Why Are Progressives So Illiberal?
Progressives adopted
identity politics and rejected class considerations because solidarity with
elite minorities excuses them from concern for, or experience with, the middle
classes of all races.
One common theme in the
abject madness and tragedies of the past 12 months is that progressive ideology
now permeates almost all of our major institutions—even as the majority of
Americans resist the leftist agenda. Its reach resembles the manner in which
the pre-Renaissance church had absorbed the economic, cultural, social,
artistic, and political life of Europe, or perhaps how Islamic doctrine was the
foundation for all public and private life under the Ottoman Sultanate—or even
how all Russian institutions of the 1930s exuded tenets of Soviet Marxism.
Pan-progressivism
To be a Silicon Valley
executive, a prominent Wall Street player, the head of a prestigious publishing
house, a university president, a network or PBS anchor, a major Hollywood
actress, a retired general or admiral on a corporate board, or a NBA superstar
requires either progressive fides or careful suppression of all political
affinities.
According to the Center
for Responsive Politics, 98 percent of
Big Tech political donations went to Democrats in 2020. Censorship and
deplatforming on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies is
decidedly one-way. When Mark Zuckerberg and others in Silicon
Valley donate $500 million to help officials “get out the vote” in particular
precincts, it is not to help candidates of both parties.
Google calibrates the
order of its search results with a progressive, not a conservative, bent.
Grandees from the Clinton or Obama Administration find sinecures in Silicon
Valley, not Republicans or conservatives.
The $4-5 trillion
market-capitalized Big Tech cartels, run by self-described progressives, aimed
to extinguish conservative brands like Parler. Ironically, they now apply
ideological force multipliers to the very strategies and tactics of
19th-century robber-baron trusts and monopolies. Poor Jack Dorsey has never
been able to explain why Twitter deplatforms and cancels conservatives for the
same supposed uncouthness that leftists routinely employ.
Silicon Valley
apparently does not believe in either the letter or the spirit of the First
Amendment. It exercises a monopoly over the public airwaves, and resists
regulations and antitrust legislation of the sort that liberals once championed
to break up trusts in the late 19th and early 20th century. As payback, it
assumes that Democrats don’t see Big Tech in the same manner that they claim to
see Big Pharma in their rants against it.
Wall Street donated
markedly in favor of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden in their
respective presidential races. Whereas conservative administrations and
congressional majorities are seen as natural supporters of free-market
capitalism, their Democratic opponents, not long ago, were not—and thus drew
special investor attention and support from Wall Street realists.
The insurrectionist
GameStop stock debacle revealed how “liberals” on Wall Street reacted when a
less connected group of investors sought to do what Wall Street grandees
routinely do to others: ambush and swarm a vulnerable company’s stock in unison
either to buy or sell it en masse and thus to profit from
predictable, artificially huge fluctuations in the price.
When small investors at
Reddit drove the pedestrian GameStop price up to well over a hundred times its
worth, forcing big Wall Street investment companies to lose billions of
dollars, progressives on Wall Street and the business media cried foul. They
compared the Reddit buyers to the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.
One subtext was: Why
would nobodies dare question the mega-profit making monopolies of the Wall
Street establishments? The point that neither the Reddit day-traders nor the
hedge-fund connivers were necessarily healthy for investment was completely
lost.
Surveys of “diverse”
university faculty show overwhelming left-wing support, reified by asymmetrical
contributions of 95-1 to Democratic candidates.
The dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. to make race incidental to our characters
no longer exists on campuses. Appearance is now essential. More ironic, class
considerations are mostly ignored in favor of identity politics. “Equity”
applies to race not class. The general education curricula is one-sided and
mostly focused on deductive -studies courses, and in particular
race/class/gender zealotry that is anti-Enlightenment in the sense that
predetermined conclusions are established and selected evidence is assembled to
prove them.
We are also currently
witnessing the greatest assault on free speech and expression, and due process,
in the last 70 years. And the challenges to the First and Fifth Amendments are
centered on college campuses, where non-progressive speakers are disinvited,
shouted down, and occasionally roughed up for their supposedly reactionary
views—and by those who have little fear of punishment.
Students charged with
“sexual harassment” or “assault” are routinely denied the right to face their
accusers, cross examine witnesses, or bring in counterevidence. They usually
find redress for their suspensions or expulsions only in the courts. What was
thematic in the Duke Lacrosse fiasco and the University of Virginia sorority
rape hoax was the absence of any real individual punishment for those who
promulgated the myths.
Indeed in these
cases many argued that false allegations in
effect were not so important in comparison to bringing attention to supposedly
systemic racism and sexism. In Jussie Smollett fashion, what did not happen at
least drew attention to what could have happened and thus was
valuable. It was as if those who did not commit any actual crime had still
committed a thought crime.
