Posted on 06/30/2017 11:33:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
Years ago Marxist-socialist leftists, embarrassed at being Marxist-socialist leftists, made up a shiny new name for themselves, “progressives.” It’s a word that sounds like a garden of forward-thinking delights, but is simply code for the failed, human-spirit-destroying government-command-and control that birthed all the evil “isms” of the past. That’s why every time I hear a conservative commentator in print, radio, or on TV call lefty-socialists “progressives” my 200 billion brain cells swoon.
The Fourth of July brings to mind how far alleged progressivism deviates from this nation’s founding freedoms. The government command-and-control against which the American revolutionaries fought was King George III and British rule that denied the colonists’ basic human rights and the freedom to govern themselves. The King’s officials and soldiers bullied the colonists and tried to break their independent spirit with oppressive laws. The Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights gave citizens the electoral power to choose their own leaders, make their own laws, and the right to freely speak their minds without reprisal from the powerful.
But today, “progressives” are trying to destroy our God-given Constitutional rights by force and intimidation, the traditional tactics of despotism. Wearing black masks, they smash cars and stores, rioting at college campuses and violating the law and the First Amendment to shut down speakers they don’t like. Prominent progressive voices in the media, celebrities, even some in Congress actually call for physically harming conservatives. Some actually gloated when Rep. Steve Scalise and other Republicans were attacked at a baseball practice by a leftist wacko whose heroine is leftist wacko Rachel Maddow.
Once content with telling us what light bulbs we could buy and how much soda we could drink, now progressives mimic ISIS terrorists by holding up a bloody fake beheaded Trump, or not too subtly suggest presidential assassination in a public play partly funded by taxpayers. Celebrities adored by millions of impressionable fans say they want to blow up the White House or ruminate about actors assassinating presidents.
These are the behaviors of tyrannical anarchists who are the very opposite of progressive which Webster defines as “continuous improvement; the development of an individual or group in a direction considered more beneficial than and superior to the previous level.” There’s nothing beneficial for us as citizens or our nation about lawlessness, property and First Amendment destruction, deadly threats, and calls for personal attacks and assassination. Yet as long as we let them get away with calling themselves progressive, we allow them to claim moral and intellectual superiority over the rest of us.
It’s an insult to all Americans when so-called progressives try to claim they are the new revolutionaries, freedom fighters like the original colonist tea-dumpers. They’re actually freedom-destroyers, bent on ripping apart the freedom of expression and the elective will of the voters, scorning the Constitution and torching the flag of liberty. Their goal is the death of liberty, not its advancement. Their heroes are murdering monsters Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, while they revile white-privileged Washington and Jefferson who pledged their lives for freedom.
The progressive credo is the same as the Cuban dictators and their mentors Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot: oppressive government control under the guise of “leveling the playing field” or “equality” and “redistribution of wealth.” But the people on the receiving end of the progressive promises of that era—variously known as socialism, Communism, or Marxism—rather than thriving, have instead died in huge numbers thanks to the benevolent “progressive” policies imposed on them. The innocent victims of progressivism amount to 120 million or so expiring at the hands of their own governments, according to historians.
Now multi-billionaire progressives like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and entrepreneur Elon Musk are calling for an exciting new way for government to ensure equality, today called “social justice.” While America was founded by brave settlers who built the new nation with their fierce spirit of independence, personal responsibility and achievement based on hard work, Zuckerberg (whose name means Sugar Mountain in German) wants to replace all that with the ultimate Sugar Daddy, a government that would provide everyone with a “universal basic income.”
Zuckerberg feels guilty that not everyone has the financial safety net to become entrepreneurial billionaires like he did with Facebook. But everyone should – it’s only fair! Hopefully millions of people immediately sent him their addresses so he could start cutting their monthly checks.
Actually a universal basic income is already here for millions. The number of Americans receiving assistance from about 79 federal poverty programs is up 32 percent since 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected president. Now more than 100 million — nearly one in three Americans — get benefits from at least one of these programs, not including Social Security and Medicare payments.
