Idiot op/ed target practice

[Surlethe]

Enjoy.

Conservatives look to the past as a guide to the future. The past tells them who human beings are, and how they behave, and what is possible. In their approach to the future, conservatives are pragmatic and ground their hopes in experience. When the Founders were drawing up plans for the Republic they looked at the history of past republics and concluded that democracy was the least problematic form of government but that it posed the danger of a populist tyranny. So they instituted a system of checks and balances to guard against tyrannies of the majority and to provide the public with a cooling off period in which their emotion driven agendas could be corrected by reflection.

Progressives, by contrast, look to an imaginary future as a guide to the present and regard the experience of the past as “reactionary” and “backward.” Progressives have in their heads an image of what the future should look like based on emotion (hope and change), and they discount the experience of past and present as products of ignorance, prejudice and selfish interests, which they are determined to overcome.

Their agendas are actually much worse than this would suggest, since progressives imagine a future that is perfect, a new world in which there is no poverty, no bigotry, no irreconcilable conflict — where there is “social justice.” Against this imaginary ideal world nothing that exists can be justified or defended, or in the words of the arch rebel “everything that exists deserves to perish.” These were words were spoken by Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and quoted approvingly by Karl Marx.

Progressives are focused on destroying what is in the name of an impossible what-can-be (“hope and change”) and it’s very hard for them – impossible for the truest believers — to correct course when they are on the march and their programs aren’t working. All contrary counsel is seen not as experience-based wisdom but as obstruction and reaction.

Some years ago there was a C-Span debate between the “Democratic Socialist” — an oxymoron if there ever was one — Barbara Ehrenreich and the bloviating Cornel West on the left side and two Heritage Foundation fellows on the right. The subject was socialism and its failure in the Soviet Union and China. The Heritage team pointed out very politely and circumspectly as though embarrassed for the socialists on the platform that progressives had encountered some problems in implementing social justice in these countries and there were some casualties along the way. Responding, Barbara Ehrenreich said (or words to this precise effect): We’ve only been trying socialism for 250 years and it’s not surprising that mistakes were made. Side note: This woman’s book attacking American capitalism and re-invigorating socialist delusions is assigned reading for students in virtually every university in the nation – at some schools required for all incoming freshmen with no countervailing text.

The investment of progressives in an imaginary future that is perfect is the reason their loyalties to their country often seem uncertain. Every movement force threatening America (or as they would frame it “American power”) however barbaric (think Saddam Hussein or Hugo Chavez or Ahmadinejad or Hamas) can readily be seen by them as striving towards the imaginary future – the utopia of social justice – however distorted. It is always the reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries who are responsible. Cuba has been bankrupted by a deranged dictator and economic crackpot, but the American “blockade” is responsible. The Palestinians behave like Nazis with a national culture that is a death cult, but Israeli “apartheid” is responsible. Muslim radicals are homicidal racists, but that’s just because they’re oppressed by corporate America. Once they’re liberated and able to enter the kingdom of social justice, they will become enlightened like their progressive apologists.

While sabotaging America’s wars abroad and national security measures at home, progressives will protest that they are patriotic and love their country, and want it to live up to its ideals. But their love is reserved for an ideal America that doesn’t exist and as long as it is inhabited by flesh and blood — and therefore corruptible — human beings never will.

Spoiler

Conservatives look to the past as a guide to the future. The past tells them who human beings are, and how they behave, and what is possible. In their approach to the future, conservatives are pragmatic and ground their hopes in experience. When the Founders were drawing up plans for the Republic they looked at the history of past republics and concluded that democracy was the least problematic form of government but that it posed the danger of a populist tyranny. So they instituted a system of checks and balances to guard against tyrannies of the majority and to provide the public with a cooling off period in which their emotion driven agendas could be corrected by reflection.

Progressives, by contrast, look to an imaginary future as a guide to the present and regard the experience of the past as “reactionary” and “backward.” Progressives have in their heads an image of what the future should look like based on emotion (hope and change), and they discount the experience of past and present as products of ignorance, prejudice and selfish interests, which they are determined to overcome.

