10 years ago, believing in abortion rights, gay rights, equal rights for non-majority racial and ethnic members, and keeping religion out of the public square was enough to make one a liberal here in America. You could also believe and fight for those things but not have to buy every bit of college professor post-colonialism and critical race dogma.
Now, to be a real progressive, you have to believe that “white supremacy” is something more than the Klan’s ideas, that there can be a world without borders and that borders are inherently wrong and racist, that Christopher Columbus was Hitler, that Israel is evil, that saying anything bad about Muslimism is both bigoted AND racist (even tho Islam is not a race or ethnicity), that being skeptical of transgender ideology is as bad as being a homophobe, and so on. I’ve been told that because I am skeptical of transgenderism, I’m as morally bad as people who physically attack transgendered people.
What has happened? Is it that the left needs new fights, since all the good fights they once had are already won?
I think the political overton window has moved slightly to the left on social issues, so what counts as an ‘extreme’ opinions in the past is now more of a moderate ideological position now.
When I was in college none of this PC stuff existed. I remember one time a conservative speaker tried to give a speech and was shouted at, but only by a couple dozen people. Most people just wanted to hear him speak. I don’t know if colleges are still like that (most people do not shout down ideas they disagree with), or if they actually have changed and large %'s of people act the way an extreme minority acted when I went.
It is interesting to watch liberals squirm on the subject of Islam. On one hand they support feminism, gay rights, separation of church & state. But only when christians do it since liberalism is to a large degree a rejection of traditional western power structures. When ‘oppressed groups’ like racial or religious minorities have backwards social views, liberals do not know what to believe. Should we stand up for feminism, because that would involve standing up to Islam, etc. etc. Also before anyone gets mad, Islamic nations rank near the bottom on human, civil and political rights.
Bill Maher gets credit for calling them out on this bullshit though. Liberalism is ideally a support of liberal values, not a rejection of a western power structure.
very good point. I wonder; is this what Obama meant when he said he wanted to be a transformative Prez and owes to the environment he might have created, is it because the college grads were getting more liberal, independent of Obama, do everyday Americans who aren’t/weren’t liberal arts students really believe this stuff?
You should go hang out at that notorious racist message board where you can be valued for your racial bigotry, but be considered a curiousity for your Zionism.
This is something of a bugbear for me, too. I consider myself a liberal. I strongly support progressive taxation, abortion rights, marriage equality, single-payer health care, prison reform, clean energy investment, reasonable gun control measures, SoCaS, a robust social safety-net, and the abolition of capital punishment. And don’t even get me started on the ‘War on Terror’. Yet despite all this, I’m genuinely embarrassed to tell strangers that I’m liberal. Liberalism in its most modern incarnation (what I like to call ‘Millennial liberalism’ or ‘campus liberalism’) is just a ghoulish melange of double-standards, intellectual dishonesty, cry-bullying, holier-than-thou sanctimony, and nauseating hypocritical bullshit. It’s no longer enough to support sensible wealth redistribution policies to curb the excesses of the free market. It’s no longer enough to support a foreign policy based on pragmatism and cultural sensitivity, rather than the profane marriage of militarism and Panglossian, neo-colonial wishful thinking that characterised the disastrous tenure of George W. Bush. And it’s no longer enough to want the government to just allow people to live and let live, marry whom they want, smoke what they want, and say what they want.
No. Nowadays, to be a “proper” liberal, you also have to believe in fairy tales. You have to believe that women get paid 78 cents on the dollar for the exact same work as men (they don’t). You have to believe that the best way to combat dissenting views is to ensure they don’t get aired in the first place (and, if such airings are unavoidable, that “safe-spaces” are available to cloister vulnerable spectators). You have to believe that “cultural appropriation” is both a new phenomenon and that it actually matters. You have to be blind to the cynical brutality of Islamism but heaven forfend a white guy wear the wrong fucking shirt, or chalk ‘Trump 2016’ on a sidewalk.
It’s just excruciating, and I firmly believe the prevalence of this kind of masochistic pseudo-liberalism is one of the driving forces behind the rise of the so-called “alt-right”. People are just so sick of these social justice hypocrites, their foot-stamping, their no-platforming, their online shaming campaigns and their perpetual high-dudgeon that they’re just slingshotting to the exact opposite end of the political spectrum in a desperate effort to get away from them.
Fuck these people. And fuck what they’ve turned liberalism into. It’s a fucking embarrassment.
When 20% of Trump supporters think the Emancipation Proclamation was a bad idea and Trump’s campaign is full of proud racists?
You know, I don’t have kids and ain’t gunna. I don’t give a flying fuck about the “White Race”. You want to know what Americans will look like in 300 years? Look at the Italians, and then throw in a dash of Asian. Not one of them will be my decendant. All I want for the future is for Humanity to be better, and to do better after I’m gone, which means caring about the NOW.
Why should I care about the now when neither I nor any of mine will be around to enjoy it? Because I’m a good person. I want good for Humanity as a whole and I really really like this planet and want IT to survive and thrive.
More bigoted idiocy from our resident bigoted idiot. It’s never surprising to see how little the critics of liberalism and progressivism actually understand the philosophies they are so angry about.
The problem with liberalism is conservatives. Actual liberalism in the real world is a movement holding sensible beliefs. But conservatives have created an imaginary liberalism and been able to present this imaginary liberalism as if it was the genuine article.
Yeah! Fuck those fantasy liberals that live in the mind and radio waves of Hannity and Limbaugh! Fuck those people that don’t exist in the real world! Fuck 'em hard!
Some on this board consider me a “liberal” but I may be out with the in-crowd after this post. I agree with OP and find the denigrating responses to him much too facile and dismissive.
Many on the left espouse extremely liberated sexual mores for America, while implicitly defending the extremely repressive mores of Arab countries. How do they handle the cognitive dissonance?
++. Even if “excessive progressivism” were based on good ideas — doubtful — the effect has been the rise of a strong alt-Right. How’s that working out for all y’all?
Maybe you’ve missed his many bigoted assertions and lies.
How do straw men stand on their own? If someone defends oppression of women in Arab countries, fuck them. It has fuck all to do with liberalism or progressivism.
White supremacists aren’t a reaction to liberals – they’ve always been around, like cockroaches. They’ve just spoken up a bit more lately because they see an opening.