Category: What is Progressivism?

Laying the Foundations

Apparently, the Biden administration is preparing to emulate its neo-Marxist counterpart to the north, the Trudeau dynasty, in officially recommending that Americans imbibe no more than two alcoholic drinks per week. Two observations on this exciting news. First, it is interesting, not to say portentous, that the U.S. government is suddenly going all temperate on alcohol at the same time that the uniparty...

Culture vs. Humanity

To treat what we moderns call “culture” as an absolute — as we do when we speak of multiculturalism or cultural appropriation — is to reduce humanity as a species to its social conventions and habits, which means to deny the existence of any underlying human nature, which nature may, under varying conditions, manifest itself in alternative conventions and habits. In other words,...

Milan Kundera In Seven Themes

Milan Kundera, the Czech-born, French-naturalized novelist — I avoid the standard appellation “Czech novelist” out of respect for Kundera’s own reasons for rejecting it — died last week. I will not describe him as the greatest or most important European novelist since World War II, as some might, not because I question that judgment but because I am wholly unqualified to make it....

The Inclusiveness Express Hits Another Pothole

North American Muslims, by a large majority, strongly oppose the use of public schools to promote the sexual deviancy normalization agenda of the radical left. Do they take this position because: (a) they have been tricked by the anti-democratic American extreme right wing, as Justin Trudeau has alleged, in a brilliant example of classic Trudeauesque snobbish condescension; (b) they are too ignorant to...

How Progressivism Kills Higher Education

Almost two thousand years ago, the Romans rounded up Christians and other offenders against official beliefs and fed them to wild dogs and lions, as a form of popular religious expression/entertainment. A few hundred years ago, it was Christians of Europe and America rounding up alleged witches, and burning them at the stake or hanging them, as an expression of religious orthodoxy. What...

True Democracy

A headline I just read from Jacobin: “True Democracy Is Incompatible With Capitalism.” My random responses to this headline and accompanying article, as they occur to me on the fly (since flying past quickly is the only reasonable way to look at such blather): How presumptuous to assume that one has discerned which sense of democracy is the true one — but never...

Tolerance vs. Progressivism

Tolerance is not equivalent to approval or “acceptance.” On the contrary, the very notion of tolerance presupposes differences of opinion, disapproval of behavior, and perhaps even personal distaste. In a political context, tolerance entails a willingness to forego any legal objections against, or punishments for, beliefs or behaviors that are regarded as socially unorthodox or disagreeable to the common view, but which have...

Passing Remarks On Late Modernity

We are all supposed to defend the idea of democracy today as though our lives depended on it. In fact, anyone who fails to do so, or who dares to ask questions such as whether this democracy we are all bound to defend amounts to anything in practice but the blunt force of absolute majority rule, is condemned or ridiculed as an enemy...

Deleting Stereotypes

One of the more overt and disquieting symptoms of the English-speaking world’s sleepy descent into totalitarian self-obliteration, aka “social democracy,” is the recent trend in the publishing world towards the shameless raping of famous works of literature in the name of rendering them more inclusive (read relativistic and propagandistic), by revising their content — i.e., changing the words and ideas bequeathed to us...

Blinders of Convenience

The aggressive effort to reduce “Western” or “European” civilization to its alleged sins — racism, sexism, imperialism, systemic inequality, cultural appropriation, greed, and the rest of the neo-Marxist talking points — serves as a convenient diversion from the truth that these same sins, such as they are, may be found equally, though perhaps with regional variations, in all times and places. By hiding...