OT Political Thread Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged Edition [WeirdDave]

I've been working with a multi-week theme for a while now, call it my "unified theory of political thought". Part 1 was the Freemen vs Serfs thread from July 19th. Part 2 was Emotions in Motion, posted July 26th. Part 3 is based upon Evan Sayet's "Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals "Think"."

I don't know how many of you have seen Evan Sayet's brilliant speech for Heritage. If you haven't, here's the video:

Now that clip is 47 minutes long, and I understand if you don't have the time to watch it. You should make the time. Not only is Evan brilliant, he's funny. It's one of those speeches that should be periodically re-watched, much like Reagan's "A Time For Choosing".

Evan's central thesis is that the driving force behind today's Progressives (he calls them Modern Liberals) is that Utopia is obtainable here on Earth.

What I discovered is that the Modern Liberal looks back on 50,000 years, 100,000 years of human civilization, and knows only one thing for sure: that none of the ideas that mankind has come up with--none of the religions, none of the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government--have succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime, and injustice. So they're convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found--can only be found--in the attempt to be right. If nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn't disagree, surely we wouldn't fight. If we didn't fight, of course we wouldn't go to war. Without war, there would be no poverty; without poverty, there would be no crime; without crime, there would be no injustice. It's a utopian vision, and all that's required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality, and decency--all the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right by trying to be right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right and moving toward it.

This is spot on, and utterly stupid. There's an old saying "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good", and the quest for Utopia doesn't just pit the good against the perfect, it straight up bludgeons the good to death because it isn't perfect. Think about this in the context of, oh, say, education reform using vouchers. Imagine the conversation, I'm sure you've had this one with Leftist friends (all numbers and percentages are made up, just to illustrate the point).

Conservative: "Our schools are failing! 50% of high school graduates can't read at an 8th grade level! We need to institute a voucher system, studies show that under such a system only 30% of high school graduates fail to achieve an 8th grade reading level".

Progressive: "Oh? And what about that 30%? Why are you condemning them to a substandard education? Hey, look everybody, this evil conservative thinks 30% of high schoolers should be condemned to substandard educations!"

Now tell me you haven't had that conversation. Go on, tell me. If you discuss politics at all with Progressives, I don't believe you.

All of that is 101 level stuff. It's true, no doubt, but it's nothing new. Humans have been looking for Utopia as long as there have been humans. As long as the people looking are flawed humans, Utopia remains an unobtainable goal.

But here's where Evan makes a quantum leap in understanding the Progressive mind. He extrapolates from the futile search for Utopia to it's real life effect:

What happens is, they are indoctrinated into what I call a "cult of indiscriminateness." The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, starting with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry; that no matter how sincerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your upbringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfather's birth; that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. It is nothing other than the reflection of your bigotries, and the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought.

There's a brilliant book out there called The Closing of the American Mind by Professor Allan Bloom. Professor Bloom was trying to figure out in the 1980s why his students were suddenly so stupid, and what he came to was the realization, the recognition, that they'd been raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I paraphrase this in my own works: "In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate."

And isn't that the heart of it? I think all of us would agree "discrimination is bad", but we would qualify it to mean discrimination against people based upon surface appearance. Progressives don't do that. They reject any kind of discrimination because it's discriminatory, damn the facts. How else to explain their full barrel support for Hamas vs Israel? Israel embodies all of the values the Left claims to cherish, and Hamas trashes them. Why support Hamas? Why, because to do otherwise would be to discriminate, what are you, a racist?

There's more, but I've covered the basic points. I strongly urge you to watch the whole speech, or, if, like me, you prefer to read a transcript click here.

Next week (or the week after, I started a post that I quite like for today that I just didn't have the time to finish, I might do that next week) I'll try to tie it all together. The last piece of my unified theory of politics is r/K. Dunno what that means? Stay tuned, same bat channel, same bat time.

posted by Open Blogger at 09:15 AM

| Access Comments