Leftists, Progressives, Liberals

[Kathianne]

I've said a version of the same for years, but never this concisely:

https://hotair.com/dennis-prager/2024/02/14/the-left-and-chaos-n3782909


The Left and ChaosDENNIS PRAGER 12:01 AM | February 14, 2024



AP Photo/Charles Krupa
It is impossible to understand what is happening to America -- and to the rest of the West -- without understanding the most dynamic ideology of the last hundred years: leftism.


We need to begin with the understanding that leftism (or "progressivism") and liberalism are not only not the same ideologies, they are in fact opposed to each other on virtually every major issue.


Leftism and liberalism have only two things in common:


One is belief in big government, which, given that individual and societal liberty decline as the state grows, is a significant similarity.


The other Left-liberal commonality is antipathy to the Right. This is even more important than commitment to big government because it explains why liberals vote for the Left despite the fact that liberals differ with far more left-wing positions than with conservative positions.


Unlike the Left, most liberals love their country. Unlike the Left, most liberals do not believe that there are more than two sexes/genders; that prepubescent boys and girls who claim they are members of the other sex should be given hormone blockers; that girls under 21 should be allowed to have their breasts surgically removed; or that men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women's sports. So, too, liberals do not believe that capitalism is evil, that America is systemically racist, that all whites are racist, that Israel is the villain in the Middle East and Zionism is racist.


So, then, given that those leftist positions are as destructive as they are absurd, how are we to explain leftism?


This question has preoccupied me all my adult life. It is why I was one of fewer than 10 graduate students in all of Columbia University to major in what was called "Communist Affairs." (I was a fellow at the Russian Institute at Columbia's School of International Affairs.) In other words, I have studied the Left all my life.


Early on, I recognized that the Left opposes liberty -- the clearest example being that wherever the Left gains power, whether at a university or in society as a whole, it suppresses free speech -- and that it destroys everything it touches. But while I (and many others) have always understood that the Left (again, not liberalism) has always, everywhere, been a force for evil, I needed to understand why.


How can people believe that men give birth; that a country to which more than 4 million black people have emigrated and which twice elected a black president is systemically racist; that the freest country in the Middle East, one in which millions of Arabs live as equal citizens, is the villain, while its barbaric enemies are worthy of support?


Here are some answers:


Throughout their history, Americans have had three great providers of meaning: family, religion and patriotism. Leftists lack the latter two (indeed, they seek to get rid of them), and increasing numbers of them lack the first. Since human beings cannot live without meaning -- it is as great a need as food, and even greater than sex -- they seek meaning elsewhere. So they create new meanings through creating secular religions: socialism, communism, feminism, environmentalism, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), "anti-racism," anti-Zionism, LGBTQIA+ pride, and trans activism, among others.


All these are united by one overarching aim: destroying the institutions of Western civilization (e.g., religion, art, music, the nuclear family, moral norms, schools and universities, free speech, capitalism, even medicine).


Those of us who appreciate Western civilization and wish to preserve it (while, of course, correcting its flaws) cannot understand why anyone would want to destroy it. That is a major reason it is so difficult for non-leftists to understand the Left.


After decades of mulling this over, I think I have discovered one answer that is not obvious even to all leftists.


What opened my eyes are the Left's beliefs that men can become women and women can become men; men give birth; there are more than two genders/sexes; men who say they are women should be placed in women's prisons, women's colleges and women's shelters; men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women's sports; and children should be taken to drag queen shows.


All these positions represent ... chaos.


The Left's trans-positions are the most obvious areas of Left-induced chaos, but there are many others. These include the Left's contempt for the ideal of the nuclear family (i.e., a married mother and father and children); its support for defunding police; its raising the dollar value of stolen goods that qualifies as a felony, which can only incentivize theft; and its support for progressive district attorneys.


Fighting crime represents order; crime represents chaos.


And why does leftism seek chaos? Because the Left hates the opposite of chaos: order. And order ultimately represents a religious view of life. Order represents divine order. The proof is that no religious people say, "Men give birth." Not all secular people believe men give birth, there are more than two sexes, men can compete in women's sports, children should be exposed to drag queen shows, or children should be given hormone blockers if they claim to be a member of the other sex. But only secular people believe those things. Virtually no one who believes in the Bible and the God of the Bible believes them. We believe in a God-created social order.


Chaos is the normal state of the world. The second verse of the Bible states that the world was in a chaotic state. God then made order. Which is why the Left is undoing it.

