I was talking with a friend that remarked about a guy that got to be all religious in middle age. Yes, I said, but what about his sister, who is a solid lefty? Leftism is a religion, too.
And how, Brett Kavanaugh.
If you understand that leftism is a religion, just like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, the Roman gods, the Greek gods, and the gods and spirits of the hunter-gatherers, then everything over the past couple of months makes sense.
It helps if you understand that politics and religion have a natural tendency to dance with each other. Put it this way: if religion is about the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, then it is natural for religion to enlist the help of politics -- the protection of the community from existential perils -- in the fight against evil that threatens the life of the community.
Except that the fight against evil can sometimes get a bit out of hand. Our Founders were among those that felt so, and the reason was that in the Reformation, which extended, let us say, from Luther's 95 Theses in 1517 to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the argument over good and evil resulted in a war in Germany that occasioned the death of about one-third of the population. Oh and don't forget the English Civil War from 1642-1651. Not Good.
As the dust settled, a bunch of smart folks set to work to make sure that, as we would say, "this never happens again." There was Thomas Hobbes that argued for a strong central authority to stop people squabbling. But then there was John Locke that argued for a separation between Church and State to stop religion from using state power to enforce its truth and politicians from using religious truth to stop the mouths of the opposition. And Montesquieu that developed the idea of separating the power of government into three branches each with equal but different powers.
These were the notions swirling in the minds of our Founders. They wanted a government powerful enough to protect people from other governments, but not so powerful that it would harness religion into a religious war like the wars of the previous century. If you read the Federalist Papers you will read men who had studied all the "issues" of the time and who were arguing that the proposed US Constitution was justified in that it created a federal government powerful enough to stand against the Powers of Europe but not so powerful that it would repeat the terrors of the religious wars of the Reformation.
The US Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1789. But guess what. The French Revolution commenced just a few weeks later, on July 14, 1789, climaxing in the Reign of Terror and Virtue from September 1793 to July 1794.
The French Revolution inaugurated the great counterargument against the notion of limited government, separation of powers and of church and state. It proposed a new (or rather old) doctrine that the only way to effect justice in this world is through the power of politics and government.
That is why I call the Leftist movement the Great Reaction that wants to roll back the Lessons Learned from the Reformation and unite once more the power of government and religion, to unite force and truth. Only this time the religion would be the secular religion of leftism consequent upon the Death of God.
The main Lesson Learned from the Reformation, as I understand it, is that the admixture of government and church is a poisonous brew that leads to death and disaster every time it is tried. And I think it is fair to note that the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Maoist Revolution, etc., were notable for death and misery and starvation, because they combined government and the new secular religion of leftism.
Back in the day our liberal friends were gloriously confident of their wisdom and evolution. They celebrated plays like The Crucible about the Salem Witch Trials from which we were to understand the danger of Puritanism run amok. And then they taught us to understand the evil of the McCarthy witch hunts from which we were to understand that the wild accusations of Communists in the State Department were not to be countenanced in an enlightened country. And of course Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale published in 1985 at the height of the Religious Right in the US is supposed to remind us what happens when the religious nutcases get into power.
Yet today we have our liberal friends hip-deep in a conspiracy theory of Russian Collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Putin government in Russia. We have our liberal friends perfectly content to anathematize a nominee to the US Supreme Court based on questionable accusations about an event alleged to have occurred 35 years ago. We have our liberal friends insisting we #BelieveAllWomen. We have a woman US Senator telling men to shut up. We have our Silicon Valley friends routinely de-platforming all manner of people for committing what the left considers Hate Speech.
All without the slightest trace of irony.
But of course. Because our liberal friends are idiots. They know nothing, have read nothing, have thought about nothing except what they have been carefully taught in schools, universities, and the mainstream media.
So here we drag in the usual squibs, that "those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And "that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."
So let me just say this to my liberal friends.
You may think that you are the helpless victims of the world and that well-born women that went to college are most grievously sinned against. But I would say that you need to analyze power this way. If a liberal says the wrong thing, do they get humiliated and fired? If a black person insults a white person at work, do they get fired? If a gay fires a straight at work for "bigotry" does it become a national scandal?
You see, the purpose of electoral politics is not to help the powerful pursue their dreams of justice, liberals. Instead it is to provide the opposition with a way to organize against perceived injustice by means short of civil war. For it is a rule of life that the ruling class usually has no clue and little interest in how its rule is experienced by people on the receiving end of its religious truths and its government force.
What do men think right now about well-born liberal women and their accusations? Has any liberal asked them? What do ordinary mothers think about what might happen to their husband or son if some well-born liberal woman decides to launch an accusation against them? Has a liberal ever asked them?
Maybe the men of America don't have a problem with the current feminist #MeToo movement. Maybe mothers are first of all concerned about women's rights rather than the rights of their husbands and sons.
All I know is that 50 years ago liberals had the bit in their teeth in The Sixties, and were then staggered to find that the Silent Majority didn't like the New Politics one bit.
In due course we will find out what the Americans of today think about all this. And I have to say that right now I don't have a clue what they think and how they will vote about it.
However, I would advise my liberal friends to think very carefully about what is coming down. And the beginning of wisdom is to understand that progressive political beliefs are a secular religion.
For, after Roy Rappaport: “No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion[.]”
And that means you, liberals. You are just as religious as any religious nutcase on the Sawdust Trail. Only you chaps don't call your beliefs and your "values" religion. You think you are above all that.
Let me just say this. When you run down the catchphrases on the #WeBelieve yardsigns,
what you are reading is a set of Theses of Belief: religious beliefs.
#WeBelieve is what liberal women believe. It is their religious faith. Until you understand that you do not understand what is going on here in these United States in these last days of September 2018.
