Posted on 07/14/2015 4:12:57 PM PDT by NRx
At the risk of sounding like Paul Krugman — who returns to a handful of cherished topics over and over again in his New York Times column — I want to revisit one of my hobby horses, which I most recently raised in my discussion of Hobby Lobby.
My own cherished topic is this: Liberalism's decline from a political philosophy of pluralism into a rigidly intolerant dogma.
The decline is especially pronounced on a range of issues wrapped up with religion and sex. For a time, electoral self-interest kept these intolerant tendencies in check, since the strongly liberal position on social issues was clearly a minority view. But the cultural shift during the Obama years that has led a majority of Americans to support gay marriage seems to have opened the floodgates to an ugly triumphalism on the left.
The result is a dogmatic form of liberalism that threatens to poison American civic life for the foreseeable future. Conservative Reihan Salam describes it, only somewhat hyperbolically, as a form of "weaponized secularism."
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...
“Became”? When was it anything but?
All this is planting the seeds for a future angry blowback.
I agree. Liberalism is unlivable and I will not live under it.
Today’s “liberalism” is nothing but “communism” in its earliest form. PERIOD!
My tagline.
Libtards have always been hypocrites who claimed only to care about peace,love, compassion, empathy, and understanding, but were always so vicious, so hostile, so narrow-minded, so relentlessly destructive, so unforgiving, so filled with hostility and raging hatred.
Nothing is more intolerant than a tolerant liberal.
It has been such my entire life.
I guess it was ok when the 3 alphabet networks were the only place the public got their news.
At its deepest level, libertarianism is "a mentality, a mood, a presumption… a prejudice" in favor of the liberation of the autonomous individual from all constraints originating from received habits, traditions, authorities, or institutions. Libertarianism in this sense fuels the American right's anti-government furies, but it also animates the left's push for same-sex marriage — and has prepared the way for its stunningly rapid acceptance — in countries throughout the West.
What he says is worth thinking over, but I don't think he's right.
Liberalism today is more about egalitarianism and group identity and self-assertiveness than about individual fulfillment or some idea of personal liberty.
Group demands get expressed in an individualistic political and cultural climate as a matter of human rights and dignity, but you can't ignore the fundamental role of various pressure groups.
Anyway, more of the article:
What makes libertarianism a dogma is the inability or unwillingness of those who espouse it to accept that some people might choose, for morally legitimate reasons, to dissent from it. On a range of issues, liberals seem not only increasingly incapable of comprehending how or why someone would affirm a more traditional vision of the human good, but inclined to relegate dissenters to the category of moral monsters who deserve to be excommunicated from civilized life — and sometimes coerced into compliance by the government.
The latter tendency shows how, paradoxically, the rise of libertarian dogma can have the practical effect of increasing government power and expanding its scope. This happens when individuals look to the government to facilitate their own liberation from constraints imposed by private groups, organizations, and institutions within civil society. In such cases, the government seeks to bring those groups, organizations, and institutions into conformity with uniform standards that ensure the unobstructed personal liberation of all — even if doing so requires that these private entities are forced to violate their distinctive visions of the good.
The Left lost the rational argument, but was unwilling to accept the will of the people. We are now at the stage that will soon become the Reign of Terror that became the French Revolution. The streets will run with blood.
Which shows that once again the statist, left-wing liberals are trying to co-opt another set of ideas and apply it to their goals. Libertarian teachings are opposed to the kind of ideas liberals are now promoting. The article is trying to blame libertarian thinking, of all things, for the intolerant, statist ideas of the left.
Libertarians do believe in letting individuals live their lives without the interference of the state, something that is the exact reverse of the current dogmatic liberalism.
Pretty soon liberals will be saying their ideas are based on conservative principles, the same way they claimed Obamacare was based on ideas from the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney.
Exactly right. Liberalism and libertarianism are polar opposites, the former collective, the later anti-collective. Leftists and RINOs lump them together because they are afraid of conservatives and libertarians joining forces. So this lie drives the conservatives away from the libertarians.
The Libs simply are acting like Muslims and communists. When they are in the minority and don’t have power, they lie and talk about tolerance. When they gain power, they then show their intolerance for any dissent. It is a playbook tactic that has been used by out-of-power groups in many situations.
The Libs HATE Christian values which declare their self-centered attitudes and action to be sin, for which they will be held accountable by God. They can’t afford to declare their total opposition to Christianity when they don’t have complete power, but when they feel secure in their power, then their intolerance shows. Look at where Libs are in charge: colleges are run by PC profs and administrators who disdain Christianity.
Damon Linker talks about libertarianism, but it is not what the Left is about. The left wants personal liberty for themselves to sin, but they don’t believe in personal liberty for people who don’t think the same as themselves. The Lib leaders want to be their own god, create their own utopia and crush anyone who would stand in the way of their desires. They’re just arrogant totalitarian statists, exemplified by Obama and Hillary.
FOX News sent some reporters to San Francisco - it's was stunning. The people FOX attempted to interview were the most closed minded people I've seen in decades. They were like old time white Southerners in the Jim Crow South... not one stray idea could move past the steel gates of their little minds.
Even O'Reilly was stunned.
"Liberals' have totally lost it.
I agree with you, there is nothing individualistic about modern liberalism. It’s pure groupthink, it’s anti-individual and very conformist. Individuality only matters in the context of some oppressed group, to which the individual can claim membership as a function of collectivism, meaning, collective oppression.
There’s thus no “paradox” about the expansion of government and gov’t influence given the rise of this mindset. The liberal mindset wants the government to use its power to enforce and expand a non-traditional so-called morality; the morality of amorality, the idea that no set of morals is superior to any other set of morals. All are equal. The liberal demands that government enforce this form of equality, which results in the gov’t acquiring more and more power, which in most cases it is only too happy to do. .
“The left wants personal liberty for themselves to sin,”
And they want you to celebrate it. Their policies are already killing Christians in the Middle East and I have no doubt that they celebrate these deaths privately as they precipitate them here.
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