Posted on 06/10/2010 4:32:32 PM PDT by Noumenon
The classical liberal contemporary of our Founding Fathers believed in individualism, in a society of free individuals organized as far as possible through mutual consent. The individualism that informed the Founder’s ideas regarded every man as an independent, spiritually sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life. The right to live is derived from Man’s nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a rational society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights – and that a group as such, has no rights other than the individual right of its members.
The Right to Live –Absolute and Unalienable
Most of the issues in modern politics can be resolved by the first-principles answer to one question: to whom does your life belong? Upon the founding of the American Republic and for the first time in human history, it was possible to state unequivocally that your life belonged to you; that it was yours to make of it what you will, for better or worse. Considered against the entire sweep of human history, this idea of universal self-ownership was unprecedented. The concept of an entire nation based upon that principle - and everything else that proceeds from it: the rights, the duties and the responsibilities - could scarcely have been imagined until then. Yet, that is what America’s founders – those dead white males – were willing to put literally everything they had on the line to achieve. And this is what in fact what we did achieve for a short time.
The Right to Live – A Progressive ‘Privilege’
Now, modern American progressives believe in precisely the opposite; they are advocates of what at best amounts to an authoritarian paternalism; at worst, they are proponents of the ghastly concentration camp cultures of genocide and atrocity for atrocity’s sake. They seek to create a society organized primarily through the use of coercion and the suppression of dissent. In the modern American progressive’s ideal, the individual is looked after by the state, and ‘rights’ as such are no more than government-granted privileges. Including your right to live.
The refusal of the Left to acknowledge the value of individual human life is one of the principal reasons why no peace can ever be made with them. It is a reckless, willful and evil disregard for the most fundamental of all of our rights: the right to live. This is the foundational premise of leftism: that people are things. This premise is absolutely necessary in order to justify the slaughter of millions - and to enslave and impoverish the rest. This is precisely the road down which that Marxist meat puppet of a President and his owners are taking us. History is my witness.
Why else would the modern American Left seek to 'move the goalposts' that define life? Why do they now insist upon defining the worth of your life by its utility - not to you, but to 'society'? We have the likes of Peter Singer speaking blithely of extending that 'right to choose' to children as old as 28 months! Why? Because Singer argues that at that age, well... they're not fully conscious and capable of reason!
Why else would we hear of Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel - also an 'advisor' to 0bama - advocating the assessment of the relative 'quality of life' under the aegis of his innocuous-sounding “Complete Lives” program? Emanuel’s guidelines are strictly utilitarian, and are based in part upon the notion of an individual’s ‘value to society’.
Progressives – Enemies of Human Freedom
These are the enemies of an open society, enemies of human freedom and dignity. And at the end of the day and as history has shown beyond the shadow of a doubt, they are killers without conscience. They range from the merely lazy to those who know exactly what they’re doing and where they’re trying to take us.
There are modern American progressives who mean well, but who are too mentally or spiritually lazy to consider the consequences of their misplaced 'compassion' and wrong-headed egalitarianism. They’d rather vote for someone who will do all of the hard work for them. Those who believe that Democrats, progressives and socialists are humanity's saviors are nothing more than idolaters in the same church of absolute power as Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot and every other totalitarian monster who left slaughter, misery and mass murder strewn in the wake of their trajectory through history. Each and every one of these killers without conscience.had their applauders, their enablers, their sycophants, and their appeasers. Most of these monsters were voted and openly cheered into positions of power – positions from which they proceeded to assume absolute power. History's very clear on this point, as it is on the consequences. Those consequences are the products of peoples’ choices – or failure to make a choice. Thus the blood of innocents - the blood of millions - is on their hands, too.
There are modern American progressives whose irrationality and self-hatred is projected outwards onto the rest of us - they seek destruction for destructions' sake. It's the all-consuming irrational hatred held by those who are driven to destroy what they cannot understand. It's the manifestation of unbridled envy. Your achievement, your happiness is an affront to those who lack the will or the ambition to achieve it for themselves. It’s the resentment and the revenge of the lazy. Ayn Rand described it as the hatred of the good simply for being good.
Then there are those who cynically employ the others I've described here in the service of tyranny – for the exercise of power at any price. These are the truly evil ones, for there is no limit to their lust for dominion over every sphere of human existence and endeavor. For these modern American progressive monsters, any means can be justified to realize their utopian dreams. The utopias of which they dream all require a mental and spiritual uniformity, a quelling of dissent that can only be achieved in the silence of the mass grave. To that end, they stand ready to 'improve' the judgment of others they deem less enlightened than themselves with the gulag, the mass grave and the gun.
The Right to Submit – and Applaud Your Enslavement
Most of all, men of reason and good will despise modern American progressives because they are not content with the 'management' of their economic lives - they demand the submission of our conscience, our innermost selves. Worst of all, they demand that we applaud them for it. Historian and philosopher Robert Conquest, in his Reflections on a Ravaged Century referred to it as mindslaughter. That last is why people like me hate them with a burning passion, for they represent the darkest aspect of the human condition - they are murderers of the best that lies within us. They are murderers of the soul. That last is why we’re willing to fight and win the next American Civil War.
