Category: What is Progressivism?

On the New American Progressivism

There has been no greater gift to the American Left than Donald Trump, for he and his personality cult embody everything that the Left tried for decades to pin, falsely, on American conservatives, without much success. Suddenly with Trump, every leftist lie about conservatism became an all too horrible truth, every untenably vulgar smear all at once an inescapably vulgar reality. Except for...

Advanced Technology, Part Three

Having outlined my basic premises and principles in Parts One and Two, I have arrived at a point where I may finally reply directly to the last of your original questions, which, once again, was… 3. Then what makes something advanced? I would like to know the examples of advances from your point of view. You phrase the question in two parts, which...

Advanced Technology, Part Two

Here in the second part of this discussion, having explained that the concept “advanced” admits of various measurements, corresponding to the various senses in which a new technology may be judged relative to its antecedents, I took a moment to prepare the pathway to a more specific reply to my student’s third and final question about my views concerning which innovations, according to...

Advanced Technology, Part One

A few months ago, I stumbled into a conversation with a most inquisitive student about the role of advanced technology in modern life, and specifically how our age’s technological obsession has blinded us to fundamental questions, not only about the ultimate human value of our rapid material changes, but also about the terms on which we categorize technological innovations as “advances” in the...

Parasitocracy, Then and Now

Back in 2013, when Barack Obama was well into his second term of running roughshod over American principles and destroying the last remnants of the constitutional guardrails against excessive executive power, I wrote an essay for American Thinker in which I attempted to outline the wide array of forces that had been gradually corralled into a generational shift away from the moral premises...

On the Infinite Memory Banks

I have not written much on this website recently. As I scan the internet these days, and come to terms with the extent to which everything that is ever written, has ever been written, will ever be written, and can ever be stolen and regurgitated in plagiarized form by a property-obliterating computer technology that short-sighted people today are all imagining will be both...

Olympic Musings

I have not followed or watched a single event at the current Olympic Games in Paris. I will not watch one. I say this not in protest over the fact that a biological man is beating up biological women in the Olympic boxing tournament. For the record, I pity the biological man in this case, because the individual was clearly born with a...

Civilization and Female Modesty: Gone With The Wind

Nothing gets deeper under the skin of feminists and their right-thinking progressive allies than the once- and long-honored notion of female modesty. This, of course, explains why the entire progressive program, from public policy and historical reinterpretation to education and popular moral messaging, has made the debunking of the “so-called differences” between men and women, and the obscuring of the very definitions of...

Turn To The Left

Britain and France, perennial rivals in their own minds for European preeminence, have just turned significantly to the socialist left in national elections. In both cases, the shift in power appears more radical when viewed in terms of elected representatives than in terms of actual total votes. Nevertheless, the reality remains: The two leading European nations of the modern era (Germany is not,...

Britain’s Labour Pains

The Labour Party, as I write this, is in the process of achieving an extraordinary landslide victory in the UK general election. The Tories and Reformers will try to tell themselves and anyone else who might listen to them, as they have been insisting for weeks leading up to the vote, that the problem is simply that the British public has “failed to...