Democratic Party Progressive Agenda Mirrors Dante's Seven Deadlies [2 of 2]

Dignitas News Service ^ | October 31, 2014 | Paul M Winters

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In the first of this two-part series, we examined how Progressives have skillfully utilized Lust, Greed and Gluttony to capture control of the Democratic Party and weaken the moral fiber of the American people. As we continue to examine the warnings of Dante as outlined in his work, Inferno, we look at the remaining "seven deadly sins" and how the Great Deceiver's earthly forces work to erode the spirit of our republic and fundamentally transform our society into one of their liking. You may view the first part, in which we discuss Lust, Gluttony and Greed by accessing the following link.

SLOTH Of all Dante's listed deadly sins, sloth is often the most misunderstood and certainly under-appreciated in its negative consequences. While the term has somewhat evolved over time, sloth, as defined by Dante is the "failure to love God with all one's heart, mind and soul." He characterized this as a "middle sin" in that sloth was unique in that of all sins it displayed an absence or inadequacy of love. As we view sloth in modern times, we often interpret it in reference to laziness. A lack of gumption and acquiescence to a life of leisurely pursuits and lack initiative is indeed a rejection of love on many levels. It is a crucial, although often overlooked, aspect of a Progressive agenda to turn upside down what mankind has considered to be essential characteristics for a prosperous and fulfilled life. Despite outwardly promoting the Great Society social welfare system as a safety net to assist the poor in hard times, it has been turned into a spider web with dire consequences to nearly all involved.

As conservatives, we rightfully lament the concept of taking hard-earned money from the industrious in the form of increased taxation, but I feel it is also important that we pay equal attention to what the system does to destroy the soul of the recipient. For two young teenagers faced with the reality of an unplanned pregnancy, the offer of government support may seem at first the answer to all their prayers. While for centuries this event would mean an abrupt end to the carefree days of youth and a start of adult responsibility, welfare's most immediate impact is to relieve the young father of the necessity of marriage and full-time work. In most cases, it is a requisite of system that the two do NOT marry. Freed of his responsibility, he is able to prolong his adolescence, something most young men would gladly welcome at first.  For too many young men, however, the idle time offered by government becomes fodder for poor choices, magnified by the fact that they do in fact have a child. Far too often this leads to an eventual disconnect with the mother and child, leading to the alarming increase we have seen in our nations single parent household rates.

There are pitfalls for the mother as well. Although Progressives have sold the system in the notion of compassion and betterment of the babies health, the safety net quickly becomes a spider web in which the recipient find hard to escape from. Giving an 18 year-old mother food stamps, direct cash aid and in many cases housing subsides, she need not rely on extended family and may find herself with her own apartment and independence without having earned it. While this seems to be a godsend, as the years pass and she reaches the limit of her benefits, she is hit with the cold reality that she is now in her mid to late 20's, without any experience in the labor market and now faces competition for work with women younger than herself. In frustration, it becomes quite understandable that she will become nostalgic for her previous life and become accustomed to a life of living off the system. For the child in this household, not only do they lack the benefit of seeing parents wake up early for work each day, many will spend their entire childhood without a father there to tuck them in at night and let them know they are loved and valued above all others by both parents. Prior to the inception of the Great Society, America's single parent household rate stood at 13% compared to the 41% it is today. Among African-American children, these rates stand at a horrifying 71%, as opposed to the 24% of 1964. While statistics for Hispanics trace only to 1980, these community has felt the impact as well, as more than half of all Latino children are now raised in single parent households. It is of no coincidence that Asians have surpassed whites as having the highest median incomes in America, as they also have the lowest rates of single parent households, at 11%.

As the welfare system has evolved, even those working are eligible to receive benefits, as Progressives have worked to increase its scope, and thus the dependence of the American people on government benevolence. In many cases, a single mother who is on public assistance with a lower-paying job with less responsibility and effort, will have the same (or better) standard of living than a single mother with a more demanding and higher paying job. The message here is that the latter woman is the sucker, who throughout her career has worked harder, sacrificed more of her free time in order to better herself, when she can maintain a lower-demanding role and still have a comparable lifestyle.

