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My Dear Friends on the Left: What Happened to You?
Half a century ago, when I was a young man, you were the ones celebrating individuality and anything-goes self-expression.
Back then, you were the ones burning the draft cards and defying authority. Today you’re a masked lump sitting on an airport bench, scolding with narrowed eyes anyone who delights in the air touching her face. What happened to you?
Back then, you were the ones demanding to be heard, saying the things the establishment didn’t want to hear, speaking truth to power. Today the phrase “free speech” terrifies you, and you offer a dozen excuses why we’re better off muzzled and restrained by those in power, like some kind of pet.
Back then, you cheered a good man as he made a great speech, sharing his dream of a future when what mattered was a man or woman’s character, not his or her skin. He died for that vision, but you lived it. Today you’re demanding segregated events, branding people “racist” for being the wrong color, obsessing about trivial differences as if they alone define a person and give him his worth.
Back then, women burned their bras and roared and you, fists in the air, roared with them: women could do anything and everything. Today you reject the very idea that “women” exist: your Woman of the Year is a man, and men lay claim to womanhood and everything that women fought to secure for themselves.
What happened to you? Yes, you got old; we all got old. But you didn’t have to become the thing you rebelled against. You didn’t have to embrace fear.
Dare to stand again for the things you once believed.
Published in Culture
I give this rant five stars out of five . . .
They never changed.
The commonality between then and now is that the left attacks what it perceives to be establishment beliefs and values. Burning bras wasn’t in contrast to where the left is now. It was one step toward their current stance on gender.
Then and now, the purpose of their positions and demands is to create stumbling blocks for average people with traditional beliefs and values, thereby creating a politically adversarial environment which they can take advantage of to gain power.
A deeper dive into Marcuse would be interesting for those of us with time. For those who need the Cliff notes version that describes the beliefs of all the Frankfurt school Marxists, I recommend The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. Critical Theory is cultural Marxism. Walsh describes it from a cultural perspective, something politicians and political science majors can’t do.
Thank you, Jerry, for the added homework. I am thinking it would be good to create a critical theory group where we, all who are interested, can pool our comments, ideas, links, and research. Posts like this get lost after a week. Thoughts?
When you are the oppressed, you call for free speech.
When you are the oppressor, you call free speech “disinformation.”
You just hit on several topics Michael Walsh covered in his book.
Horowitz.
They all believed in progress. Sadly, their idea of achieving progress was based on their idea of what progress is and how best to get there. Often, their idea of progress was counter to founding principles and the constitution. That is why both are their enemies.
Don’t confuse the Marxist left with the young skulls full of mush lefties who were the useful idiots of the Marxist lefties.
Fiction and empathy
What about us?
What have we become?
In Europe we became a movement of no principles, we turned our backs on the little guy. We don´t defend the culture or stand by our history. We left issues like immigration and patriotism to the far right. We let the left take over the institutions. We mumble a bit about the need to pay the bills but that’s it.
In America what have you done? Where’s the party of small government? Why did you give up on the black vote? Since when is the confederate flag compatible with a party of Lincoln? Why isn’t the GOP the main party in the suburbs? Why have you left the big cities to the Democrats? Why do so many think that all it takes to be a conservative is to hate the left? Aren’t the left our brothers, sisters, nieces, wives, husbands, friends, etc? Why do we imitate the left in their hate?
Both in America and in Europe we stopped talking sense. We either became boring and with no ideas (Europe) or crazy (Trump!? Really?).
Jorge,
I don’t agree with most of what you wrote, but that’s really beside the point: On the issues I mentioned in the post, no, I never became something else.
Racial identitarianism, the negation of womenhood, censorship and speech controls, and a slavish obedience to authoritarian expertise are features of the modern left. It is people tempted to embrace those views to whom I’m speaking.
H.
I’d challenge the Trump=Crazy assertion…
…and lots more.