This huge redistribution of taxpayer wealth toward welfare benefits is making America’s founding values of personal responsibility and self-reliance seem not only quaint, but unnecessary. Amazingly, in 35 states combined welfare benefits pay more than minimum-wage jobs, which means many have no reason to work. According to a Cato Institute study, a worker would need to make more than $60,000 in Hawaii, and more than $50,000 in Washington D.C. and Massachusetts, to earn more than collecting welfare would bring.
So it’s no mystery that U.S. labor participation is at an all-time low – and that those numbers pretty much mirror the number of people collecting government benefits. Just before the 2016 elections fully 37.2 percent of our non-institutionalized, civilian population over 16 was not working or even looking for work. Of course, free money becomes an effective bribe to vote for the party that will keep the checks coming: the Democrats.
Given human nature, it only makes sense that for many, if you don’t need to work to support yourself and your family, you won’t. Those who continue to work will be ridiculed by those who feed at the government sugar dispenser.
But the satisfaction of work, almost any kind of work, is essential for a healthy sense of self-worth in humans. Even FDR, the Democrat president who created the New Deal to aid the jobless in the Great Depression, warned against the habit of welfare; “relief” as it was called then. “The lessons of history show that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber,” he said in 1935. “To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief.” But it has only increased.
Government is a fickle master as the victims of the “isms” discovered. Dependency breeds subservience and finally bondage after it destroys the aspirational nature fundamental to human happiness.
Since it’s been abundantly demonstrated for centuries that the “progressive” approach leads to more human suffering rather than an improvement in the human condition, the leftist/socialist/Marxistists are actually taking us backwards, not forward. Their plans would regress humanity to an earlier and utterly failed model that’s left a trail of blood across human history. So let’s call them what they are: “regressives,” not progressives. And let’s celebrate Independence Day, not Dependence Day.
I refer to them as demonrats. That’s good enough for me
Appropriate name for them. Also subversives.
“Progressives” is a misnomer. “Regressives” would be more accurate, as they destroy everything they touch. I watched them “Progress” many of our major cities that represented the zenith of modern civilization into 3rd World cesspools of violent crime ridden welfare dependencies, destroy the black family with almost 80% illegitimacy, and higher unemployment. They turned our once great public education system into a laughing stock of brainwashed dumbed down students and pedophile teachers.
History shows that the Democratic Party is a violent Death Cult made up of Perverted Progressives, Simple Socialists, Marxist Pragmatists, Communist Agitators, Angry Anarchists, Racist Blacks, Muslim Radicals, and Illegal 3rd World low skill/no skill Mexican Illegals and violent Drug Gangs, all who violently attack conservatives on Campuses for trying to practice free speech.
Remember, those that make up the Democrat Left have a long history of violence and are the real evil and threat to peace. COMMUNISTS murdered 94 Million men, women, and children in the last century. Socialists started WW2. DEMOCRATS got us into Vietnam and the violent deaths of 55,000 young Americans, and they got us into the Korean War and the violent deaths of 37,000 young Americans, AND into WW2 and the violent deaths of 400,000 young Americans, AND into WW1 and the violent deaths of 120,000 young Americans.
The Democrat Party is the party of Black slavery, The Confederate States and a war that killed another 600,000 young Americans.
The Democrats are the founders of the KKK, the Black Lynching epidemic in the South, Jim Crow, the party of Bull Connor, Racial Segregation, and Japanese Internment. And a Democrat Administration developed and dropped the Atomic Bombs that killed 225,000 men, women and children.
Democrats supports and promotes Abortion that has resulted in the deaths of 59,115,995 Americans since 1973. Their sexual revolution helped promote an epidemic of STD’s, AIDS that caused the deaths of over 617,000 adults in the US alone.
They work to destroy a peaceful Judeo-Christianity and replace it with a violent intolerant Islam. Their multi-culti-diversity campaigns have caused more friction and violence, and America to be more divided than ever.
Liberalism ultimately results in violence, death, rot and decay everywhere it goes.
Call them what they are: Fools.
Your words were short and sweet. In your brief comment, you nailed it!
Progressive is a euphemism for progress toward communism. Call them what they are...democrats.
You are right.
In the early ‘80’s I worked in a conservative Think Tank in Denver. We had KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov as a guest for three weeks. He was very good at explaining Useful Idiots, among many other things.
