Can you prove that progressivism exists? We can all name some famous progressives. We know that progressivism is on the ascendancy, and that our response to the current push for a final progressive victory will largely determine the fate of humanity in the coming centuries. And yet in all of this there is a whiff of mirage -- as though, if one were to come too close to the thing itself, one would suddenly recognize that the oasis (or swamp) on the horizon was just more desert all along.

Let us journey towards that closer view, if you will, and ask, without a hint of irony, whether there has ever actually been a true progressive, i.e., a thinker or politician who espoused progressivism sincerely and as advertised. Stated differently, does progressivism, as a genuine political philosophy, even exist, or is the mirage all there is?

Progressives claim to believe in equality, which they never clearly define, except when they are speaking in strictly administrative terms ("equal pay"). They rally for "fairness," which they describe only in terms of particular goals ("universal healthcare"), rather than according to any underlying principle. ("People before profit" is merely an incoherent bromide, not a principle; go ahead, try to explain it discursively.) They advocate "rights" which multiply like rabbits, while carefully obscuring how this overpopulation of rights affects the more traditional rights that must be sacrificed to make room for these new ones. (A "positive right" to the property of others means that property rights no longer exist.) Progressives plan the destruction of traditional Western rationalism, individualism, and morality -- i.e., of the conditions of practical freedom and material prosperity -- but they do so, without exception, under the banner of "progress." Whether they be socialists, communists, fascists, or some hybrid of these, all progressives -- and I mean the vanguard, the leading intellectuals and statesmen of progressivism -- promote their various hopes and policies by means of the same slogan: Forward.

Forward, in practice, means, and has always meant, the same things: death to multitudes of innocents; economic collapse; spiritual degradation; widespread poverty; a drudgerous, machinelike existence for "the masses," leavened only by mindless amusements designed to palliate the senseless waste of time that is life without genuine hope; and forced debasement in compulsory retardation and indoctrination centers (aka government schools).

The willing victims of this world-historical abuse -- those not offended at being identified as the amorphous "masses" -- seem truly to believe in "Forward," in progressive "equality," "fairness," "rights," and the rest of the dogma. They believe in it while they watch their material prospects dwindling, the moral framework of centuries being mocked into ridicule, the laws tightening around the most absurd minutiae of their daily lives in the name of protecting them from their own childlike ignorance, and their leaders speaking of them, "the masses," with the utmost disdain for their wishes, their dignity, or even their very lives.

But in what, or in whom, are these willing victims actually believing? Do they even know? Christians, Jews, and Buddhists know who they are following. So do Pythagoreans, Cartesians, and Kantians. Do the victims of progressivism know who is leading them "forward" in the name of equality, fairness, and rights?

We all speak of the "progressives." The word is in vogue again these days. I myself usually prefer it to "socialist" or "leftist," mainly because it speaks more broadly of an underlying philosophical position, rather than of a specific economic program or political stripe, and therefore cuts closer to the bone of the hundred-and-fifty-year assault on Western civilization that has led mankind to its present bleak prospect. But of whom, exactly, are we speaking?

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton describe themselves proudly as progressives. So do Bill Ayers, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and all international socialist and communist organizations. So did Frances Perkins, FDR's Labor Secretary, regarded as the mother of New Deal. So did Tommy Douglas, the founder of Canada's first mainstream socialist party, and the godfather of socialized medicine. So did Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who, like Douglas, Hitler, and many other progressives, advocated eugenics for the purpose of racial and social purification.

"Wait a minute!" some may object here. "You can't just throw Hitler's name into that list -- he wasn't a progressive, but merely a power-mad lunatic." And so he was. So let us leave him off the list of "real" progressives, in the name of being fair to progressivism.

Here, however, is where things get dicey. If we leave Hitler -- one of the most prominent of "Forward" sloganeers -- off the list of legitimate progressives, then must not our purging of the list continue, until we are left with only the "legitimate" ones?

Mao Tse-tung was a progressive, was he not? And yet his person and policies were directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent human beings. My guess is that most of "the masses" would not find this an acceptable road to equality, fairness, and rights, and hence would not accept Mao as exemplary of progressivism. Likewise with Stalin. However, forced migrations and deaths did not prevent many so-called progressive intellectuals in the West from supporting and defending Stalin -- who, after all, was killing as a necessary evil on the road to the progressive dream of collectivization -- until the inhumanity of his methods was exposed to the Western "masses," thereby becoming an embarrassment to the intellectuals. And Mao still has prominent apologists among the "progressive" elite, a group that includes appointees of the Obama administration who, like Canada's iconic progressive prime minister Pierre Trudeau, have lauded Maoist China as an admirable attempt to achieve the ideal of "equality."