And how, Brett Kavanaugh.
If you understand that leftism is a religion, just like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, the Roman gods, the Greek gods, and the gods and spirits of the hunter-gatherers, then everything over the past couple of months makes sense.
It helps if you understand that politics and religion have a natural tendency to dance with each other. Put it this way: if religion is about the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, then it is natural for religion to enlist the help of politics -- the protection of the community from existential perils -- in the fight against evil that threatens the life of the community.
Except that the fight against evil can sometimes get a bit out of hand. Our Founders were among those that felt so, and the reason was that in the Reformation, which extended, let us say, from Luther's 95 Theses in 1517 to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the argument over good and evil resulted in a war in Germany that occasioned the death of about one-third of the population. Oh and don't forget the English Civil War from 1642-1651. Not Good.
As the dust settled, a bunch of smart folks set to work to make sure that, as we would say, "this never happens again." There was Thomas Hobbes that argued for a strong central authority to stop people squabbling. But then there was John Locke that argued for a separation between Church and State to stop religion from using state power to enforce its truth and politicians from using religious truth to stop the mouths of the opposition. And Montesquieu that developed the idea of separating the power of government into three branches each with equal but different powers.
These were the notions swirling in the minds of our Founders. They wanted a government powerful enough to protect people from other governments, but not so powerful that it would harness religion into a religious war like the wars of the previous century. If you read the Federalist Papers you will read men who had studied all the "issues" of the time and who were arguing that the proposed US Constitution was justified in that it created a federal government powerful enough to stand against the Powers of Europe but not so powerful that it would repeat the terrors of the religious wars of the Reformation.
The US Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1789. But guess what. The French Revolution commenced just a few weeks later, on July 14, 1789, climaxing in the Reign of Terror and Virtue from September 1793 to July 1794.
The French Revolution inaugurated the great counterargument against the notion of limited government, separation of powers and of church and state. It proposed a new (or rather old) doctrine that the only way to effect justice in this world is through the power of politics and government.
That is why I call the Leftist movement the Great Reaction that wants to roll back the Lessons Learned from the Reformation and unite once more the power of government and religion, to unite force and truth. Only this time the religion would be the secular religion of leftism consequent upon the Death of God.
The main Lesson Learned from the Reformation, as I understand it, is that the admixture of government and church is a poisonous brew that leads to death and disaster every time it is tried. And I think it is fair to note that the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Maoist Revolution, etc., were notable for death and misery and starvation, because they combined government and the new secular religion of leftism.
Back in the day our liberal friends were gloriously confident of their wisdom and evolution. They celebrated plays like The Crucible about the Salem Witch Trials from which we were to understand the danger of Puritanism run amok. And then they taught us to understand the evil of the McCarthy witch hunts from which we were to understand that the wild accusations of Communists in the State Department were not to be countenanced in an enlightened country. And of course Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale published in 1985 at the height of the Religious Right in the US is supposed to remind us what happens when the religious nutcases get into power.
Yet today we have our liberal friends hip-deep in a conspiracy theory of Russian Collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Putin government in Russia. We have our liberal friends perfectly content to anathematize a nominee to the US Supreme Court based on questionable accusations about an event alleged to have occurred 35 years ago. We have our liberal friends insisting we #BelieveAllWomen. We have a woman US Senator telling men to shut up. We have our Silicon Valley friends routinely de-platforming all manner of people for committing what the left considers Hate Speech.
All without the slightest trace of irony.
But of course. Because our liberal friends are idiots. They know nothing, have read nothing, have thought about nothing except what they have been carefully taught in schools, universities, and the mainstream media.
So here we drag in the usual squibs, that "those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And "that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."
So let me just say this to my liberal friends.
You may think that you are the helpless victims of the world and that well-born women that went to college are most grievously sinned against. But I would say that you need to analyze power this way. If a liberal says the wrong thing, do they get humiliated and fired? If a black person insults a white person at work, do they get fired? If a gay fires a straight at work for "bigotry" does it become a national scandal?
You see, the purpose of electoral politics is not to help the powerful pursue their dreams of justice, liberals. Instead it is to provide the opposition with a way to organize against perceived injustice by means short of civil war. For it is a rule of life that the ruling class usually has no clue and little interest in how its rule is experienced by people on the receiving end of its religious truths and its government force.
What do men think right now about well-born liberal women and their accusations? Has any liberal asked them? What do ordinary mothers think about what might happen to their husband or son if some well-born liberal woman decides to launch an accusation against them? Has a liberal ever asked them?
Maybe the men of America don't have a problem with the current feminist #MeToo movement. Maybe mothers are first of all concerned about women's rights rather than the rights of their husbands and sons.
All I know is that 50 years ago liberals had the bit in their teeth in The Sixties, and were then staggered to find that the Silent Majority didn't like the New Politics one bit.
In due course we will find out what the Americans of today think about all this. And I have to say that right now I don't have a clue what they think and how they will vote about it.
However, I would advise my liberal friends to think very carefully about what is coming down. And the beginning of wisdom is to understand that progressive political beliefs are a secular religion.
For, after Roy Rappaport: “No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion[.]”
And that means you, liberals. You are just as religious as any religious nutcase on the Sawdust Trail. Only you chaps don't call your beliefs and your "values" religion. You think you are above all that.
Let me just say this. When you run down the catchphrases on the #WeBelieve yardsigns,
what you are reading is a set of Theses of Belief: religious beliefs.
#WeBelieve is what liberal women believe. It is their religious faith. Until you understand that you do not understand what is going on here in these United States in these last days of September 2018.
tsk tsk... wondering if even Marjorie reads these columns.
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