I would argue that they are progressing toward being European.
They somehow believe that the socialist democracies of Europe are superior to the capitalist republic that is America.
Yes, I know.
A progressive is one who:
1. Believes in a predetermined course of human history (hence the name);
2. Believes that the human condition will improve as this path is followed to its (usually) Utopian conclusion;
3. Believes that it is the duty of a moral, compassionate human being toward his or her fellow human beings to advance this progress and eliminate impediments.
The devil, as always, is in the details. Critical is the choice of which historical model one believes is inevitable, and Marx's was only one of many, albeit by far the more prevalent these days. But it wasn't always like that. For Fichte and Hegel it was the State that represented a sort of end point, for Marx it was only an intermediate stage toward a stateless, classless society. Many of the models do trend toward some form of collectivism, which is a little curious in itself, but not all are Marxist. The Fabian socialists, GB Shaw, HG Wells, early Russell, had a collectivist model that was not Marxian. Hitler's model involved collectivist domination by an Aryan race state. These all may be termed progressive, a thing guaranteed to infuriate modern progressives when they are reminded that the concentration camps were, after all, part of their intellectual heritage. Teddy Roosevelt considered himself a progressive and shared none of the preceding philosophies. It isn't all Marx.
A second critical decision in the formation of a progressive is the conviction that the march of history is inevitably benign. There are other historical models, Ostwald Spengler's, for one, Toynbee's for another, that throw considerable doubt in that direction. If history turns out to be a long slide toward the abyss, what must we conclude about the morality of pushing it along?
A third critical decision is the degree to which impediments to this progress may properly be removed. This might be a mountain between the two sides of the transcontinental railroad, but far more typically it's people, people who happen to disagree with the progressive's most cherished precepts. Counterrevolutionaries and Kulaks were an impediment toward Stalin's realization and they went to the wall. Jews and other Undesirables were an impediment to Hitler's imagined new society and they went to the gas chambers. The current enthusiasm expressed by some of the wilder progressive pens these days for genocide - white, male, wealthy, or any combination thereof - is very much within that pattern. From the 10,000 foot view mass murder is merely a bump in the road. Most progressives do, or at least used to, show some moderation in the lengths to which they will go to advance their vision. Radicals don't.
Confusing the matter still further, as the author points out, is a deliberate attempt to mask malice under a more acceptable term. The term for a bomb-throwing radical is "evil", not "progressive". One who does it out of progressive convictions is still evil. Still more confusing is that most people claiming that description these days have no idea of historical determinism other than the third-rate derivative garbage they've been spoon-fed in media and academia. Nor do they care. They have a tribe, that tribe has an enemy that must be harassed and destroyed. That is not advanced political theory, it is political theory in its most brutal and ignorant form, and its adherents tend to be brutal and ignorant people.
That sounds good to me.
I vote for leftests, or if appropriate, extreme leftests.
"Progressive" ... as in cancer is a "progressive" disease!
Progressivism is the idea of “progressing” beyond the Constitution to institute rule by experts.
They’re certainly not libezal in any sense of teh word.
This is a story that is long overdue. As Patton The Elder said, “Never let your enemy shape the battlefield.”
In the 1988 General Election, every Republican TV ad referred to the Dems with the same phrase; “Tax-and-spend Democrats.” It soon became the standard national description of all Dems.
I once represented a company against a very bad Muslim physician who negligently (I can’t go into details) caused the reprehensible death of their daughter. He pronounced his last name “Kales-yud” I called him “Doctor Kills-you” every time I addressed him on Cross. Stupid inexperienced Def lawyer never objected.
Big $ verdict.
The RNC needs to research a phrase, and then get every Sen and Rep to start using it. It will catch on.
I agree and I have been saying this for a long time.
They LIKE to be called Progressives.
They are really LEFTISTS.
They need to be named Leftists.
It is time conservatives started taking control of the vocabulary .
Words Matter.
Actually this is the second article by the author with the exact same title. She wrote the other one July 7, 2015. You can do a search
20 years ago Progressive Democrats were pretty much under cover and had ties to the American Communist Party...
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