Almost all media surveys
of the last four years reflect a clear journalistic bias against conservatives
in general. Harvard’s liberal Shorenstein Center on Media,
Politics and Public Policy famously reported slanted coverage
against Trump and his supporters among major television and news outlets at
near astronomical rates, in some cases exhibiting over 90 percent negative bias
during Trump’s first few months in office. Liberal editors can now be routinely
fired or forced to retire from major progressives newspapers if they are not
seen as sufficiently woke.
No major journalist or
reporter has been reprimanded for promoting the fictional “Russian collusion”
hoax—and certainly not in the manner the media has called for punishment,
backlisting, and deplatforming for any who championed “stop the steal” protests
over the November 2020 elections. The CNN Newsroom put their hands up and
chanted “hands up, don’t shoot”—a myth surrounding the Michael Brown Ferguson
shooting that was thoroughly refuted. Infamous now is the CNN reporter’s
characterization of arsonist flames shooting up in the background of a
BLM/Antifa riot as a “largely peaceful” demonstration. BLM, of course, has been nominated for a
Nobel “Peace” Prize. After the summer rioting, one could better cite
Tacitus’s Calgacus, “Where they make a desert, they call it peace”.
A George W. Bush or
Donald Trump press conference was often a free-for-all, blood-in-the-water
feeding frenzy. A Barack Obama or Joe Biden version devolves into banalities
about pets, fashion, and food. The fusion media credo is why embarrass a
progressive government and thus put millions and the planet itself at risk?
Andrew Cuomo’s policies
of sending COVID-19 patients into rest homes led to thousands of unnecessary
deaths. Still, the media gave him an Emmy award for his self-inflated and
bombastic press conferences, many of which were little more than unhinged rants
against the Trump Administration. Anthony Fauci’s initial pronouncements about
the origins of the COVID-19 virus, its risks and severity, travel bans, masks,
herd immunity, vaccination rollout dates—and almost everything about the
pandemic—were wildly off. Yet he was canonized by the media due to his
wink-and-nod assurances that he was the medical adult in the Trump
Administration room.
It would be difficult
for a prominently conservative actor or actress to win an Oscar these days, or
to produce a major conservative-themed film. Bankable
actors/directors/producers like Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson operate as
mavericks, whose films’ huge profits win them some exemption. But they came
into prominence and power 30 years ago during a different age. And they will
likely have no immediate successors.
Ars gratis doctrinae is the new Hollywood and it will continue
until it bottoms out in financial nihilism. When such ideological spasms
contort a society, the second-rate emerge most prominently as the loudest
accusers of the Salem Witches—as if correct zeal can reboot careers stalled in
mediocrity. Hollywood’s mediocre celebrities from Alec Baldwin to Noah Cyrus
have sought attention for their careers by voicing sensational racist,
homophobic, and misogynist slurs—on the correct assumption their
attention-grabbing left-wing fides prevents career cancellation.
Hollywood, we learn, has
been selecting some actors on the basis of lighter skin color to accommodate
racist Beijing’s demands to distribute widely their films in the enormous
Chinese market. Yet note well that Hollywood has recently created racial quotas
for particular Oscar categories, even as it reverses its racial obsessions to
punish rather than empower people of color on the prompt of Chinese paymasters.
Ditto the political
warping in professional sports. Endorsements, media face time, and cultural
resonance often hinge on athletes either being woke—or entirely politically
somnolent. A few stars may exist as known conservatives, but again they are the
rare exceptions. For most athletes, it is wisest to keep mum and either
support, condone, or ignore the Black Lives Matter rituals of taking a knee,
not standing for the flag, or ritually denouncing conservative politicians.
Those who are offended and turn the channel can be replaced by far more new
viewers in China, who appreciate such criticism directed at the proper target.
Again, what is common to
all the tentacles of this progressive octopus is illiberalism. Of course,
progressivism, dating back to late 19th-century advocacy for “updating” the
Constitution, always smiled upon authoritarianism. It promoted the “science” of
eugenics and forced race-based sterilization, and the messianic idea that
enlightened elites can use the increased powers of government to manage better
the personal lives of its subjects (enslaved to religious dogma or mired in
ignorance), according to supposed pure reason and humanistic intent.
Many progressives
professed early admiration for the supposed efficiency of Benito Mussolini’s
public works programs spurred on by his Depression-era fascism, and his
enlistment of a self-described expert class to implement by fiat what was
necessary for “progress.”
Even contemporary
progressives have voiced admiration for the communist Chinese ability to
override “obstructionists” to create mass transit, high-density urban living,
and solar power. Early on in the pandemic Bill Gates defended China’s conduct
surrounding the COVID-19 disaster. Suggesting the virus did not originate in a
“wet” market was “conspiratorial”; travel bans were “racist” and “xenophobic.”
In contrast, had SARS-CoV-2 possibly escaped by accident from a Russian lab, in
our hysterias we might have been on the brink of war.
So it is understandable
that progressivism can end up as an enemy of the First Amendment and
intellectual diversity to bulldoze impediments to needed progress. To save us,
sometimes leftists must become advocates of monopolies and cartels, of
censorship, or of the militarization of our capital.
