Progressive Catholicity
Have you ever, at any time in your life, displayed anger in a public place? Have you ever had too much to drink and spoken or behaved in a childish and irresponsible manner? Have you ever used a bad word in front of other people? Have you ever said something disrespectful to another human being during a disagreement or dispute? Have you ever, as a young person, acted belligerently or with excessive brashness while in a group, in a misguided attempt to look cool, tough, or brave?
If you have, then you need not bother applying for any job or position concerning which any American progressive or member of the mainstream media has a say in the matter. For American progressives, from the Democratic Party elite to the lowliest free lance cartoonist, are all above such behavior, and will have no truck with any of it.
They don’t get angry, drink, misbehave, curse, disrespect anyone, shoot their mouths off to impress people, or otherwise demonstrate socially imperfect souls. They don’t do or say such things, and they never have. Understandably, then, they cannot accept anyone who has ever engaged in any such wrongdoing as a member of their society, let alone a member of their federal government. I mean golly jeepers!
The fuel and moral prerequisite of the Marxist-Leninist tribunal is not merely self-protective hypocrisy (a universal human weakness), but rather the progressives’ preternatural ability to assert their hypocrisy so vehemently, with so much love for the Party and bloodlust against anyone whom the Party judges undesirable this week for any reason, that hypocrisy loses its normal self-refuting vacuity, and is elevated — sublimated we might even say — into a form of moral righteousness unto itself.
This transcendent hypocrisy — hypocrisy as a principled stand — is progressivism’s special virtue and indispensable impetus. That is to say, without the ability to transform the dirty water of disingenuousness into the wine of collective condemnation and non-personhood, progressivism could not survive the weight of its obvious self-contradictions. The moral genius of progressivism is its instinct and reflex for exalting self-contradiction, and for asserting a falsehood with such assurance and lack of hesitation that it bears, in the hearts of the ignorant and immature, the force of absolute certainty, or even infallibility.
This need and will to stand by a certainty that defies reason, facts, and history (both global and personal) explains the frequent and accurate depiction of progressivism as a religion or cult. And in this faith, hypocrisy is the pope.
