What's the Difference Between a Liberal and a Progressive? Hint: This One's Gonna Kill You! (if you don't watch out)

I was startled to find a quote from Mark Steyn that, in referring to the rape in Rockville on a Fox television program, "This is the depravity of the political class. They’re basically willing to offer up their own citizens, 14-year-old schoolgirls and sacrifice them on the altar of diversity and virtue signaling and the shameless political posturing.”

This remark echoed and reinforced a theme I have been exposing for some months now and has led me to a new conclusion about my the waxing trend toward Human Sacrifice in the world today.

To explain this conclusion I need to take a step back and explain from the beginning.

The left acts as though it believes that human nature is naturally good and left to their own devices, people will be happy and content in a “natural” state. They ascribe all that is painful and even evil in life to flaws in “society”, “organized religion”, “morality”, “the culture” or any other target that exerts control over human behavior. This blameless image of the individual seems soothing and comfortable but the result is, anything but comfort. It leads to the idea that “freeing” the human spirit from those controlling institutions and forces is the way to achieve peace, health, enlightenment and happiness. Wishing only to make life better and more equal for all, they set about dismantling or (at the least, arbitrarily refashioning) all the structures and values that have evolved to maintain health, peace and equilibrium. 

Welcome to what the inverted logic of the left calls progress; they want to tear away the culture and safeguards and begin to replace them with socialism that resembles nothing so much as the egalitarian propertyless primitive hunter/gatherer groups in pre-tribal cultures. They want equality without considering that the outcome of equality is to bring all economic development to a standstill and redistribute wealth so that industrious and clever people earn no more than what the most indolent and incapable receive. They call this Progressivism. 

This is what fuels the zeal of “Progressives”. They feel they know what is needed and are willing to force people to agree to their view of things- whether they like it or not. When reality becomes impossible to ignore and the progress leads to conflict, chaos and inequality (as it inevitably  does in the real world), it is either blamed on individuals who are not progressing (kuffirs, counter revolutionaries or enemies of the state as the case may be), or it is blamed on whatever “system” is still in place. Revolution, suppression and barbarity often ensue. Any idea that contradicts the romantic egalitarian principles is suppressed - made politically incorrect. All collectivist governments are leftist; and they are all to some degree quite literally, murderous, totalitarian and nihilistic.

The right, on the other hand, behaves as if they think that human nature, and indeed the larger natural world as a whole, is the source of chaos and evil as well as good and harmony. They acknowledge that society, religion and culture are all merely tools that have evolved to put the individual into a condition whereby he and the larger society can prosper and be safe. Different cultural systems may have more or less success in the attempt to control and channel whatever energy, chaos and evil exists into productive or, at least, harmless endeavors. 

These opposite views of human nature and the nature of the world are the invisible but omnipresent forces that pit left wing and right wing against each other. There has been, a sort of compromise that was arrived at in Western Civilization. I refer to the particularly American brand of what I think of as Classical Western Liberalism- not to be confused with what is called Liberalism today. The founders of the United States were all liberals of some stripe in that they all believed in something that they called Liberty. This idea of human dignity and responsibility through Liberty found its expression in our revolution against tyranny and the nation that emerged from that revolution. Today,The Constitution of the United States stands alone in the history of humanity as the one concise system that has given rise to the freest, most prosperous in all human history.

So what is the difference between the liberals who founded our country and those who have inherited the name? There is confusion around the inexact application of the table “liberal” because there is a fundamental lack of understanding of where liberalism ends and progressivism begins.

The key difference between liberalism and progressivism is that progressivism requires the acceptance even the advocacy of human sacrifice as part of the “progress" toward the  “new (and improved) world” they imagine that they have the wisdom and mandate to force us all to “evolve into. 

This sacrifice takes many forms. Among these are:

• The acceptance of terroristic atrocities as “the new normal”
• The refusal to take and steps to prevent rapes and murders by stopping illegal immigration (as in Rockville)
• The willful ignorance of the connection between Islamic scripture and modern Jihad.
• The abandonment of U.S. officials and employees to danger and death in order to insulate the higher officials - esp during political campaigns (eg Benghazi).
• The swallowing up of private relationships that are central to well-being and happiness by stifling bureaucracies (Obamacare)
• The insidious growth of a dual standard of justice in which progressive politicians and their administrative lackeys (eg, Lois Lerner)are less subject to media exposure, law enforcement investigation and prosecution when they harm and betray citizens.