We begin and end with a horribly skewed perspective of progressives. Instead of accurately portraying progressive positions on social issues, economic issues, and foreign policy issues, Horowitz can condense a series of complex arguments into meaningless soundbites by painting progressives as naive, emotional optimists ignorant of the human condition. It doesn't even occur to him that people might have different priorities regarding what should be accomplished within fallible society. This sets the stage for the entire brief essay; every point he makes further on requires this misrepresentation, and every point is consequently dead wrong.

What's your take?

[J]

Nice. I haven't seen much ranting such as this outside of Tom Kratman's afterwords. Substitute "Tranzis" and "Cosmos" for Progressives and it might as well be one of those afterwords. The op/ed begins with a gross mischaracterization of both sides and goes downhill into the loony bin from there. The conservatives are of course portrayed as the perfect wise founding father figures and progressives get painted as hippy commie pie in the sky airheads. Yeah. It's so bad it's almost funny.

[Akhlut]

So, were the progressives of the mid 19th century a bunch of soft-headed jerkasses who simply wouldn't see the reason of the Founding Fathers' decision to allow for the legality of black slavery?

Does the author not realize that it wasn't until the 1970s when nearly all legal barriers based on race were finally destroyed in this country, and that it certainly wasn't conservatives who were moving this country toward more equality? Same goes for women's rights and queer rights.

On the whole, it's hard to really criticize this writing, simply because I don't know where to start. There's simply too much to work with. From his ideas on the origin of the US to his rampant mischaracterization of political ideologies, to his complete inability to understand context, there's just too much to work with.

[irishmick79]

This guy is just regurgitating commonly held falsehoods about the left that have been circulating for decades. Total strawman bullshit here, and the author doesn't even try to make this particular strawman all that unique or interesting. It looks like something he threw together on the fly to beat a deadline, almost.

[Elfdart]

You do realize that Front Page is a holocaust revisionist website, don't you?

One of their columnists (Robert Boatman) was fired from the staff of a Congresswoman for writing an op-ed in a local paper claiming that Anne Frank's diary was a forgery. Other writers (Steven Plaut, David Horowitz, Phyllis Chesler) have also tried to re-write the history of the Final Solution. In one case, they accused Maryla Finkelstein, a survivor of Majdanek whose entire family was gassed at Auschwitz and testified against Nazi camp guards in several trials, of being a Nazi.

[Guardsman Bass]

What's your take?

Here goes -

When the Founders were drawing up plans for the Republic they looked at the history of past republics and concluded that democracy was the least problematic form of government but that it posed the danger of a populist tyranny. So they instituted a system of checks and balances to guard against tyrannies of the majority and to provide the public with a cooling off period in which their emotion driven agendas could be corrected by reflection.

I always find these types of statements from conservatives immensely ironic. They point out that the Constitution was very much an exercise in politics (they had to build up a union that would be acceptable to the heterogenous states and their governments) and that they looked to previous examples to do so - and then they treat the Founding Fathers as some type of "pure" thing that must not be violated.

Their fundamental goal isn't using the past to properly guide to the future - it's about preserving the past into the future. That's why you often see them attempting to white-wash it.

Progressives, by contrast, look to an imaginary future as a guide to the present and regard the experience of the past as “reactionary” and “backward.” Progressives have in their heads an image of what the future should look like based on emotion (hope and change), and they discount the experience of past and present as products of ignorance, prejudice and selfish interests, which they are determined to overcome.

Progressives look at an unjust present and ask, "Why?" and "How can we make things better?"

As for the latter part, much of the past was a product of ignorance, prejudice, and selfish interests. Why, for example, did the Founding Fathers protect slavery in a Constitution that was otherwise all about human liberty? Because of prejudice (they saw blacks, native americans, and the like as less than human and thus not deserving of any real rights) and selfish interests (the system in which black slavery existed just happened to be one in which many of them had a vested interest, particularly the plantation owners - and this just happened to be that coincided with their views on blacks. Convenient).

Side note: This woman’s book attacking American capitalism and re-invigorating socialist delusions is assigned reading for students in virtually every university in the nation – at some schools required for all incoming freshmen with no countervailing text.

Yeah, how dare that woman provide an anecdotal account of how shitty things are for America's working class!

Of course, that's par for these idiots.

