"I don't know why, although Rush is very technically accomplished, their politics are just to the left of Michael Moore..."
Don't know about their personal politics, but I know Neil Peart writes a lot of music with a true Libertarian Bent to it. "2112" is an adaptation of an Ayn Rand novel ("Anthem")
I've always found their early stuff to be oriented toward the exercise of free will. Can't speak for anything past "Hemispheres" though-they had a change in musical style that still does not suit my taste-still a good band, just not what I like to listen to.
That depends on what you define as being “Libertarian.” I'm not a Libertarian (big “L”).
As far as 2112 as an album, it was great musical composition. Philosophically, it was a Communist advocacy full of New Age neo-paganism.
(Canadians are almost a lost cause, as far as I am concerned anyway.)
I am also not part of the Ayn Rand cult of personality. Although I do agree with a lot of her economic theory, Ayn Rand and her idea of “morality” is nothing but an anti-Judaic self-loathing (she was a Russian Jew) that fed a lot of her nihilism she inherited from Neitzche. Ayn Rand's egotism was something that came directly from Thomas Hobbes and the later John Locke.
In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates advanced argument that piety to many gods, who all want conflicting devotions and/or actions from humans, is impossible. Socrates exposed pagan esoteric sophistry.
Morality and all of its associated concepts are from the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct in human behavior. Today, “morals” are a religious pagan philosophy of esoteric hobgoblins. Transfiguration is a pantheon of fantasies as the medium of infinitization. Others get derision for having an unwavering Judaic belief in Yahweh or Yeshua, although their critics and enemies will evangelize insertion of phantasmagoric fetishisms into secular law.
There are three ways people are influenced according to the school of behavioral psychology - - visual (sight), auditory (sound), kinesthetic (emotion). The kinesthetic or ‘feeling’ is also olfactory and tactile sense, just like Pavlov’s salivating dogs (conditioned responses).
Considering that 90% of people tend to be more influenced by the visual, television has become a new religion. It is analogous to Plato’s cave allegory and the pagan Oracle of Delphi. The visual media as a propaganda tool helps create visual phantasms or fantastical images in the brain.
Was Freudian psychoanalytic theory of sexual stages in psychological development more accurate than accredited? The Michael Jackson Complex is fixation on mutilation of and deviance with human anatomy in the media. It is a social psychosis catering to the lowest common denominator and generated with Pavlovian behavioral conditioning in popular culture.
Visual images and sound portrayed can be used to anchor emotional and/or conditioned responses desired by those that present them, which is the case of the visual media, actors who create fantastical images in film, and Leftist politicians who pander to ‘symbolism over substance.’
Observe when in public places, at your workplace or in other community activities (i.e., restaurants, retail stores, gas stations, etc.) the pervasive presence of some exposure to music or television. This is because many people are actually terrified of being alone with their own thoughts or at the prospect of it (neuro-linguistic programming).
There is a clear connection between modern neo-paganism and ancient paganism related to Islamic conflict with the Judaic roots of Christendom. A focus on how this is manifested in a modern sense only requires a look at pop-culture icons in entertainment, steroid sports "heroes," and attempts by the Left to use a pseudo-Judaic sense of pagan moralistic idolatry to demonize political opposition. (Attacks on U.S. Senator Rick Santorum for comments on sodomy, and the ostracizing of U.S. Senator Zell Miller within the Democratic Party are cases in point.)
It is no coincidence Islamist pagans hate Israel, Jews, Christians and Western Civilization. The entire basis of Western Civilization is Mosaic Law; something both the Neo-Pagan Left and the pagan Islamist thugs cannot abide and wish to destroy. (Surprisingly, something a lot of Libertarians and so-called conservatives want to ignore.)
Should we really be canonizing special societal privileges in secular law based on idolatrous fetishes? Perhaps civil union and homosexual monogamy advocates could conclave to enshrine their own phantasmal state religion and consecrate Michael Jackson as its first ecumenical Pope!
Contemplate the macabre pagan elements of Michael Jackson's video, Thriller, and his Nation of Islam entourage escorting their pharaoh to and from court. (A Golden Calf; something Ayn Rand, as a Jew, should have been aware of when she began to use the term “morality,” it is a huge, gaping hole in her philosophy of Objectivism.)
Paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes:
‘They ‘worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream…’(http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-contents.html)
Rush as a musical performance is (or was, since I have not seen them in years) no different in their politics than the Hollywood left-wing nutcases.