And here the complications increase exponentially. Today's "legitimate," "genuine" progressive leaders and intellectuals commonly regard the "illegitimate," "inauthentic" ones as their spiritual kin. According to their own proclamations and policy proposals, they want the same things, although our "legitimate" progressives, whether due to squeamishness or pragmatic calculation, eschew some of their forebears' more extreme measures.

Consider, for example, the moral support and political sympathy so casually expressed by today's political, media, and Hollywood "progressives" towards Fidel Castro and his sidekick, the super-cool Che Guevara of campus T-shirt fame. Castro and Guevara were killers, and thorough devotees of Lenin and (particularly in Guevara's case) Stalin. Their Cuban revolution was a lodestar of the North American New Left, and the Cuban communists, through their intelligence agency, the DGI, were directly involved in training and funding "progressive" terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground and Canada's Front de Libération du Québec. These groups were open in their support for Castro, Mao, the Viet Cong, and the Soviet Union. They used, advocated, and incited violence, including murder. Several of the leading members of the Weathermen are now leading "progressive" education theorists and children's rights advocates. Two of them hosted Barack Obama's first-ever campaign event in their home, and one of them -- one who regarded the murder of twenty-five million Americans as a practical necessity of The Revolution -- worked together on multi-million dollar community organizing projects with Obama, as well as probably having a hand in writing the latter's most famous autobiography.

The very progressive Communist Party USA, whose current leadership includes at least one person who received formal honors from the Soviet Union, has boisterously supported Obama throughout his presidency, and cited his key agenda items as the most practical road to socialism in America -- a reasonable position, as Obama's agenda bears a striking resemblance to that of the progressive co-authors of the famous little manifesto whence the CPUSA gets its mission statement.

See the problem? Sorting the "genuine" progressives from the power-mad lunatics gets more complicated with each step. Where, exactly, is the cutoff point, the line in the sand distinguishing the bloodstained tyrants from the "real" progressives, who sincerely wish to promote the cause of equality, fairness, and rights?

-snip-

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/d...l#ixzz2OSy3mC29
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Quote: Eglman wrote in post #1

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Can you prove that progressivism exists? We can all name some famous progressives. We know that progressivism is on the ascendancy, and that our response to the current push for a final progressive victory will largely determine the fate of humanity in the coming centuries. And yet in all of this there is a whiff of mirage -- as though, if one were to come too close to the thing itself, one would suddenly recognize that the oasis (or swamp) on the horizon was just more desert all along.

Let us journey towards that closer view, if you will, and ask, without a hint of irony, whether there has ever actually been a true progressive, i.e., a thinker or politician who espoused progressivism sincerely and as advertised. Stated differently, does progressivism, as a genuine political philosophy, even exist, or is the mirage all there is?

Progressives claim to believe in equality, which they never clearly define, except when they are speaking in strictly administrative terms ("equal pay"). They rally for "fairness," which they describe only in terms of particular goals ("universal healthcare"), rather than according to any underlying principle. ("People before profit" is merely an incoherent bromide, not a principle; go ahead, try to explain it discursively.) They advocate "rights" which multiply like rabbits, while carefully obscuring how this overpopulation of rights affects the more traditional rights that must be sacrificed to make room for these new ones. (A "positive right" to the property of others means that property rights no longer exist.) Progressives plan the destruction of traditional Western rationalism, individualism, and morality -- i.e., of the conditions of practical freedom and material prosperity -- but they do so, without exception, under the banner of "progress." Whether they be socialists, communists, fascists, or some hybrid of these, all progressives -- and I mean the vanguard, the leading intellectuals and statesmen of progressivism -- promote their various hopes and policies by means of the same slogan: Forward.

Forward, in practice, means, and has always meant, the same things: death to multitudes of innocents; economic collapse; spiritual degradation; widespread poverty; a drudgerous, machinelike existence for "the masses," leavened only by mindless amusements designed to palliate the senseless waste of time that is life without genuine hope; and forced debasement in compulsory retardation and indoctrination centers (aka government schools).

The willing victims of this world-historical abuse -- those not offended at being identified as the amorphous "masses" -- seem truly to believe in "Forward," in progressive "equality," "fairness," "rights," and the rest of the dogma. They believe in it while they watch their material prospects dwindling, the moral framework of centuries being mocked into ridicule, the laws tightening around the most absurd minutiae of their daily lives in the name of protecting them from their own childlike ignorance, and their leaders speaking of them, "the masses," with the utmost disdain for their wishes, their dignity, or even their very lives.

But in what, or in whom, are these willing victims actually believing? Do they even know? Christians, Jews, and Buddhists know who they are following. So do Pythagoreans, Cartesians, and Kantians. Do the victims of progressivism know who is leading them "forward" in the name of equality, fairness, and rights?

We all speak of the "progressives." The word is in vogue again these days. I myself usually prefer it to "socialist" or "leftist," mainly because it speaks more broadly of an underlying philosophical position, rather than of a specific economic program or political stripe, and therefore cuts closer to the bone of the hundred-and-fifty-year assault on Western civilization that has led mankind to its present bleak prospect. But of whom, exactly, are we speaking?

