Jonah Goldberg on the Myth of Live-and-Let Live Liberalism

First, the term Liberalism, as used in the US, is anything but in the sense of classical liberalism. It is statism/progressivism. Jonah does make this point in the National Review Online article here. That said he uses the news that the DC City government is about to issue 66 pages of rules regulating the tattoo and piercing industries to illustrate the point that when it comes to intrusive and largely unnecessary regulation, you are going to find a liberal-run big city, state or national government entity behind it.   From the article:

There is a notion out there that being “socially liberal” means you’re a libertarian at heart, a live-and-let-live sort of person who says “whatever floats your boat” a lot.

Alleged proof for this amusing myth (or pernicious lie; take your pick) comes in the form of liberal support for gay marriage and abortion rights, and opposition to a few things that smack of what some people call “traditional values.”

The evidence disproving this adorable story of live-and-let-live liberalism comes in the form of pretty much everything else liberals say, do, and believe.

Social liberalism is the foremost, predominant, and in many instances sole impulse for zealous regulation in this country, particularly in big cities. I love it when liberals complain about a ridiculous bit of PC nanny-statism coming out of New York, L.A., Chicago, D.C., Seattle, etc. — “What will they do next?”

Uh, sorry to tell you, but you are “they.” Outside of a Law and Order script — or an equally implausible MSNBC diatribe about who ruined Detroit — conservatives have as much influence on big-city liberalism as the Knights of Malta do.

Read the whole thing.

What the Left Touts as Progress Is Really Regression to the Past

Writing about Libertarianism over at the National Review, Jonah Goldberg makes the following very good point about the Left and statism:

It’s a little bizarre how the Left has always conflated statism with modernity and progress. The idea that rulers — be they chieftains, kings, priests, politburos, or wonkish bureaucrats — are enlightened or smart enough to tell others how to live is older than the written word. And the idea that someone stronger, with better weapons, has the right to take what is yours predates man’s discovery of fire by millennia. And yet, we’re always told that the latest rationalization for increased state power is the “wave of the future.”

That phrase, “the wave of the future,” became famous thanks to a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She argued that the time of liberal democratic capitalism was drawing to a close and the smart money was on statism of one flavor or another — fascism, Communism, socialism, etc. What was lost on her, and millions of others, was that this wasn’t progress toward the new, but regression to the past. These “waves of the future” were simply gussied-up tribalisms, anachronisms made gaudy with the trappings of modernity, like a gibbon in a spacesuit.

Read the whole thing. 

Argument from Intimidation–A Favorite Debating Tactic of Bullies With No Other Argument Otherwise

Not only was Ayn Rand prescient when she wrote “Atlas Shrugged” in 1957 she did it again with this essay from 1964. It’s a bit shorter than “Atlas Shrugged”. It’s about what she identified as another logical fallacy that she called the Argument from Intimidation which is closely related to Argumentum Ad Hominem. From the essay:

The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy. The pattern is always: "Only those who are evil (dishonest, heartless, insensitive, ignorant, etc.) can hold such an idea."

Argument from Intimidation is the type of “argument” employed by Piers Morgan as he debated Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com last week but Shapiro recognized the tactic and wouldn’t be intimidated and as Roger Kimball put it a PJ Media, Morgan was deftly filleted by Shapiro.

Go and read the whole essay. It isn’t long and it’s well worth the read if you want to recognize and defeat the tactic.

Number Six- That Would Be the Sin of Envy

Bill Whittle’s latest Firewall Video deals with number six on the list of seven deadly sins, envy, and how the left uses it to promote class warfare. I had a few things to say about envy myself a few years back, as well as envy’s kissing-cousin, greed. You can read that here but meanwhile, here’s Bill:

 

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Andrew Klavan on What Leftism Does to People

Over at PJ Media, Andrew Klavan explains how leftist ideology inevitably makes people awful:

Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.

This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves.

Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil?Leftists call conservatives hateful…

Read the whole thing.

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The Race Card: All the Left Has Left

Roger L. Simon talks about the real reason the left accuses Tea Partiers of racism: it's all the only weapon they have left.

"The real reason liberals accuse Tea Partiers of racism is that contemporary American-style liberalism is in rigor mortis. Liberals have nothing else to say or do. Accusations of racism are their last resort."

I've said before that the race card is a corollary to Godwin's law. The first party to play the NAZI/Hitler card loses the argument because they've just proved they don't actually have an argument. It's the same with the race card. No one wants to be called a racist and tend to go into automatic defense mode when accused of same. That is beginning to change, thankfully, as people finally wake up to the tactic. Overuse tends to blunt the effectiveness of any tactic. More Roger:

"Say what? Without hard evidence from either side? In the US of A, where I live, we are supposedly innocent until proven guilty. There was no proof at all offered for this accusation of racism. Indeed, some of the accusers have even walked away from it; the originator has gone silent. In a court of law, there would be no need whatsoever for the Tea Partiers to offer evidence of innocence of any kind in their defense. This accusation would be thrown out in a trice. But of course, the Tea Partiers did offer a defense, because the mainstream media has unconscionably stacked the moral deck against the Tea Party movement. And the world knows it. And so does Mr. Jonsson, who, most probably without thinking, employed the rhetoric of “moral equivalency” for his article where there is not even remote moral equivalency. There is only an accusation without proof. I could just as easily accuse Mr. Jonsson of racism — and I don’t know him. He, at least, had the courage to report on this matter with some honesty."

Read the whole thing.

Why Are Conservatives So Mean? Andrew Klavan Explains

Go and see this short Klavan on Culture video over at PJTV (sorry, no embed) in which Andrew Klavan explains for the benefit of those just graduating from college just why it is that conservatives are so "mean."

Evan Sayet - How Modern Liberals Think

Former "L"iberal Evan Sayet talks to tthe Heritage Foundation about where and why modern liberalism has gone dreadfully wrong. The talk goes 34 minutes and then Q&A for 13 more. It's worth every minute.