While sabotaging America’s wars abroad and national security measures at home, progressives will protest that they are patriotic and love their country,

"Wars abroad" and "national security" measures at home. I suppose we should at least be grateful the author didn't use that putrid Giuliani-style phrasing "the terrorists' war on us". This is pretty much the usual regurgitated shit - those leftists are selling us out to the Commies appeasing terrorists.

[K. A. Pital]

Just for kicks.

Their agendas are actually much worse than this would suggest, since progressives imagine a future that is perfect, a new world in which there is no poverty, no bigotry, no irreconcilable conflict — where there is “social justice.” Against this imaginary ideal world nothing that exists can be justified or defended, or in the words of the arch rebel “everything that exists deserves to perish.” These were words were spoken by Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and quoted approvingly by Karl Marx.

Ha-ha-ha. This is perfect. So progressives want to install a utopia. Not gradually progress towards a better society, but straight away go into some sort of City of the Sun. This is preposterous. The quote is also wrong. It's not Marx. It's Engels (too bad the moron can't discern between the two, all right). And if you read the quote itself... well - here it goes:

Thus the Hegelian proposition turns into its opposite through Hegelian dialectics itself: All that is real in the sphere of human history, becomes irrational in the process of time, is therefore irrational by its very destination, is tainted beforehand with irrationality, and everything which is rational in the minds of men is destined to become real, however much it may contradict existing apparent reality. In accordance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.

But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained.

This quote really deals with the continuing process of learning and perfecting science (human thought) and reality (which is interdependent on human actions).

Some years ago there was a C-Span debate between the “Democratic Socialist” — an oxymoron if there ever was one — Barbara Ehrenreich and the bloviating Cornel West on the left side and two Heritage Foundation fellows on the right.

Well, one got killed with U.S. support in the name of the market. Others live still, a surprise.

The subject was socialism and its failure in the Soviet Union and China. The Heritage team pointed out very politely and circumspectly as though embarrassed for the socialists on the platform that progressives had encountered some problems in implementing social justice in these countries and there were some casualties along the way.

Liberation from slavery didn't come without casualties either.

This woman’s book attacking American capitalism

I must read it, then. If it's even half as good as "The Shock Doctrine" (which has quite certainly irritated all capitalist-leaning academia in the USA), might be a time well spent.

however barbaric (think ... Hugo Chavez)

Hugo Chaves is barbaric? Did he torture people in secret prisons? Perhaps invade other nations and bomb the crap out of them? Nay? Pot calling kettle black, not surprising.

Cuba has been bankrupted by a deranged dictator and economic crackpot, but the American “blockade” is responsible.

Cuba is far from being bankrupt (does he even know what "bankrupcy" is?), and American blockade certainly is not the last factor in it. Cuba did have a higher GDP per capita than most similar LA nations, and frankly even after the collapse of the USSR it managed to restore the GDP to pre-collapse levels.

The Palestinians behave like Nazis with a national culture that is a death cult, but Israeli “apartheid” is responsible.

Did the Palestinians blow themselves up and turn their culture into a death cult before Israel happened to take their land?

I don't think this rant-article is anything important though - it's a holocaust deniers' den, after all. Doubt it enjoys a lot of readers, anyway.

[Winston Blake]

A quick switcheroo. Note that this is a parody - in reality I resent the many pie-in-the-sky hippies, and I am sure many conservatives appreciate science, if only for its great utility in the defence sector.

Progressives look to scientific understanding as a guide to the future. Scientific understanding tells them who human beings are, and how they behave, and what is possible. In their approach to the future, progessives are pragmatic and ground their hopes in experience. When the Founders were drawing up plans for the Republic, an imaginary future with greater 'social justice' than the British Empire, they looked at the history of past republics and concluded that democracy was the least problematic form of government but that it posed the danger of a populist tyranny. So they instituted a system of checks and balances to guard against tyrannies of the majority and to provide the public with a cooling off period in which their emotion driven agendas could be corrected by reflection.

Conservatives, by contrast, look to an imaginary past as a guide to the present and regard scientific evidence as “condescending” and “elitist.” Conservatives have in their heads an image of what the future should look like based on emotion (comfort in the present and reverence of the past), and they discount scientific evidence as products of ignorance, prejudice and selfish interests, which they are determined to overcome.