The "New Man”, the Caliphate and the "perfected societies" of Mohammed, Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other promised utopias that were really dystopian houses of horror had that one thing in common with our American Progressive movement. Stretching back to Wilson (supporter of the KKK and popularizer of the concept of the “living constitution”), Sanger (Eugenesist) and Roosevelt (socialist nationalizer of private business) and led more recently by Obama (Open borders enabler and Islamist apologist) and Clinton (all of the above and “what difference does it make now anyway?”).

Their Ultimate Sacrifice, if we do not stop them is The Constitution and our Republic.

Here are my other two posts on this subject:

How my Little Girl Almost Became a Human Sacrifice

http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/2016/10/my-little-girl-almost-became-human_26.html

Human Sacrifice in the 21st Century- Surprise, it is Us!

http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/2016/10/human-sacrifice-in-21st-century.html

Shelby Steele on The Exhaustion of the Liberals

Shelby Steele’s wonderful article in the WSJ this past Monday is a masterwork. And yet I feel there is one thing I would presume to add to his insightful and honest analysis. That "shame of the past" needs to be looked at with that same honest insight. We all know that Mr Steele refers primarily to the two "grand sins" of American history, slavery and the taking of the continent from the indigenous peoples. Mr Steele seems content to let those pass into history as well they should. However, there needs to be a common understanding of them in order to keep those self styled "liberals" from wanting to replay them and spoil the future on their account. Those who have a compulsion to deny they are part of our shared history will always find a way to posture that feeling. In doing so they denigrate the rest of us.

Slavery was, indeed, an atrocity and should never be forgotten, although the bloodbath of The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation and the past century of (sometimes sincere, often courageous) civil rights activism should count for something. There is no way to repair such a horror but there has been a price paid. All the same, it is not possible to counter-balance the past horrors but it serves no useful purpose to only look backward and feel nothing but regret. By his example but not in any explicit way, Shelby Steele leads the way into a future in which we can acknowledge the sins of the past and still benefit from the great honor and advantage of citizenship in this great country.

The Indians are actually a different kind of question. As I have written in an older post,”

"When the white man came to “The New World” he was not, as some …would have it, invading a pair of continents that had been under the stewardship of a single people, living peacefully and in harmony with nature for thousands of years. He was stepping onto a perpetual battlefield where the inhabitants had arrived in successive waves of occupation, conquered and re-conquered each other, committed repeated savagery upon each other and had already permanently changed the character of the environment. Human sacrifice, slavery and constant low-intensity warfare (that often featured torture and rape) were universal across both North and South America before the Europeans arrived. The Europeans who trickled in for the first three hundred years and then poured in in immense numbers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to escape religious persecution, political domination and limited economic prospects in their home countries. They came here and founded the greatest experiment in liberty, prosperity and self-government ever seen on earth. Without their descendants and The United States of America, the national socialist and communist monsters of the twentieth century could not have been defeated and would have dominated the earth. You can, as I do, feel compassion and even nostalgia for the American Indians but you can only lament their replacement as the dominant culture in the Americas if you believe that life on earth would be better had they not been conquered.”

Did I say “conquer”? Yes, I know that the word “conquer” is out of fashion these days. It makes most people very uncomfortable because it is redolent of violence, greed, slavery and colonialism. In this post-colonial age. The West has a very guilty conscience about all of that and its not that we don’t deserve it. Conquest is a messy and spontaneous process and it gets exceedingly ugly at times. Conquest by force is bloody, and even conquest by cultural conversion can look very harsh. The fact remains, to paraphrase D.H. Lawrence, when cultures that are as different (from each other) as Western Civilization and the American Indians meet, one must prove fatal to the other.”

Mr Steele has done us all a great service in his article by not just eschewing the shaming and moral posturing but also pointing out the damage that the liberal establishment dwelling on the guilt to excess has done. Rather, he strikes an optimistic, even heroic note and calls upon us all to recognize American Exceptionalism and its benefits. He also reminds us that, in the end the guilt and shaming has only been used to consolidate and manipulate political power and that minorities are much better served by allowing them achieve and strive without the enervating, will-sapping, family-destroying liberal creations of welfare, affirmative action and low expectations. As Steele puts it, liberalism has been,  “…about white esteem rather than minority accomplishment…,”.

No nation has ever been perfect but The United States was born reaching for perfection and has striven always, as it is written in the Preamble to the Constitution, for “ a more perfect union”. To keep striving, it is necessary to confront and understand that both of those “sins” are history and belong to history. The fact that America is the finest, fairest and most productive nation yet inhabited by humans on this planet must be kept in the present and future. Furthermore, unless the schools begin teaching history and civics free from the disingenuous harping on imperfection, the left will always be able to distract us all from the greatness of our nation and drag our young people out of their rightful future and into the darkness of the past.