The new Left sorts,
rewards, and punishes people by their race. And some progressives are the most
likely appeasers of a racist and authoritarian Chinese government and advocates
of Trotskyizing our past through iconoclasm, erasing, renaming, and cancelling
out. San Francisco’s school board recently voted to rename over 40 schools,
largely due to the pressure of a few poorly educated teachers who claimed on
the basis of half-baked Wikipedia research that icons such as Lincoln,
Roosevelt, and Washington were unfit for such recognition.
Absolute Power for
Absolute Good
There are various
explanations for unprogressive progressivism. None are necessarily mutually
exclusive. Much of the latest totalitarianism is simple hula-hoop groupthink, a
fad, or even a wise career move. Loud progressivism has become for some
professionals, an insurance policy—or perhaps a deterrent high wall to ensure
the mob bypasses one for easier prey elsewhere. Were Hunter Biden and his
family grifting cartel not loud liberals and connected to Joe Biden, they all
might have ended up like Jack Abramoff.
More commonly,
progressivism offers the elite, the rich, and the well-connected Medieval
penance, a vicarious way to alleviate their transitory guilt over privilege
such as a $20,000 ice cream freezer or a carbon-spewing Gulfstream by abstract
self-indictment of the very system that they have mastered so well.
Progressives also
believe in natural hierarchies. They see themselves as an elite certified by
their degrees, their resumes, and their correct ideologies, our version of
Platonic Guardians, practitioners of the “noble lie” to do us good. In its
condescending modern form, the creed is devoted to expanding the administrative
state, and the expert class that runs it, and revolves in and out from its
government hierarchies to privileged counterparts in the corporate and academic
world.
Progressivism patronizes
the poor and champions them at a distance, but despises the middle class, the
traditionally hated bourgeoise without the romance of the distant impoverished
or the taste and culture of the rich. The venom explains the wide array of
epithets that Obama, Clinton, and Biden have so casually employed—clingers,
deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, ugly folk, chumps, and so on. “Occupy Wall
Street” was prepped by the media as a romance. The Tea Party was derided as
Klan-like. The rioters who stormed the Capitol were rightly dubbed lawbreakers;
those who besieged and torched a Minneapolis federal courthouse were
romanticized or contextualized.
Abstract humanitarian
progressives assume that their superior intelligence and training properly
should exempt them from the bothersome ramifications of their own ideologies.
They promote high taxes and mock material indulgences. But some have made a
science out of tax evasion and embrace the tasteful good life and its material
attractions. They prefer private schooling and Ivy League education for their
offspring, while opposing charter schools for others.
There is no dichotomy in
insisting on more race-based admissions and yet calling a dean or provost to
help leverage a now tougher admission for one’s gifted daughter. Sometimes the
liberal Hollywood celebrity effort to get offspring stamped with the proper
university credentials becomes felonious. Walls are retrograde but can be
tastefully integrated into a gated estate. They like static class differences
and likely resent the middle class for its supposedly grasping effort to become
rich—like themselves.
The working classes can
always make solar panels, the billionaire John Kerry tells those thousands whom
his boss had just thrown out of work by the cancellation of the Keystone XL
Pipeline. It is as if the Yale man was back to the old days when the
multimillionaire and promoter of higher taxes moved his yacht to
avoid sales and excise taxes and lectured JC students, “You study hard, you do
your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you
don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
There is no such thing
as “dark” money or the pernicious role of cash in warping politics when Michael
Bloomberg, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg, both through direct donations and
through various PACs and foundations—channeled nearly $1 billion to left-wing
candidates, activists, and political groups throughout the 2020 campaign year.
In sum, the new tribal
progressivism is the career ideology foremost of the wealthy and elite—a truth
that many skeptical poor and middle-class minorities are now so often pilloried
for pointing out. Progressives have adopted identity politics and rejected
class considerations, largely because solidarity with elite minorities of
similar tastes and politics excuses them from any concrete concern for, or
experience with, the middle classes of all races. The Left finally proved right
in its boilerplate warning that the “plutocracy” and the “special interests”
run America: “If you can’t beat them, outdo them.”
Self-righteous
progressives believe they put up with and suffer on behalf of us—and thus their
irrational fury and hate for the irredeemables and conservative minorities
spring from being utterly unappreciated by clueless serfs who should properly
worship their betters.
About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is
an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and
scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State
University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior
Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting
professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National
Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer
(growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of
social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently
of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was
Fought and Won (Basic Books).
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Biden has an obligation to the anti-Semites in his party which now speak for the Democrats. They are not only the Muslims in Congress but blacks as well and that includes our thin skinned former president who hated Bibbi.
Remove Omar From Foreign Affairs Committee
Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) on Tuesday revealed a measure proposing the removal of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee in opposition to calls from Democratic leaders to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) from her committee assignments over violent and anti-Semitic remarks made in recent years, The Hill reports.
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