Strange bedfellows

Mr Spengler's lede line may sound a bit histrionic as well as unexpected: First they came for the Catholics...then they'll come for the Jews. Seems out of order.

But it reminded me of two Jews, Jonah Goldberg and Benjamin Kerstein, who are keenly aware of what most of their fellow-Jews, overwhelmingly leftliberals, are blind to. The progressive mind, agenda, temper, ideology, whatever, is messianic and totalizing. Like Downton Abbey's Mrs. Crawley, it really recognizes no area of life that is beyond its reforming zeal and improving regulation.

Goldberg's recent interview on Uncommon Knowledge points out that Obama's attempt to force Catholic institutions to provide contraceptives, sterilization and abortifacients is a logical outcome of his worldview. Progressives do not recognize "islands of separateness" outside the Grand Design of Universal Equality. And the First Amendment --which Obama has a telling habit of referring to not as freedom of religion but the far narrower freedom of worship...very Islamic-- is no bar. After all, what are the complaints of a narrowly sectarian and frankly atavistic sexual prohibition to the eschatological value of Wymyn's Reproductive Rights...for free...from the State?

As in San Francisco last year, what are the barbaric preferences of a 3000 year old religion to the rights of newborn males to full genital pleasure?

Kerstein had an anti-Chomsky blog. He described growing up in the Boston public school system:

Liberalism in its post-Vietnam form, a kind of quasi-pacifist libertarian socialism shot through with a ferocious strain of racialism, was in every way our state religion.

I believed, first and foremost, that the United States was an irrepairably corrupt and wicked society, founded on racism, consolidated through genocide, perpetuated through oppression at home and tyrannical imperialism abroad, and fueled by a psychotic machine capitalism which was, through its environmental destruction and cultural hegemony, destroying the world itself.

Nicely put, eh?

What drove him out of that America-hating church was recognizing that, as a Jew, he was finally unassimilable. The tribal specificity of the Hebrews, past and present, which resisted the totalizing dreams both of Christendom and Islam, and Rome before them, was not a diversity to be celebrated, but a stubborn threat to the homogeneous universal community. The leftist lionizing of the Palestinians was always, he discovered, a way of hating the very existence of Israel, a substitute for himself as a Jew. (And IMHO, the White West itself). His ironically named* but very articulate convert's confession, My Road to Damascus, is worth a read.

Progressivism has no internal brake, no built-in sense of limit. Progress is its own justification and it is endless. How can we say that this is progress enough? The horizon ever recedes. I read yesterday, somewhere, that some young Black activist, daughter of an older Black activist, proclaimed that just because America elected a Black man as president does not mean that the country is not still deeply racist. Well, of course, girl! At no point will it ever be anything less than deeply racist. No matter what happens. Once all evidence of it has disappeared on the surface, all you'll have to do is investigate the White Subconscious to find it. This is crucially important because as long as Blacks are the victims of Whitey they can never be held accountable for their own massive self-induced failures. So you bet, sistah. Racism Now! Racism Forever!

We're all in this together. No exceptions. It's the Way of Progress.


*For you Biblically-challenged, it was on the road to Damascus that Saul, a Jew persecuting Christians, was knocked down and confronted by a vision of the risen Jesus, and became a Christian, changed his name to Paul and wrote most of the New Testament. The archetype of the sudden conversion to the opposite side.