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton describe themselves proudly as progressives. So do Bill Ayers, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and all international socialist and communist organizations. So did Frances Perkins, FDR's Labor Secretary, regarded as the mother of New Deal. So did Tommy Douglas, the founder of Canada's first mainstream socialist party, and the godfather of socialized medicine. So did Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who, like Douglas, Hitler, and many other progressives, advocated eugenics for the purpose of racial and social purification.

"Wait a minute!" some may object here. "You can't just throw Hitler's name into that list -- he wasn't a progressive, but merely a power-mad lunatic." And so he was. So let us leave him off the list of "real" progressives, in the name of being fair to progressivism.

Here, however, is where things get dicey. If we leave Hitler -- one of the most prominent of "Forward" sloganeers -- off the list of legitimate progressives, then must not our purging of the list continue, until we are left with only the "legitimate" ones?

Mao Tse-tung was a progressive, was he not? And yet his person and policies were directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent human beings. My guess is that most of "the masses" would not find this an acceptable road to equality, fairness, and rights, and hence would not accept Mao as exemplary of progressivism. Likewise with Stalin. However, forced migrations and deaths did not prevent many so-called progressive intellectuals in the West from supporting and defending Stalin -- who, after all, was killing as a necessary evil on the road to the progressive dream of collectivization -- until the inhumanity of his methods was exposed to the Western "masses," thereby becoming an embarrassment to the intellectuals. And Mao still has prominent apologists among the "progressive" elite, a group that includes appointees of the Obama administration who, like Canada's iconic progressive prime minister Pierre Trudeau, have lauded Maoist China as an admirable attempt to achieve the ideal of "equality."

And here the complications increase exponentially. Today's "legitimate," "genuine" progressive leaders and intellectuals commonly regard the "illegitimate," "inauthentic" ones as their spiritual kin. According to their own proclamations and policy proposals, they want the same things, although our "legitimate" progressives, whether due to squeamishness or pragmatic calculation, eschew some of their forebears' more extreme measures.

Consider, for example, the moral support and political sympathy so casually expressed by today's political, media, and Hollywood "progressives" towards Fidel Castro and his sidekick, the super-cool Che Guevara of campus T-shirt fame. Castro and Guevara were killers, and thorough devotees of Lenin and (particularly in Guevara's case) Stalin. Their Cuban revolution was a lodestar of the North American New Left, and the Cuban communists, through their intelligence agency, the DGI, were directly involved in training and funding "progressive" terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground and Canada's Front de Libération du Québec. These groups were open in their support for Castro, Mao, the Viet Cong, and the Soviet Union. They used, advocated, and incited violence, including murder. Several of the leading members of the Weathermen are now leading "progressive" education theorists and children's rights advocates. Two of them hosted Barack Obama's first-ever campaign event in their home, and one of them -- one who regarded the murder of twenty-five million Americans as a practical necessity of The Revolution -- worked together on multi-million dollar community organizing projects with Obama, as well as probably having a hand in writing the latter's most famous autobiography.

The very progressive Communist Party USA, whose current leadership includes at least one person who received formal honors from the Soviet Union, has boisterously supported Obama throughout his presidency, and cited his key agenda items as the most practical road to socialism in America -- a reasonable position, as Obama's agenda bears a striking resemblance to that of the progressive co-authors of the famous little manifesto whence the CPUSA gets its mission statement.

See the problem? Sorting the "genuine" progressives from the power-mad lunatics gets more complicated with each step. Where, exactly, is the cutoff point, the line in the sand distinguishing the bloodstained tyrants from the "real" progressives, who sincerely wish to promote the cause of equality, fairness, and rights?

-snip-

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/d...l#ixzz2OSy3mC29
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

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Zitat

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Indeed, apart from their declared advocacy of equality, fairness, and rights, the one thing all these progressives -- genuine or otherwise -- seem to have in common is cold-bloodedness. That is, they not only show contempt for individual human life, but they also tend towards statements, sentiments, and policies that would actively require the deaths of many people -- and this requirement seems not to bother any of them very much. Progressivism, as I have previously argued, is in part a death cult.

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Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #3

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Zitat

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Indeed, apart from their declared advocacy of equality, fairness, and rights, the one thing all these progressives -- genuine or otherwise -- seem to have in common is cold-bloodedness. That is, they not only show contempt for individual human life, but they also tend towards statements, sentiments, and policies that would actively require the deaths of many people -- and this requirement seems not to bother any of them very much. Progressivism, as I have previously argued, is in part a death cult.

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To drive this point home, look up and watch Hillary's statement about the men killed in Libya, she said"what difference does it make", in other words they were dead so what. Who fracking cares. Hillary progressive to the bone.