Fascism is the New Liberalism

I'm just sitting here waiting for Dementia Joe to give his Remarks on Our Ongoing Efforts in Afghanistan. As usual he's late, so I'm gonna pass the time by free associating on the passing scene.

I'm a big believer in intersectionality -- specifically, the intersection of stupidity and viciousness, AKA progressive wokeism.  

The left's dictatorship of relativism is one way to escape from the tyranny of reality -- of merit, standards, and intelligence.  

The massive rise in the educated class over the past half century in no way tracks with a rise in intelligence, since the latter is constrained by genetics. There are always cognitive elites, and it is the task of the progressive education establishment to make it more difficult to identify them. It's very much like inflation: flood the intellectual market with paper credentials, and they're no longer worth anything.

Our knowledge class has neither. 

Increased mass education correlates with the shocking increase in mass illiteracy. The left is making it official by insisting it is racist to require high school graduates to be literate and numerate. Equity in a nutshell: if we can't make everyone equally intelligent, at least we can make them equally ignorant.

For Siegel, "the 60s" wasn't a decade, but rather, more of an era that hasn't yet ended. To be sure, the old liberalism ended -- we can argue over when, but Siegel picks 1972, with the McGovern nomination. Although he lost the presidential election in a landslide, his side has increasingly dominated the Democrat party ever since. 

Biden has been around so long that he now believes the opposite of what he did 50 years ago (for example, he used to pretend to be against racial discrimination), but with no explanation. This amount of cognitive dissonance would kill a normal man. How does he do it? Yes, dementia surely helps, but something else is needed to explain how an entire party can become proudly illiberal while still calling itself liberal.

I suppose deconstruction helps, in that it severs the link between words and reality. Therefore, words mean whatever we want them to mean. Language becomes entirely expedient, in service to political power. The rest is commentary.

I don't want to get too far afield, but it's very much like end-stage nominalism, which entails the utter loss (or effacement, rather) of transcendent reality -- a reality upon which our nation is founded, including such perennial realities as natural law, natural rights, and just nature, period, as in the nature of things. 

Quite simply, postmodernism is the denial of essences. The rest is commentary. And it couldn't be easier: detach, say, "sexual identity" from biological reality, and anything is possible. 

But you will have noticed that they nevertheless draw necessarily arbitrary distinctions of various kinds, distinctions that their principles do not permit. On what principled basis can a man not marry his pet, or his toaster? Why can I not identify as black? In one one sense it comes down to majority rule -- that is, just get five justices to agree with you. 

But this can be further reduced to the rule of one person, i.e., the Almighty Fifth Vote. And people say the Pope has too much power, and that "papal infallibility" is absurd! But for the left, there is no principle preventing the Fifth Justice from infallibly ruling that men are women, such that biological reality -- AKA reality -- is against the law. 

It's just a matter of time before the Catholic Church -- the first and last bastion of natural law -- is declared illegal. Which would represent paganism coming full circle and making a frontal assault on the very foundation of western civilization.  

Indeed, that's how I would proceed if I were the devil: don't mess around with effects, go straight to the cause. The only surprise is that they haven't yet ruled the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional because it anchors our rights in the Creator. For that matter, the Constitution renders itself unconstitutional by virtue of its talk of the "blessings" of liberty. Those blessings com from God, so they negate what follows.

"Today's identity politics took hold of liberalism in 1972" (Siegel). He mentions, oh by the way, that there were in excess of 1,900 terror bombings in the U.S. that year, none by white supremacists or by QAnon, whatever that is. One of terrorists also helped launch Obama's political career. At least he's consistent, in that it too was a bomb.

Yesterday, one of Cuomo's last acts as governor was to pardon another liberal terrorist, David Gilbert. The progressive circle of death!

"It has been largely forgotten," writes Siegel, "but for the left of the 1960s it was liberals and not conservatives who were their primary enemy." Correction: still are their primary enemy, except now we're called fascists, white supremacists, and insurrectionists.