A view of the progressives

From Glenn Reynolds at USA Today:

Because political leaders’ chief concern is their own power and position, they’re willing to do almost anything to stave off a collapse, except reduce their own power and  position. Kicking the can down the road usually just makes the problem worse in the end, but politicians would rather do that than make any sacrifice up front.

This sums up my view of the progressives.  Their power — and possible accumulation of power — comes first before anything.  

I will never forgive these people for what they did over Iraq, trying to legislate a defeat that would have put al Qaeda on steroids, the cost of which would have been horrendous.

And then there are the vegans:

The news has come as a shock to many vegans, who have been regular customers of the restaurants and claim the Engelharts have built their brand on not just serving vegan food but clearly wrapping themselves in the righteousness of the vegan cause — which they argue has now been undermined. “The reason we’re so upset is that veganism is a belief system,” says Carrie Christianson, who started the Facebook boycott group. “You are patronizing a restaurant that you think has that philosophy, and it turns out it doesn’t. Vegans should know that this restaurant has a farm that slaughters animals.”

That’s the key line in this article: “The reason we’re so upset is that veganism is a belief system” — in other words, like radical environmentalism and radical feminism, veganism is one of many alternate religions that are subsets of the holistic New Age Left. (Nietzsche killed God, but man is hardwired to believe in a cause higher than himself. When traditional religion is rejected, the odds are pretty good that something cultish will be chosen to replace it.)

The restaurant owners chose to cater to the faithful, apparently without pondering the jihad they would face if and when their core customers discovered that they were apostates. Or as a wise social critic once described the nihilistic alternative lifestyles of California, “You can checkout anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

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Has Dennis Prager been reading my blog? For how many years have I been saying that the Left hates the Judeo-Christian tradition because it’s predicated on justice, morality, and grace? I don’t know how many myself, although I was already making the argument back in 2011. I’ve made it fairly recently too, but can’t locate the darn post.

Why am I waffling about past posts? Because Dennis Prager makes much the same point I’ve been making when he asks “Why the Left loathes Western Civilization?”

So, then, the Big Question is, Why? Why is the Left hostile to Western civilization?

After decades of considering this question, the answer, I have concluded, is: standards.

The Left hates standards – moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards. The West is built on all three, and has excelled in all three.

Dennis Prager’s discussion, of course, is more learned and in-depth than mine, but it’s gratifying to me to see that we’re thinking along the same lines.