A Progressive Rant

I started to write a screed in July in response to a Belmont Club post, Definitions, entitled Those Hellbent On Leading Us Into A New Dark Ages. But I cooled off after I answered a misunderstanding posted by BC commenter 3Case.

In June I wrote "Progressives" Are Demonstrably Dangerous to Human Life, but I still wasn't satisfied. This was to be followed by a part II that had been provoked by Mark Alger here. Instead, it languished incomplete for a couple months. I was feeling downright low about how hard a nut this was going to be to crack.

Many years ago I wrote this of Progressives. My wry humor sprung from the fact that it didn't take long for the Progressive reform movement that grew out of the late 19th Century American Populist movement to degrade into a comfy home for deceptive power seekers who succeeded in breeching our government's constitutional limits incrementally for "only the best of reasons."

In early August, Our Curmudgeon, in the pursuit of another topic, wrote of the treachery of "Progressives" as I've always wished him to do, but it still was not enough. For, on that same day, I had heard parts of a speech by Hilliary Clinton that got me started on another screed that I never finished: The "Progressive" Hatred for People.

And now this last week, Mark Alger needled me with the thought that we who are representative of true progress ought steal the progressive label from the phonies.

ARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH! 8/17/07

Continued on 9/05/07

The people who have been granted (by the PC crowd) the leave to wear the label Progressive are anything but. In addition to having long ago become the home for those whose lust for power may well set a new standard for perversion, they are well on their way to making a pejorative of the word progress just as they have made an unbearable burden for anyone who is truly liberal. Those who would wish we will not progress could not be happier.

More and more I run across both writers on the Internet and casual conversants who see that "Progressive" must be put in scorn quotes whenever we refer to those who claim that label.

This is unacceptable. This is Orwellian Newspeak being thrust upon us because we people who must speak with each other in order to counter this road to serfdom and a new dark age do not control the mainstream news media's effluent. We so badly need a new and widely influential means of communicating our viewpoint so that we can counter the anti-language corps. Where is our John Galt who can pirate, even for a little while, all media outlets away from those who relentlessly destroy our language?

A few days ago I had to contend with the confusion over what is a "Progressive" at The Belmont Club. After my initial comment to Wretchard, I had a short interchange with two of his active readers, Charles and LarryD, over the words Postmodern and Progressive. I think I stumbled on the best way verbally to deal with our tormentors: call them Postmodern Progressives.

In the end I think we were all dancing around the same idea at core. Today's Progressives are not advancers of civilization even if there were once some who could rightly claim to have been. Just as "Liberals" view as progressive the liberal growth of government -- and thereby the growth of restrictions on the liberty of individuals (anti-liberalism) -- so too when something will lead to mankind's diminishment, that is what "Progressives" view as progress (anti-progress).

I think we all understand that "Progressives" are NOT. But what are we who really love to see progress going to do about it?

I am convinced that most "Progressives" fall under the category of the misled. The most troublesome of them are the true-believers who allow themselves to become useful idiots. But the task that we who are optimists must find is how to unmask the mostly quiescent troublemakers who lend their support to the useful idiots, thereby accomplishing what they themselves could never achieve: mankind's self-destruction.

I know from what I've read throughout the web on the Right that most Right thinkers see that the label of Progressive has been stolen every bit as much as classical liberals have had Liberal stolen from them.

We must fight to take back the label Progressive so that those that follow us will be able to progress. So that those that follow do not find themselves under a yoke that so many Americans have fought to keep from being institutionalized on these shores. This is a patriotic battle. This is a battle that the bulk of humanity will always have with the effete elite. Understanding it does not require rocket science. It does not require knowing what Postmodernism is, only that it is something that wants you to return to times of enslavement over men's minds. It wishes for nothing less than a new Dark Age.

My friend Og often suggests that at some point the need to argue must end; that it is time for the cricket bats. He may be close to right.