[Gunny]

Agree. Can't add much to that without restating it :)

[Kathianne]

Very related:

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/02/14/disney-decided-to-enter-political-fray-after-january-6th-n3782885


Disney Decided to Enter Political Fray After January 6thDAVID STROM 8:00 AM | February 14, 2024



AP Photo/Ricardo Arduengo
Christopher Rufo has unearthed an explosive video in which Bob Iger announced to employees that the company would start taking political stands in response, presumably, to the danger he saw from the MAGA movement.


The all-hands meeting took place in the days after January 6th, and Iger expressed his sorrow that Disney hadn't been political enough in prior years.




There are several striking things about this video, and none of them really have to do with MAGA or January 6th, which I believe were excuses and not causes of Disney's rush into the political fray.


Iger puts his finger on the real issue when he starts talking about Disney's commitment to DEI and his assertion that those issues aren't actually debatable or political at all. They are manifestly good in themselves.


In other words, the issue is primarily the culture war. Disney committed itself to conducting the culture war in its content, and Iger was signaling in this all-hands meeting that it was now going to engage in it in public.


Want proof of that? Look at what Disney did: dive head first into the culture wars, and its put its considerable resources into fighting Ron DeSantis and against sanity itself.


DEI became the guide star for Disney, both in its content and in its political battles. The end of the Trump era in the January 6th debacle simply ignited a bonfire for which the kindling had already been accumulating.




Disney's embrace of Alphabet Ideology and Critical Race Theory in the years prior to 2021 were the real motivating factors, not some political awakening. Disney isn't out there campaigning for Democrats; it's pushing the radicalism that the entire cultural elite has embraced.




It is a mistake to look at what Iger or others in the cultural elite are doing as being about which party is in power--obviously they support Democrats, but that isn't the point. They care about who is in power because they care about DEI and CRT first and foremost. It is not partisanship that is motivating them, but revolutionary ideology.


Now it may strike you as absurd to imagine that Bob Iger and Disney are revolutionaries--and certainly they are not political revolutionaries--but it is so obviously the case that they have bought into the cultural revolution and are committed to pushing it at great cost.


Since Disney dove headfirst into the cultural battlefield, the company has been burning brand value and billions of dollars of not just shareholder equity but actual cash in the bank in the service of this cause. If this were about the good of the company or even persuading average Americans, they would have reversed course by now. No rational person in charge of a major corporation would be willing to take so much damage in normal circumstances.




Disney is doing so. They have destroyed the most valuable movie franchises in history--Star Wars and Indiana Jones--in the name of DEI, and they have been destroying the Marvel franchise as well. Goodwill is being destroyed, and of course, Disney lost its special status in Florida because of its war on Ron DeSantis.


This isn't about January 6th, Democrats, MAGA, or anything else. It is using up the resources of a great American corporation in order to fight for a radical ideology most Americans despise because Disney's top management despises American culture.


Obviously, nobody would have predicted this in the 90s or 00's, when Disney was riding high and was seen as quintessentially American. But then again nobody would have predicted that the entire medical establishment of the United States and the West would come out in favor of sterilizing and mutilating kids.


The culture war is very real, and it is a fight to the finish. The cultural elite is on a mission to destroy America as we know it and replace it with a rainbow culture in which they rule supreme.


Ironically, the vanguard of the proletariat--the people at the top of such revolutions--rarely survive its implementation. Ask Robespierre.

[Kathianne]

Hot Air appears to have a message today, they are getting it across in awesome way:

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/02/14/why-she-walked-away-from-the-democrats-n3782905


She Walked Away From the DemocratsDAVID STROM 9:20 AM | February 14, 2024



AP Photo/Michael Wyke
It's hard to remember, if you are deeply immersed in tracking political, cultural, or social issues that most people don't have a clue about what is going on.


That may be infuriating, but it is actually a reflection of a good thing. People should be allowed to live their lives without having to keep track of everything going on in the world. Politics shouldn't impact your life too often except when big things are happening, and cultural trends should be a spectator sport, not life and death issues.


That's one of my arguments for limited government: the better the government, the less you have to care about what they do. "That government is best that governs least, because its people discipline themselves."


Unfortunately such luxuries are rarer and rarer in the modern world, where governments are huge, invasive, and influence every aspect of our lives.


I ran across a fascinating video yesterday that captured one young lady's political awakening, and it was based on her direct experience with how topsy-turvy the world has become and how invasive legal and cultural trends have become.




