Posted on 06/11/2021 9:50:23 AM PDT by PoliticallyShort
Many Americans—focused on their businesses, careers, home, and family—prefer to ignore the political battles and attendant controversy dividing our country. But neutrality is no longer an option.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about Americans’ love of being left alone. He called it “individualism,” and he fretted that one of the risks to our experiment in self-government was the tendency to retreat from questions concerning the public—political questions—in favor of enjoying our private lives. The risk, he recognized, was that retreating would enable subversion of the whole polity by people manipulating it for their own gain.
Sound familiar?
Our society has morphed away from anything recognizable even ten years ago. For many, politics was always something away from home, away from daily life. It was somewhere else—often relevant mostly to small things like marginal differences in a tax bill. Not anymore. A corrosive trend has developed: as some become increasingly political and demanding, the cost for others of expressing an opinion—or even ignoring the wrong activist demand—has grown intolerably high. This distorts the public debate, giving the illusion that a vocal group of ideologues is representative of the mainstream, because the mainstream has been intimidated into silence. And as more mainstream Americans find themselves in a country they don’t recognize, they are realizing that remaining apolitical was a luxury of another time.
Political fanatics take advantage of normal people who try to play it down the middle. This holds true in ordinary businesses in Middle America, in elite liberal arts colleges, and in the New York Times newsroom. Many people would rather go about their work and ignore the political battles that increasingly divide our country. But the left will not leave you this option.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanmind.org ...
The frightening thing to me is how these crazy leftist ideas and demands seem to spread like wildfire before they are even debated: open borders, defund the police, CRT, LGBTQ indoctrination, open hatred of white people, the 1619 Project, and on and on. It’s like some invisible authority is instantly enforcing allegiance and obedience to all of these extreme ideas and demands: or else.
We misuse the labels left and right. In what way are statists on the left and populists on the right?
The risk, he recognized, was that retreating would enable subversion of the whole polity by people manipulating it for their own gain.
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As a result we have lost our Republic.
They do seem pretty organized.
I think China has a lot of experience in these areas.
Trump had ‘em on the ropes.
Just sayin...
bmp
How can you not know by now that the FR search feature is faulty? I can be looking at the page, enter a word from a title I see, and get “no results”.
I see the problem.
Try pasting the whole title into the box and searching "titles".
Works like a champ.
Thanks for the tip.
I will try to do it that way in the future.
Appreciate it!
While I totally agree with the writings suggestions for repelling leftists the writing leaves out half the equation.
What is suggested here will delay and impede the evil of the left but it will NOT stop them. Given this strategy the left will still ultimately destroy our society and way of life it will just take them a little longer.
It’s like some invisible authority is instantly enforcing allegiance and obedience to all of these extreme ideas and demands: or else.
Yes, it is. Then good people have to spend 40 to 60 years cleaning up the mess.
The search will work with a single word (like “interested” in the case of this article) but you have to make sure you select ‘titles’ from the pulldown menu like HG said. Otherwise it defaults to a ‘keyword’ search which often doesn’t work because most articles either don’t have any keywords assigned to them or, if they do, the keywords aren’t words in the title.
A good example is the earlier posting of this thread’s article which has “communism” and “totalitarianism” entered as keywords. If you inadvertently did a keyword search and didn’t use either of those words, your search would come up empty. I’m guessing that’s what has happened to you.
I will add that this kind of search mistake could be probably be avoided if the FR software made ‘titles’ the default setting instead of ‘keywords.’
Before I retired I was in database management, so I know to query on the “titles” if I’m sure a word is in a title. And I assume case sensitive just in case. (I almost never query on keywords.) Anyhow ... sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. :(
And whatever is going on, nobody will die, right? ;)
Hm, well, never mind then:)
Must be something else going on with the search function. It works pretty well for me at least with newer articles, but I know a lot of people have trouble with it.
Bkmk
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