USAToday FoxNews (via YouTube)

On top of the human toll a subsidized lifestyle takes on the individual, the loss of production and cost in national treasure continues to drain America of its power. In the close to 50 years of the Great Society "War on Poverty," the rate of indigent Americans has remained virtually unchanged. Far from eradicating poverty, it has done little but segregate it. For Progressives, however, a system of government enabled sloth has certainly been a success as it has created a source of their power base, strengthened the bureaucratic apparatus which provides it the bulk of their campaign war chest and provided them with an endless stream of voters whose very daily bread depends on the continuance of Democratic Party hegemony in lower-income areas.

WRATH

The fifth deadly sin of wrath can also rightfully be labeled as anger or hatred. Dante described vengeance as "love of justice perverted to revenge and spite," and although he of course could into have foreseen this, in this statement perfectly summed up the modern Progressive notion of "social justice." The entirely of the Democratic Party's concept of social justice is to punish, to exact revenge for past injustice on the descendents of beneficiaries of social inequities. Rather than charting a course of seeking policies to enable formerly aggrieved to reach an organic of level of equality in society, it seeks to "take" from one side in order to even the score.

The entire debate over "white privilege" is one than seeks not to bring our nation to a greater understanding and sense of true brotherhood, but to pit people against one another. The history of America is a story of an admittedly imperfect nation which has genuinely aspired to a higher ideal with each generation attempting to do its part to reach a level of true equality among all men. This battle continues even into the present day, as we as individuals often fight our lesser instincts to aspire to the beautiful ideals of the framers.

For Progressives however, our society is to be judged against an ideal that has never existed in the history if civilization. It is weighed against a standard mankind has never achieved and as such, is to be viewed as a failure to be "fundamentally transformed." And as American traditions and ideals are embodied in that of conservatism, it is self-evident to the Progressive that this too must be eliminated from the national consciousness and cast as "the enemy."

As such, as they develop their propaganda to the urban white liberals and minorities that make up their loyal constituency, Progressives attack not the methods of conservatism but it's very motive. To stand up for the rights of the unborn is not a reasoned position on life and liberty, but a nefarious "war on women." To oppose illegal immigration is akin to discrimination against Latinos. To believe that welfare with no plan for self-sufficiency is to "hate poor people" and to stand for individual liberty and the nature of equality under the law is to hate black people. As New York Democratic Congressmen Charles Rangel infamously stated in 1994, "It's not 'spic or nigger' anymore, instead they say lets cut taxes."

In this election cycle of 2014, we see Progressives using the shooting of Michael Brown to stoke the anger of African-Americans, hoping to drive them to the polls to vote for the same Democratic Party that has methodically reversed the historic progress made by black Americans from a people brought to this nation in bondage to one that fought and earned their rightful place in our society. While one cannot dismiss the assistance of white Americans, liberal and conservative Democrat and Republican, in the civil rights movement of the 1950's & 60's, it was a struggle begun by and suffered through by black Americans. Yet still, for decades we have had to listen to insufferable white Progressive leaders give stirring recollections of the day they marched in a parade or how they beamed with pride as they watched Martin Luther King speak, selfishly tying themselves to a movement they never risked anything on.

By re-writing history to bestow undue credit to the Democratic Party for the gains made by black leaders of this era, they have created a false narrative that Democrats are synonymous with racial progress. This, despite the fact that Jim Crow and racial injustice was often perpetuated by Democratic Party officials and to this very day, income inequality, racial disparities and hate crimes are far more prevalent in Democrat controlled cities than can be seen in those controlled by Republicans. In the case of Ferguson, the left is opportunistically using the anomaly of this town having a Republican Mayor in an attempt to obscure that nearly every majority black community in this country is politically led by Progressive Democrats.

Nearly every elected official for local, state and Federal in majority black communities is a Democrat.

The framers of our constitution recognized that they lacked the time to tackle obvious inequities of the society they inherited as they founded a new nation. Had they attempted to in earnest, the very republic they fought and dies for would have unraveled and left us a fractured and weak collection of states who could never be whole and would most likely be taken over by a larger power of the time. As such, the battles over slavery and the legal definitions of the citizen, specifically as they applied to black Americans, was to be taken up by future generations. This is the mandate for all Americans, particularly as we have become a larger and more diverse nation, but there are two paths to take in this struggle, one of constructive understanding and one of anger, vengeance and wrath. As evidence by Ferguson, as well as the Trayvon Martin situation in Florida, Progressives chose to appeal to our citizens lesser angels to stoke anger, fear and wrath.