“When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
I don’t see how “middle of road republican” couldn’t achieve the same Without the crass behaviour(except 4). I grant you in that list that number 4 could only be done by Trump. Nr 1 ; why didn’t he pursue negotiation with the Asian Pacific countries? 3 why didn’t the GOP that at the time controlled both houses finished the damn wall?
I agree with you 100% regarding the left. I might even have a more radical opinion about them. It’s a cult. They believe they are superior, better, good and that being conservative is a kind of retardation.
I don’t think we disagree. I was thinking about “progressives,” particularly. Of course we still have fair minded, boomer-era leftists among us (Stephen Fry; Nadine Strossen) but they seem vastly outnumbered by unprincipled, progressive power grabbers.
If you want examples of ‘crass behavior’, I give you Joe Biden: bragging (ridiculously) about how much higher his IQ is than that of his questioner, talking about how he wants to take people out behind the barn and beat them up, etc. Might also consider Bill Clinton. Further back historically, Lyndon Johnson was notorious for crassness, though this didn’t tend to be visible in public.
How much of the talk about Trump’s ‘crassness’ is really about his refusal to genuflect to the educationally-credentialed and his non-use of what David Mamet called ‘hieratic language’?
Who were their heroes “back in the day”? Che Guevara, Fidel, Ho Chi Min, Mao, Sendero Luminoso, PLO, etc. They never cared for free speech other than their own speech. And it’s an old story, John Dos Passos was a leftist in his youth but the Spanish civil war opened his eyes his pal Hemingway died dumb and this was decades before the 60’s.
My replies in bold above
The left have always been the say anything, do anything crowd. They’ve always been after power and control, and to a large degree they have it now. Giving up controlling the hive-mind at Twitter absolutely frightens them.
I like it.
I attended college from 1963 to 1967 at a private all-male university in Pennsylvania. In 1963 Republicans were largely the white collar and small business owners and Democrats were blue collar mostly unionized workers. But nearly everybody on both sides was socially conservative.
The catalyst for the changes I observed in male students stemmed from the Vietnam war and the draft. If you left school you were immediately reclassified 1-A and draftable (and the odds kept going up that you would get drafted).
The people that followed me at college got more radical every year. They were anti-war radicals mostly for not wanting to be drafted. (We did not fully understand the futile way the war was being conducted until later; that became more obvious as the sixties came to a close.)
Of course, you’d still get the 1-A after graduation or a year of grad school, but if you worked in certain occupations, you’d get deferred. A lot of guys I knew became school teachers for that reason alone.
To be one of the cool guys in the anti-war movement, you would adopt the hippie look. There were three pillars of the hippie style at the time:
1. Demonstrating against the draft
2. Availability of weed
3. The belief that “hippie chicks” were easy.
Of the guys I knew personally, some set of those reasons were stronger than any considered principles about life.
David,
And Elon Musk himself tweeted that graphic out two minutes ago.
H.
I’m not 24 hours back and a thread that isn’t about Trump has become about Trump. I’m goin’ back to Twitter now!
Ha! And who started it? An NT!
My apologies, first to @HenryRacette, I veered off-topic and it was wrong.
My apologies to @Spin, I promise to behave from now on.
@CM, A question, what’s a NT?
Have a good weekend fellows!
It stood for Windows New Technology.
This is a creature that became extinct in November 2016. However, like Bigfoot, there are still frequent unverified reports of NT sightings from various quarters. And, like the gremlins of WWII, these mischievous creatures are attributed to be the cause of all kinds of problems that are otherwise inexplicable in the minds of a certain group of those suffering from a particular variant of TDS.
A subspecies of RINO? When I get insulted (I will not get offended though) I want to know exactly what I have been called.
I don’t know how you could possibly read anything by GR and not believe in Bigfoot.
But the guy whining about Trump = crazy aimed at the voters is classic Never Trump posturing.
I know you aren’t one, but this comment is [redacted for profanity]. More than mine was.