Don's Tuesday Column 8-9

                 THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   8/09/2016

                    Progressivism, tyranny, virtue

By now, both parties’ conventions will have played out as political performance art, shall we say; writing in late June for an August column allows for a focus on topics that will be relevant no matter what transpires in Cleveland or Philadelphia. Such events occur in the midst of larger political and ideological contests that overlap, to a great degree, the candidates, personalities, controversies and the issues of the day.

In America’s past, the two major parties each contained ideological diversity: Republicans of more liberal persuasion shared the table, or stage, with the more conservative side of the party; Democrats would welcome the culturally, militarily conservative union households.

The general narrative for the Republican Party has been well discussed (although overstated) among the media class and political intelligentsia—that it has moved hard right and expelled less ideological moderates. From the Democratic Party there has been an even more pronounced exit, or purging, of moderates and conservatives—on abortion, the military, the size and reach of government, and cultural hot buttons like gay marriage.

Because the news media have decidedly left-of-center, pro-Democrat leanings—based on voting records, contribution patterns and positions on issues—they exaggerate the Republicans-going-right theme while hardly even noticing the Democrats-going-left counter narrative. Self-identified Independents are free to form their own opinion, but it’s true as I see it. I’ll share with readers some thoughts on progressivism/leftism and what is at stake in November.

Look up “Resolving the contradiction of ‘Progressivism,’” by Steven Hayward (4/29). There is a glaring contradiction in Progressive ideology, which emphasizes greater “democracy” through innovations like the direct election of U.S. Senators and direct referendums and initiatives. “Give the people what they want! Up with democracy! At the same time, Progressives also advanced the theory of government administration deliberately remote from politics and popular accountability,” using “experts.” The government of men is to be replaced with the administration of things.

A former Leninist, Martin Diamond, writing in the late 1960s, understood this clearly: “The liberal aim is thus clear. In order to transform the human condition, the liberal (progressive) seeks to make the political order fully dependent upon a transformed people. To achieve the transformation, he seeks the right kind of constitutional institutions to produce the right kind of party to produce the right kind of majority.” Central to liberalism/progressivism is the premise that the truly “democratic” party must, as one unified body, forge a majority from the masses that supports liberal goals.

The progressive movement believes that it must imbue in the masses the acceptance of those goals because history proceeds inevitably as they foresee it. The same applies to the interim goals, the achievement of which “the Constitution with its ‘auxiliary precautions’ (checks and balances, federalism, distributed power and representative democracy) does indeed obstruct the way.” You could say that Progressives are indistinguishable from totalitarians, as the elitist minority defines from the onset what the majority must believe to be “truly democratic.”

The above pattern of the progressive movement is the core of the Democratic Party’s platform of beliefs, whether individual party members realize it or not; it is alien to what the Republican Party stands for.

In a similar vein, political correctness is rejected by Republicans and embraced by Democrats.  Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple): “Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies (DP: interchangeable with ‘socialist’), I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.

“When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”

Asked if it is proper for political leaders to model virtue, author Eric Metaxas replied: “Generally speaking, yes. How they behave affects how citizens think of the whole government and the whole nation. When one has a Washington or a Lincoln in leadership, one knows that one can generally trust one’s government to do the right thing, even when it is very, very difficult to do the right thing. Virtuous leaders inspire virtue in the citizenry (and) the belief that the system is not rigged…”

Asked if that implies that you cannot vote for Trump: “Not only can we vote for Trump, we must vote for Trump, because with all of his foibles, peccadilloes, and the metaphorical warts, he is nonetheless the last best hope of keeping America from sliding into oblivion.” On Trump’s supposed tyrannical impulse: “If Trump were to indulge the Caesaristic longings he’s feared to have…the liberals in Congress wouldn’t be nearly as feckless and cowardly in dealing with him as the conservatives have been in dealing with the tyrannical impulses of Barack Obama. So yes, I do think that the separation of powers would counter this decidedly, and work in America’s favor, as long as the imperious fascist troublemaker isn’t a Democrat.”