There are two motives at play here, as the Progressive left salts its sheep; one to discourage their constituents from even considering conservatives proposals as an alternative to Democratic Party policy, and to so demonize conservatism so as to harness the fear and rage of these voters into effective campaign energy. Sadly, its proven to be a largely successful agenda, having provided Progressives with their base of power for nearly 50 years.

This is not only effective in chaining minorities to the Democratic Party, but large segments of younger voters as well. Capitalizing on the natural tendencies of human beings to lean more liberal in their youth, by painting conservatives as "evil," they are able to lock these voters in for much longer periods and delay natural progressions toward a more conservative outlook. Many in our ranks can speak at length to their "conversion" toward a more right-leaning outlook which initially was accompanied by a near feeling of revulsion at finding ourselves agreeing with conservative positions. This comes from a healthy dose of propaganda which indoctrinate one to believe that what is righteous is evil, what is right is wrong, and (as evidence by he evolution of lexicon) literally making what is good be called "bad."

In the following clip, a young woman who appears to be either on her way to or from work, comes across a few young pro-life activists promoting their cause on a downtown corner. In what is a perfect example of how Progressives have shaped the mind of young liberally minded individuals in our society, she begins her attack with a profanity-laced barrage of all negative stereotypes of conservatives and people of faith those like her have been indoctrinated with. There is a point somewhere in the middle where she pauses (in apparent exhaustion) and exhales, where one can witness in her eyes a pain and frustration of a human being possesses with an entity driving them with hate. While her methods are reprehensible, I cannot feel anything but pity for this young woman whose ultimate motivations may indeed be just, but has been so twisted with a propaganda of hatred that she has become engulfed by it and unable to communicate her feelings rationally. She certainly was not born with this anger, but she has been taught to be filled with wrath. Her mind has been engineered to view these young men of faith as a threat, as an evil to be reviled and attacked. She and millions like her have been conditioned to this emotion by Progressives in the world of politics, entertainment and academia. And they are legion.

AbortionActivistAttacksProLifers_CreatedEqualFilms (via YouTube)

The primary motivating force behind the psychology of the Progressive left's drive to power is Dante's sixth deadly sin, that of envy. Feeling themselves to be outcasts in a society which values faith and an aspiration to divinity, and likewise rewards thrift, ingenuity, strong families and methodical planning, the Progressive desire to "fundamentally transform" the nation to one which grants success to endeavors more of his liking.

The Progressives manifests their own feelings of envy into a propaganda attack on the very foundation of our economic life, the free-market capitalist system. While if one looks objectively there is irrefutable data which shows that free-market system has been the single greatest vehicle for income redistribution in the history of our species. The demands of capitalism dictate that in order for families elites to maintain their place in society over the course of generations they must display the same disciplines and ingenuity as did those who created their fortune in the first place. As Nathan Hawthorne observed in his reflections of American dynamism, "Families are always rising and falling in America."  While a privileged birth is certainly a great advantage, it is no guarantee of success. Across generations, we find that the richest of Americans are not born into their wealth, but creators, as embodied by Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg whose drive and vision built massive fortunes, and opened up jobs and opportunities for millions of their fellow countrymen.

The competitive nature of the arena of capitalism, however, is not one in which the Progressive excels in. While any disingenuous grifter can succeed in business in the short-term, sustained success in the marketplace requires excellence, frugality and perseverance; qualities lacking in the dreamy-headed arrogance of the Progressive. As such, they have sought to pervert the free market through regulation, taxation and control of labor to open doors more conducive to their skill set. The academic, labor "leader" and bureaucrat are thus able to demand a greater place in society, to be filled by throngs of Progressives exiting our universities with degrees in (fill in the blank) "Studies" majors. An entire industry that employs millions of like-minded individuals that yields absolutely no production to the natural economy enjoys a place in our society far in excess of its organic value. We now have an economy in which Federal and State Government employees make more money, enjoy far better benefits and work far less hours than workers in the private economy. This new elite occupies lily-white upper-crust communities and establishes a power base in which to control the poorest Americans. It is of no coincidence that the Democratic Party maintains control of both America's richest and poorest congressional districts.

