You're a brave man, Clifton. And deeply inspiring. Thank you!
The Right and all of us who are proudly Not Left need to become more involved in the arts. It's an oft-repeated cliché : artists are the first to go in totalitarian regimes. Since in many telling aspects we are headed that way, the Right dismisses creating art at society's peril.
You may not believe in the Divine, Clifton, but the Divine believes in you. And I thank God for you and your intrepid voice.
Is it naive of me to resist calling this sort of behavior "Leftism"? As a nobody who's done a little bit of non-violence, and a little bit of pro bono law, and a little bit of volunteer work and etc. that I thought of as leftist in intent, I feel like the the phenomenon that we're talking about is something other than Leftism. There are definitely a bunch of people on "both sides" who insist on calling the new authoritarianism "Leftism", but I reject that label. It's something else, something that's not really supposed to help.
What would you call it? We generally draw a distinction between leftism and liberalism i.e. leftists and liberals are not the same thing and it sounds like you are a liberal not a leftist. Would love to hear your point of view though. What is a better label for the sort of progressive authoritarianism we are seeing?
I call it postliberal progressivism, because it's a form of progressivism that has given up on the liberal order of tolerance, equality, individual rights, and market economics. Among them there are economic postliberal progressives, who remain somewhat subscribed to tolerance and equality but not rights and markets (this includes the old-school socialists), and identitarian postliberal progressives, who have abandoned all four and are responsible for the culture that made Clifton's professional life impossible.
Liberals have much more in common with conservatism than they did in any other epoch. Or perhaps conservatives have more in common with liberalism. The Republican party has changed markedly though the years, whereas the Democrats are virtually unrecognizable from the party I grew up with. Maybe classic liberalism and classic conservatism were always strong allies.
That's a good question. I like to think that I'm not just a bourgeois liberal, that I also incorporate left-wing economic analysis into my approach. However, I take pains to distance myself from the sort of authoritarianism, or totalitarianism, which left-wing economics is often associated with (for better or for worse). I like to read and think what I want to read and think, so I figure I should provide that liberty to others, if I desire it for myself.
I don't think that we're truly threatened by "cultural Marxists", or any other serious sort of left-wing cultural movement. I think that members of the economic upper class who want to think they're "good", but who are also more or less addicted to the status quo that serves them, are being provided with neurotically satisfying content, in the guise of "Progressivism", that allows them to aggress and transgress, using a cartoon version of left-wing humanism as an alibi. The ultimate goal is to prevent meaningful resistance to the wars that we're engaging in, by distracting and appeasing the demographic that has the electoral and economic power to resist.
I call it "faux-progressivism", or Potemkin Village progressivism.
You're a brave man, Clifton. And deeply inspiring. Thank you!
The Right and all of us who are proudly Not Left need to become more involved in the arts. It's an oft-repeated cliché : artists are the first to go in totalitarian regimes. Since in many telling aspects we are headed that way, the Right dismisses creating art at society's peril.
You may not believe in the Divine, Clifton, but the Divine believes in you. And I thank God for you and your intrepid voice.
Peace. Be good to yourself.
Is it naive of me to resist calling this sort of behavior "Leftism"? As a nobody who's done a little bit of non-violence, and a little bit of pro bono law, and a little bit of volunteer work and etc. that I thought of as leftist in intent, I feel like the the phenomenon that we're talking about is something other than Leftism. There are definitely a bunch of people on "both sides" who insist on calling the new authoritarianism "Leftism", but I reject that label. It's something else, something that's not really supposed to help.
What would you call it? We generally draw a distinction between leftism and liberalism i.e. leftists and liberals are not the same thing and it sounds like you are a liberal not a leftist. Would love to hear your point of view though. What is a better label for the sort of progressive authoritarianism we are seeing?
I call it postliberal progressivism, because it's a form of progressivism that has given up on the liberal order of tolerance, equality, individual rights, and market economics. Among them there are economic postliberal progressives, who remain somewhat subscribed to tolerance and equality but not rights and markets (this includes the old-school socialists), and identitarian postliberal progressives, who have abandoned all four and are responsible for the culture that made Clifton's professional life impossible.
Liberals have much more in common with conservatism than they did in any other epoch. Or perhaps conservatives have more in common with liberalism. The Republican party has changed markedly though the years, whereas the Democrats are virtually unrecognizable from the party I grew up with. Maybe classic liberalism and classic conservatism were always strong allies.
That's a good question. I like to think that I'm not just a bourgeois liberal, that I also incorporate left-wing economic analysis into my approach. However, I take pains to distance myself from the sort of authoritarianism, or totalitarianism, which left-wing economics is often associated with (for better or for worse). I like to read and think what I want to read and think, so I figure I should provide that liberty to others, if I desire it for myself.
I don't think that we're truly threatened by "cultural Marxists", or any other serious sort of left-wing cultural movement. I think that members of the economic upper class who want to think they're "good", but who are also more or less addicted to the status quo that serves them, are being provided with neurotically satisfying content, in the guise of "Progressivism", that allows them to aggress and transgress, using a cartoon version of left-wing humanism as an alibi. The ultimate goal is to prevent meaningful resistance to the wars that we're engaging in, by distracting and appeasing the demographic that has the electoral and economic power to resist.
I call it "faux-progressivism", or Potemkin Village progressivism.