and the self-contented middle classes--the very groups that the Punitive Liberals wished to chastise.

And thus it was perhaps inevitable that the policies of the Punitive Liberals would give us the worst of all worlds--weakness and embarrassment abroad, inflation and unemployment at home, and a public that was beginning to lose hope in its future. By 1980, the nation had seen the results of its experiment with Punitive Liberalism, and was beginning to look for an alternative vision.

Fortunately for all of us, Ronald Reagan stepped into the void and supplied that vision. He understood, more than any other candidate of the time, that the pervasive negativism of the Democratic party was largely responsible for our national difficulties. And thus his pragmatic proposals for tax cuts, deregulation, and defense spending were accompanied with inspiring rhetoric about national pride and a hopeful future.

He stated the matter with abundant clarity in his acceptance speech before the Republican Convention in July 1980:

The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of the Democratic Party leadership--in the White House and in Congress--for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us. They tell us that they have done the most that humanly could be done. They say that the United States has had its day in the sun; that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems; that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities.

"My fellow citizens," he continued, "I utterly reject that view. The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves."

Ronald Reagan during the campaign and then in office challenged the leaders who had encouraged the spirit of malaise and doubt. He exposed, confronted, and eventually defeated the bizarre and self-flagellating doctrine of Punitive Liberalism. For this, as for so many other things, he earned the eternal gratitude of the American people.

James Piereson is executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation.

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The Man on Whom Everything was Lost

Photo: "Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the early 1960's" (wikipedia)

Commentary Magazine, February 2008, by Joseph Epstein

ABSTRACT - Others have offered a kinder, gentler view of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. than the one provided by Edmund Wilson in his diaries. “He was a great historian and an incomparable witness,” said Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, in announcing the library’s acquisition of Schlesinger’s voluminous personal papers this past November. LeClerc went on to compare Schlesinger, who died a year ago at the age of eighty-nine, with Voltaire—to the latter’s detriment. Voltaire, after all, may have been “the historian of France, but he didn’t get in the inner circle the way Schlesinger did.” The recent publication of Schlesinger’s diaries* is a useful reality check on such claims. The book also provides an account of a career in American liberalism that is, in microcosm, a partial account of the career of the liberal temperament itself over the past half-century. [Full article requires subscription]

Note: A December 2002 Weekly Standard reprint of , Race and Republicans: From William Lloyd Garrison to Trent Lott by Alvin S. Felzenberg (June 7, 1999), attributes the loss of the Republican Party's illustrious history in civil rights achievement in part to " ...these left-leaning historians --Henry Steele Commanager, Allen Nevins, Claude G. Bowers, and the Arthur Schlesingers."

See Michael Zak's Grand Old Partisan Blog for January 31, 2008 for a shining example of one of the GOP's great achievements. Mr. Zak contends that it is the responsibility of Republicans to recapture the history of their party. Read More......