PRIDE It is by no accident that the term pride, which is Dante's seventh and arguably most devastating of sins, is a mainstay of Progressive terminology. In each of the various confederacies that make up the Democratic Party, self-pride is the driving force. While the American flag has come to be defined by Progressives and accepted by liberals as offensive, Black Pride, Brown Pride and above all Gay Pride have come to be not only accepted but encouraged. While Americans of all stripes rightfully reproach groups like the Aryan Nation and others who display tattoos and shirts proclaiming "white pride," hand-wringing white liberals nervously applaud Progressive notions that similar attitudes by minorities is a source of ethnic awareness. Progressives then take it a step further by insulating that pride in one's own country is a veiled display of white racism, ironically making the argument that America exceptional-ism is synonymous with whiteness by their very own critique.

Nowhere is Progressive worship of pride more confusing than in that of the left-wing aspects of the LGBT (Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender) community. While on one hand preaching the virtues of sex as a personal and private aspect of life, Progressives on the other hand make the argument that one's sexual behavior and its (seemingly endless) public display of such is to be a source of great personal pride. As discussed in the previous segment of this series, lust is a driving force behind Progressive seduction of America. By combining the two, they have usurped the gay-rights movement in much the same way (albeit different methodology) as they did the civil-rights struggle.

The gay left and their Progressive allies could have chosen a variety of methods to achieve the tangible goals of the gay marriage issue. Even many staunchly religious conservatives have expressed sympathy for gay life-partners as related to matters of probate, property, tax laws, as well as hospital and prison visitation rights. While imperfect, this is a fight which the gay community could have taken on (and most likely won) through the Civil Unions laws. While critics will argue that current Civil Union legislation does not address all legal benefits (and responsibilities) of traditional marriage, these are laws that can be altered and remedied to rectify these shortcomings. This could have been done without tearing apart the entire nation and altering the concepts of traditional marriage, one of the most important bedrock practices of human civilization predating the societies of ancient Mesopotamia.

By playing own gay Americans own feelings of insecurity about their lifestyle, Progressives were successful in convincing many that they should accept nothing less than exact and equal placement with traditional married couples. Belying both tradition and biology, Progressives have demanded that the time-honored tradition of heterosexual matrimony lose its special place among relationships of humans. Since the dawn of time this unique relationship has maintained a distinction apart from all others, without necessarily disparaging those couplings.

The traditional heterosexual marriage is available to all Americans, regardless of creed, color or national origin. While Progressives attempt to argue that homosexuality is not based purely sexual desire, they expose their hypocrisy when arguing this is not an option for gay Americans. The fact is, it is absolutely available to them. The person we choose to marry is not necessarily (often not) the person we had the most fulfilling sexual intercourse with, and ideally should be based on factors other than sexual attraction.

The most devastating impact of Progressive pride, of course, is their arrogant belief that they are more capable than the individual citizen at managing their day-to-day life. It is this hubris and belief in their own brilliance that has enabled this unnatural and wicked ideology to take such a hold in our society. This arrogance would be understandable if there were at least tangible evidence of their ability to improve the lives of the American people. Given that lower-class inner-city neighborhoods have been the primary petri-dish for Progressive policy, one would think that at some point they would question the effectiveness of their left-wing ideology. But such is the nature of sin, that it blinds a man from his own shortcomings and seeks to deflect blame elsewhere.

As the final furlongs of the 2014 midterm election season approach, it is important that as conservatives we reflect upon not simply on polling data and the issues that drive individual races, but precisely what drives our political activism. While establishment Republicans and Tea Party enthusiasts alike fully recognize the failings and inadequacies of the GOP, we need fully recognize that our goals of a more perfect Union and the future of our children depends on electing men and women who share and reflect our values to the US Senate, Governors mansions and (possibly of even greater importance) state legislature seats throughout the nation. It is also of paramount importance that we defeat the agenda of Progressives, who now firmly control the Democratic Party and whose values mirror that of the “Seven Deadly Sins” detailed by Dante so long ago.

By Paul M Winters Founder, Dignitas News Service

Sources: AbortionActivistAttacksProLifers_CreatedEqualFilms (via YouTube) USAToday FoxNews (via YouTube) CNNMoney DanteInferno

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