Category: What is Progressivism?

Reflections On The New Tribalism

A Symptom.— Public shaming implies a character that is incapable of mercy, which implies a lack of empathy, which implies an inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, which implies seeing the other as specially separate and thus essentially unfamiliar. The inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, i.e., to see the subjectively unfamiliar as objectively familiar, indicates an uncivilized man....

Musings to Begin the New Year

Lost in the Cloud.— We are all, today, in all our endeavors, at the mercy of everything we ever did, everything we ever said, and everyone with whom we ever interacted in any way, at any time, under any circumstances. In practice, this means that standing apart from others, or disagreeing in any way with current moral or political orthodoxies, no longer merely...

Race To The Bottom

The entire world is being taught today, from kindergarten through graduate school and throughout the popular media and the mainstream commentariat, that racism is specifically, endemically, and inescapably a white tendency; that is, a mental trait essentially characteristic of those who are born white….

Speaking of Ireland (While One Still Can)

Ireland, whose most influential modern artist described its capital, a century ago, as “that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,” and which seems to have been a country on the edge (or further) of collapsing into some strange combination of drunken suicide and murderous self-indulgence for centuries, finds whatever life force it has left (not at all paradoxically, but rather characteristically)...

Cool

Cool (adj.): appealing to others’ fashionable tastes or preferences in such a way as to allow those others to feel that in liking you (the cool one), they are expressing their own independent and original minds.

In short, coolness is, to both the cool one and his admirers, merely a collectively aggrandizing euphemism…

Life Beneath the Veil

There is no living politician I know of whom I would trust unmonitored with my wallet or my cell phone. Why in the world would I trust one with my liberty or my need to know the truth about anything? Steps are being taken, in every advanced country on Earth, towards establishing the latest manifestation of the totalitarian dream, a cashless society, which...

The Premises of Progress

The other day, a serious student who is reading Brave New World wrote with some musings and questions inspired by the World Controller’s explanation, in one of the later chapters, of the World State’s reasons for prohibiting all access to the great art and thought of the past. I reproduce her main questions (in italics) and my replies, below, with only a few...

Living Amid the Tribunal: A Case Study

In 2019, a young comedian named Shane Gillis won the career-making prize most North American comics dream of, earning a job as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. In response to this hiring, someone named Seth Simons took to social media to draw attention to a past performance in which Gillis (“who is white,” as the media would announce today, as though...

An Inconvenient Presumption

Russell Brand, a moderately clever British comedian who has of late taken to playing the celebrity-pundit-for-profit game on the internet, and who has thus effectively self-identified as an opponent of the radical Marxist zeitgeist, has, not surprisingly, become the latest popular target of a progressive pogrom, aka he is being “cancelled.” In this case, the modus operandi appears to be the same one...

Mission Almost Accomplished

Ten years ago, early in the second term of America’s first overtly socialist presidency, I wrote a book review at American Thinker, “Progressivism: Revenge of the Sociopaths,” outlining the unofficial blueprint, published a century earlier, for the Marxist transformation of America, namely Philip Dru: Administrator by Edward Mandell House. A few years later, I incorporated that review into my series, “Progressivism 101,” on...