Liberal used to mean open-minded, interested in the welfare of everyone, eager to help the downtrodden, all that gooey good stuff. Liberalism used to mean hope, faith in a better tomorrow, and giving everyone a seat at the table. A few years ago the word liberal went bat-shit crazy and now liberals are actively touting the merits of censorship and advocating destroying the lives of people with whom they don’t agree. I don’t know what that is, but it sure as hell isn’t liberalism.
Alice and I want to continue to call ourselves liberal…but we simply can’t when it’s been so thoroughly hijacked that, with the aid of a time machine, the modern Woody Guthrie song would now be just all kinds of confusing.
I think it was the national response to this Corona-virus that did it, or maybe that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Either way, when “liberals” are actively taunting social media companies into censoring non-state-sponsored information, that’s miles away from liberalism. Again, allow me to stress that Alice and I both would prefer to call ourselves liberal, but since the national political party which used to represent liberal viewpoints has contorted itself into a logic-impaired national socialist pretzel, we’re both stuck in taxation-without-representation limbo. Maybe that’s a better place to be for real liberals. We don’t actually need political parties anyway. Read the Constitution. There’s nary a mention of them in our founding document. No less an authority than George-freaking-Washington warned us of the dangers of factionalism in his Farewell Address.
America has flirted with fascism a few times before. McCarthyism. The Alien and Sedition Acts. We’ve always managed to pull ourselves out before we got stuck in the mud, but now that we’ve renewed the Patriot Act four times and we came damn close to creating a Disinformation Board at the Department of Homeland Security, I worry that we’re getting so used to the idea that privacy was some quaint notion of the past and that critical thinking is unpatriotic that we’re not going to be able to pull ourselves out this time.
Who are the modern saviors?
Rednecks. God bless them.
The American Redneck, once hunted to the brink of extinction, is a true success story of The Endangered Species Act, with population levels now soaring, thanks to their impressive reproductive ability and lack of understanding of the ins-and-outs of modern contraceptive devices. God bless their country asses and their innate distrust of the government. They are truly the saviors of our time.
It was the rednecks and their dislike of all things governmental who saw through the Covid hype and were able to see the thing for what it was. It’s a real disease, but not as universally-dangerous as the hype would have us believe. They want us to abandon democracy in favor of Medical Fascism…and only the country folk saw that one right away.
I will add a caveat here. Disease is always more serious in cities, because that’s where the people-to-air ratio hovers at a level that humanity was never meant to dwell. “Social distancing” isn’t something that needs enforcement when your closest neighbor lives a few miles east as the crow flies. Hell, if you’re describing distance with agriculturally-appropriate phrases like “as the crow flies” you’re going to be fine when the next disease hits. Pretend liberals live in cities and conservatives don’t.
This modern pretend liberalism seems to be perfectly fine with totalitarian tendencies like abandoning the last remaining nugget of privacy (They called it “contact tracing,” but it’s better known by the more descriptive term “LoJacking,” which is fine for poodles but not for Aunt Linda.) and turning in your neighbor for violating state-sponsored ideas (“See something, say something” — that’s Fascism 101), like language usage or not wanting to inject themselves with an unproven “vaccine.” Hell, I’m not even sure vaccine is the right word for something that pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t allow the public to see until every single country on earth promised not to sue them first. Perhaps a more fitting title would be ? The Pfizer? Johnson&Johnson’s single shot?
I have a theory about why this totalitarian nonsense masquerading as liberalism found such fertile soil here in the land of the free. America used to have two guiding lights: capitalism and religion. Back during the late 18th century, we were still formulating the idea of America, back then religion, and the idea of religion itself, was so strong that no could conceive of a future where only a fraction of Americans would even have a religion to call their own. Basically I’m trying to box out the evangelical harshness while admitting that their warnings about the perils of a secular society are now coming true. God bless the rednecks.
Back when capitalism and religion were friends, one would balance the other out. Now that capitalism has BECOME our religion, we’ve got a problem. There’s no morality in capitalism. There’s not even supposed to be. Back when liberalism was liberal, progressive theologians and radical priests led the social movements. A few still do. That rotund man in North Carolina seems totally legitimate. Reverend Barber. He’s a religious liberal, a seemingly decent man and someone we should all listen to if we want to rescue liberalism from its current predicament. And look how much more effective he is at explaining liberalism than, say, Nancy Pelosi or some other rich, hypocritical pretend-liberal pushing power mongering and fascist ideals under the guise of progressivism.
Capitalism without religion results in a cult of malignant greed, where increasingly the bottom line is prized over anything else, even human life. It used to be that the alpha male was celebrated for ousting a fellow worker from his job – acceptable cruelty and ruthlessness – but somewhere it changed into not caring if people died. The best depiction of this corruption is the film by Michael Moore of the guys at Enron congratulating themselves over their triumphs, snickering and saying, “Too bad that Midwestern grandma is going to freeze to death when she can’t pay her utilities.”
The larger point is that we need something to balance out capitalism run amok. It used to be religious morality. Now that we’ve lost the morality, we’re searching high and low for replacement value systems, but what we’re discovering is less than ideal. Science is a great thing, but “following the science” hasn’t led us to a higher plane of existence. Science is a poor substitute for a moral belief system. It’s given us passenger spaceships, safer cars and vastly better drugs (the real ones, not this “vaccine”), all of which are helpful developments, but not nearly big enough to replace religion. That hasn’t stopped this pretend “liberalism” from trying to shove square science into religion’s round hole.
What about Wicca? That’s a belief system. It’s modern (in the sense that it’s actually really, really old, but we forgot about it, so it seems modern). It’s got a basic value system that actually IS in line with liberalism: respect and veneration for the earth, its creatures, its natural ways, promotion of a simple life of living off the land but not having to own the land, a generalized respect for most ways of life. Hell, it’s already got large monuments. They’re the ones people routinely flock to, without even knowing they were shrines. The pull is still there, even if the reason for the pull has yellowed with time.
It doesn’t have to be Wicca, but we do need a religious revival if we want to tamp down the worst excesses of capitalism without abandoning it. And we shouldn’t abandon capitalism. It’s the best economic system we’ve got. It just needs a spiritual tune-up.