" ... Here is where things have changed in my lifetime.
Being a liberal used to mean things like concern for workers being exploited by big business, staying out of wars, free speech and expression and of course loosened sexual morals.
... They believed in what they were saying and they wanted to tell you why you were wrong if you didn't believe the same thing.
The hippies and the music counterculture of the 60s and 70s was all about "fighting the man" and struggling against the prevailing culture.
Even as recently as the early 90s when I was in college, liberals were still game for an argument.
Then something began to change.
More and more Americans went to college and their professors were increasingly monolithic in their far left ideology.
At the same time (future) teachers in public schools were being taught less about teaching and their subject matter and a lot more about "justice" and various groovy theories about teaching that have led to a precipitous decline in educational standards.
The entertainment world shifted hard to the left.
...Today what you hear from the largest corporations and what you hear from far Left activists is virtually identical.
In short, liberals have become what they once hated and don't even seem to realize it.
They are not the counter-culture, no matter how much they talk about "resistance".
How can you resist the very system that you are deeply invested in supporting and that in turn supports you?
What is more important, liberals today have nothing interesting to say.
They are mostly middle or upper class Whites, deeply embedded in corporate consumerism, talking endlessly about racial justice.
They use terms like "Latinx" that no actual mestizo uses or recognizes.
They throw rocks through the windows of the same Starbucks they patronize in the name of black Lives Matter but go out of their way to not live anywhere near black people.
They talk about communism but would die in a matter of days without the machinery of capitalism to provide them with their every want and desire.
They used to think censorship was the worst thing in the world but now are the biggest advocates of censoring political speech, to the point where offering an opinion they dislike sends them into paroxysms of agony and is considered to be literal violence.
The people you once could never get to shut up now are incapable of engaging in even the most mild debate over the most innocuous topics.
Far from the supposedly free spirits of the Vietnam era, today's liberals are the most illiberal, violently angry and censorious people around.
Their brand of secular leftist legalism puts the most conservative Christians sects to shame.
I still use liberal to describe people on the Left even though they are the most illiberal and intolerant people in America because it is lazy and the accepted term, just as I use conservative to describe people on the Right even though they never conserve anything.
Still, it is worth noting that the two terms used to categorize all of our political discourse are essentially meaningless today.
Our political world has shifted far from where it once was and we are entering a very different, very dangerous new world that really demands some new definitions."
Sunday, February 28, 2021
"Why Are Liberals So Illiberal?"
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