As Solzhenitsyn has said, we can tolerate a physical tyranny and still retain some sense of our inner or spiritual sovereignty. But when we surrender our inmost selves to the lies these monsters preach, then we can no longer call ourselves human. Economist G. Warren Nutter pointed out that the greatness of a society does not come from its monuments but from the kind of people it produces. Justice, responsibility, and humanity - these are the qualities of greatness in a people. Only the humane can remain free, and only the free can remain humane. Progressives have proven themselves to be anything but humane, and the outcome of their aims and policies is death and horror.
Never Surrender
My family and I choose freedom. We choose life. These choices are not negotiable.
We believe that we are fit to govern ourselves.
We despise progressives because they don’t.
We believe that the disposition of the fruits of our labors is and should always be a matter of personal conscience.
We despise progressives because they don’t.
We believe that voluntary and thoughtful charity is humane, but that charity at gunpoint is theft.
We despise progressives because they don’t.
We believe that we have the fundamental right to live according to the dictates of our most deeply held values.
We despise progressives because they don’t.
The principles in which we believe are conditions and prerequisites of human dignity and freedom that the religious believer and non-believer alike can recognize. The corollary is that the individual or institutional use of force to deprive any of us of these rights and conditions is a crime against God, Man, nature, justice and reason and must always be resisted. If we fail to resist then we give those who commit those crimes our sanction.
• To believe otherwise amounts to an utter and profound abdication of personal responsibility; it is a rejection of the foremost qualities that make us human.
• To believe otherwise is to embrace an ideology of helplessness and the worldview of the victim.
• To believe otherwise is a despicable betrayal of ourselves and those we love to evil.
• To believe otherwise is to declare oneself an enemy of human freedom and dignity - like it or not, know it or not - and to expose oneself to all the inevitable, inescapable and lethal consequences.
• To believe otherwise is to place oneself firmly in the camp of the enablers of human misery, impoverishment, oppression and yes, mass murder.
Think carefully, therefore, about the nature, about the character of those whom you applaud, aid and abet. I believe that we have arrived at one of those great watersheds of history where the course of human destiny will either descend into a nightmare of slaughter, slavery and misery from which it may well never recover, or we may begin a great philosophical and moral renaissance - a rebirth of our respect for our heritage of life, liberty and individual rights.
In closing, I offer the following thoughts:
• Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.
• Compassion, when exercised by the mentally, physically and spiritually lazy, is an open invitation to tyranny.
• Nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. Nobody. The more power a regime has, the more likely it is that people will be killed. This is the indisputable record of history, and it the major reason for promoting the cause of liberty and the rights of the individual.
• Educators, political scientists, religious leaders and philosophers virtually everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power, the dilution of individual responsibility and the death of discourse. They are the clergy of oppression - enemies of human freedom who must be opposed, discredited and defeated at every turn. They are humanity's dark shadow; they will always be with us, and they must always be resisted and fought.
• Acton's Corollary: Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.
• Tyranny, genocide and mass murder can be virtually eliminated through restricting and limiting the power of government. The means to uphold the rule of law, to promote individual freedom and the responsibility that freedom demands was given to us by the Founders - the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
• We have always had a solution for war: expand the sphere of liberty and drastically limit the power of government.
• Our knowledge and our ability to handle our problems proceed through the open conflict of ideas, through tests of inner consistency, and practical-moral consequences. The death of discourse at the hands of a Stalinist political correctness has halted that progress. Consider the consequences, for they are dire.
• Reason may err, but it can be moral. If we must err, let it be on the side of our creativity, our freedom, our betterment.
PROGRESSIVE...Code word for “neo-Marxist”.
I like it. Short, and to the point.
i hate them because EVERYthing, every policy that support actually does the opposite of their intention. ALL their policy hurt the poor and less fortunate in society
bump for later reading.
I LOVE ‘progressives...properly cooked
I’ve always found them to be a little too gamy for my taste...
When individual rights are subsumed to the collective, very bad things happen. Always. It is up to those clear-headed enough to understand the true intentions and unavoidable consequences of collectivism to stop its advance, even in the interest of those fooled by its phony appeals to humanity, which serve to mask a desire for power and unearned wealth.
For what it’s worth, I’m trying to present different approaches, different facets to the same argument. It’s good to know history, but it’s even more important for folks to be absolutely clear as to the nature of the enemies of human freedom and the dangers they present to all that we care about.
So I beg everyone’s indulgence if I appear to repeat myself.
It’s a test of the premises, and practice for presenting the material to a wider audience. Thanks for your kind words...
Self ping. Great essay.
APf
Modern liberals have nothing in common with the original, real Progressives (who probably spin in their graves whenever the label is attached to our current wackos)
You sure about that?
Some of the original Progressives, George Bernard Shaw in particular if I recall correctly, thought it perfectly acceptable to "humanely execute" people if they were not, for whatever reason, adequately productive.
Woodrow Wilson would be genuflecting to Obama if he were alive today.
The irony of the progressive message is that as an individual, you are not capable of governing yourself, but, some of us (government) are capable of governing all of us.
The “better than you at living” crowd as I call them.
Bump for later.
Wasn’t Shaw connected to English Fabian Socialism? I guess I was thinking about American Progressives who promoted an American ideal to cope with the demographic changes after 1880. That is “foreign” to (whatever they are) today.
Yes, Shaw does appear to have signed-on with the Fabian Socialists.
H.G Wells was one of that crowd, too. Some of his utopian visions were genuinely scary.
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