The Daily Wire is thrilled to have been mentioned--and good on them!--but the story here isn't that Matt Walsh helped convert a liberal into a full-fledged MAGA hat-wearing Republican, but that the Left did it by bullying this young lady into rebellion.


Her story, I suspect, is one of many that will be repeated in the coming years. Lifelong Democrats who are getting bullied by the cultural and political Left, and who are waking up to the fact that this is going on in many aspects of our lives.


We are seeing the Glenn Greenwalds, the Matt Taibbis, and the Bari Weiss' who are, if not moving Right, abandoning the Left and laying the groundwork for a new coalition to develop.


The America is not so bad, or even really pretty great coalition. People who in the past would likely disagree on the issues they considered most important to them, and who had little idea that they shared fundamental principles because they were so foundational that they never thought about them.


We argued about taxes, levels of welfare spending, foreign policy, or gay rights.


But we all shared a fundamental agreement about how American society and government should work. We didn't even have to think deeply about it.


Now we do, because we all have the same opponents: people who want to fundamentally change America, for the worse.


This is how coalitions are built, and once they are build a consensus develops on other issues about which we would fight vigorously not too long ago. It takes a while, but generally it happens. And where it doesn't we get cease-fires until the overriding issue is resolved.


I see this in who I follow--many people with whom I would have had fundamental disagreements just a few years ago I now consider allies, because the issues on which we disagree are now secondary. Still important, but secondary.


The old coalitions are fracturing, and for those of us who grew up in them it is very uncomfortable. I, for one, am an advocate of Pax Americana. I have my frustrations with NATO and other allies, and mixed feelings about Ukraine and regret about recent interventions in the Middle East. But generally speaking I am like that America is the most powerful nation in the world and think on balance we do more good than harm.


Lots of MAGA people are more isolationist than I. I think Trump was an exceptionally good foreign policy president (I was pleasantly surprised!), but I worry that too many MAGA folks are too isolationist. American prosperity is built on American power, which means being more active than a lot of people on that side of the issues want.


But we share the same political enemy: the radical Left and the administrative state. That issue binds the emerging coalition.


That coalition will include a huge working class component--people who feel abandoned for one reason or another by the Democrats in their embrace of the radical Left. It will include Gays Against Groomers. Some Bernie Sanders supporters. Who knows?


People like this young lady. I am proud to stand next to her in the fight to come.


We can unite against the Establishment because the Establishment has embraced the worst of the Left.

[Alice in Russia]

I've said a version of the same for years, but never this concisely:

https://hotair.com/dennis-prager/2024/02/14/the-left-and-chaos-n3782909
Since I live in the European system of political coordinates, what you call liberals, I would call Social Democrats. In Europe, liberals are called those who in America are called libertarians.
But the question is different: why do you think that the Social Democrats (Liberals) cannot support gender diversity?
And in general, gender issues in my opinion are not fundamental for distinguishing such ideologies as liberalism (libertarianism), social democracy (liberalism) and communism (leftism)

[Gunny]

Since I live in the European system of political coordinates, what you call liberals, I would call Social Democrats. In Europe, liberals are called those who in America are called libertarians.
But the question is different: why do you think that the Social Democrats (Liberals) cannot support gender diversity?
And in general, gender issues in my opinion are not fundamental for distinguishing such ideologies as liberalism (libertarianism), social democracy (liberalism) and communism (leftism)

I agree that gender issues are not fundamental to political ideology. The simplest explanation I can off is everyone here in the US is an oppositional label. If you embrace certain ideals, you are *this*. Rather than reject such ignorance, people themselves embrace those labels in order to belong. They prefer listening to an echo chamber to honest discussion. Rather than listening, they focus on hating the opposition, their key weapon being fear. It is the extremes of both left and right, while the majority sit silent between them.

[Kathianne]

Since I live in the European system of political coordinates, what you call liberals, I would call Social Democrats. In Europe, liberals are called those who in America are called libertarians.
But the question is different: why do you think that the Social Democrats (Liberals) cannot support gender diversity?
And in general, gender issues in my opinion are not fundamental for distinguishing such ideologies as liberalism (libertarianism), social democracy (liberalism) and communism (leftism)
While I'm sure there are some that have issues with 'gender diversity,' I don't think the majority do regarding adults. Where issues come up it has to do with grooming children; taking away parental rights-mostly giving those rights to government or agency of such; forcing some to act against religious beliefs-to grant extraordinary rights to the minority.