Fifty years later

They seemed like good ideas at the time.

I am a Boomer, come of age in the Sixties. I was in favor of practically all the projects hatched during those days, causes that have now come to toxic fruition a half century later. The last time I was in Washington DC, where I was born, was for an anti-Vietnam war rally. Now, of course, as Ex Cathedra, I find that most of them were half-truths at best, others self-serving frauds from stem to stern.

While dressed in the modern sheep's clothing of justice and equality and freedom and inclusion and peace, (or most recently, hope and change) the lupine heart of these progressive crusades is driven by the ancient engines of envy and hatred.  These undertakings --with histories older than that revolutionary decade--have played out over time largely to the detriment of the culture and civilization that has played host to them.

Host in its secondary meaning, as the victim of a brood parasite.

Each of the Seven Pillars of Progressive Change, shinily packaged for maximum ethical attractiveness, is a cuckoo in the nest. The oppressor/victim narratives of multiculturalism, feminism, redistributionism; pacifism, transnationalism, secularism, environmentalism. All these are forms of group warfare under the rubric "social change".

As one visiting extremist recently put it:

In the United States you fought against Nazi Germany, you fought against Fascist Italy, you fought against Imperial Japan in the Pacific theater, and yet in a strange way you’re the losers of that war. You’ve turned into the apostates of that war, retrospectively, and you’ve partly done it to yourselves, as all continental European people and post-European people have all over the world.

You could make a similar case about the Cold War. Institutional Marxism in its classical Communist form has mostly collapsed or morphed into something else, but the backwash into the West by politically correct cultural Marxists has proven far stronger. Gramsci was smarter than Lenin.

A big part of my migration from standard gay liberal Democrat to Ex Cathedra was that I noticed results that I was not supposed to notice. There are all sorts of counter-evidences to the narrative of happy progress toward utopia. But it is strictly forbidden to notice them or worse, to mention them out loud. Given my characterological resistance to being told what I may or may not think or feel, I eventually began to see the Great Experiment as an emperor without clothes. Along the way, I discovered that the True Believers on the progressive Left were the mirror image, in the worst ways, of what they proposed to hate on the Right: rigid and blindly self-righteous dogmatists driven by hatred and fear, who would willingly impose their fundamentalism on the rest of us*. Enantiodromia strikes again.

Breaking my Lenten resolution not to read articles likely to provoke me to stroke or murder, out of habit I read a Jim Goad piece on Limbaugh's latest joust with the feminist passion players over "free" contraception mandated by Federal law.

 

The self-serving victimist lingo, the mantric repetition of the sacred word "women", the hysterical hyping of the catastrophic outcomes: her terrible dilemma:  a quality law school education at Georgetown and the cost of her choice-preserving pills. And then Barry Hussein O's phone call.  Even in Soap Opera Nation, it is beyond tawdry.

This is just one sad example, five decades later, of where those noble-sounding half-truths have gotten us.




*A recent self-outing (of the political kind) by the creator of Carnivale, provoked by the death of Andrew Breitbart.