Moral Schizophrenics

On campus, on the campaign trail.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
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17 thoughts on “Moral Schizophrenics

  1. Dr Hanson –
    You are very clever with words but it seems that this article can be summed as this: Liberal elites are phony two faced hypocrites and our higher education schools are more concerned with turning out PC robots rather than training students to think freely.

  2. This This is the way of an adulterous woman: She eats and wipes her mouth, And says, “I have done no wrong.” Proverbs 30:20 NASB.

    Why don’t the universities just get to their point, and hire a Muslim Extremist for $300,000 to speak to Eloi undergrads & cut off their heads. Would this be more honest than hiring Hillary to speak worms into their brains?

  3. Fantastic correlations. THANK YOU for speaking up.

    Isn’t it strange too how “Morality” used to include faithfulness to one wife and abstinence from sex before marriage, paying one’s debts and taxes honestly, speaking the truth at all times. Now it only seems to include race and gender issues, and even the latter is only a matter of public speech, not private exploitation and lechery.

  4. It appears to at least one old-retired-fart that the United States is on the road to emulating, if not becoming, another western banana republic.

    From Lois Lerner “taking the fifth” with impunity to Hillary Clinton openly boasting of brazen ineptitude under a “what does it matter” banner, and everything in between, so much of our government and other public institutions are ‘substandard’ (to paraphrase our banana republic fearful leader).

    Although our debt is oblivious, sliding-the-slippery-slop into a one party system still doesn’t seem quite likely. Possibilities notwithstanding, the one image that does it (or undoes it) for me is Lois Lerner’s granddaughter doing the same thing as her grandmother but not as a newly minted apparatchik full of ideology but as an apparatchik minted from a worn-out stamp-press and filled with privilege to grease her palm.

  5. The only issue that Dr.Hanson has not addressed in depth in his acutely accurate survey of the elite hypocrisy, is that the issue is a moral one and hence a direct descendant of the rejection of the acceptance of a transcendent moral code. As a Catholic who, in his youth, left the Church (since returned) and accepted the relativism of the elites, I am sensitive to the gross as well as the subtle aspects of ” do it if you feel good about it” morality.
    There is simply no way to fight an Islam that, however murderous, is so for what it deems irreducible morally correct reasons. Nor without a moral basis can we rely on the law as a restraint with its apparently easily avoided bite, not the internal belief in good and evil. But if we have abandoned the very basis of the society of the West, what is it we offer the world besides an increasingly empty, (if dazzling), materialism and sloppy emotionalism?
    For example,if we do not even accept that the obvious physical differences between men and women reflect far deeper differences in their entire being, (something so obvious that anyone can grasp it as a natural reality, how in the world can we offer that our flawed democratic republic as preferable to a theocratic totalitarianism?
    The ethical problems which Dr. Hanson describes are moral issues. But we have abandoned the shared morality of Christianity, weakened by the Protestant Revolution into the relativism of the dominance of individual judgement, which inevitable deteriorates, because of its chaotic nature, into the unrestrained dominance of the powerful.
    And who will watch the watchmen if they are not motivated to watch themselves?

  6. Obama broke off the chain and left lasting damage to the United States that may never be fixed. The Democrat spin-machine knows this; they need a Hail Mary pass. The Hillary playbook—- Recapture the fever of Obama making history, except this time with an estrogen twist. Look for the old battle-axe to bribe the public for a vote—– Republican’s, be ready to counter that.

  7. “…at worst PC seems to delude students into thinking that … they are morally correct…” Yes, PC is an ethos in itself that has and endgame: deconstruction of judeo-christian culture and values. From there the leap to totalitarian society is well, not a leap at all. The moral idiots preening on the American campus are the true useful idiots of the Left that cannot exist without a vacuum. So it is tribal warfare, coming to a shopping center near you and a “society” that seriously considers Hillary Clinton as its leader. Older Americans, mostly dead now, would say the solution is another Depression. Alas, that insight is no longer true, because the only lesson to be learned by these moral idiots in an economic catastrophe will be merely how to prey on the weak.
    Have a nice day.

  8. No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

    Wonder where this is from? The oath Hillary Took?

  9. Too true. And aptly described as usual. But I don’t think it’s as new or recent a phenomenon, relative to progressivism, as the good professor suggests. Nothing new under the sun. My considered view is that it began in earnest with FDR’s duplicitous character (Four Freedoms for all zero fidelity for the individual : Save the world for democracy incarcerate your own citizens who merely happen to look like one, and only one, of your enemy ethnicities), and really got into full swing with JFK’s even more advanced kink between private (those nuisance particulars) and public (the nuanced cosmos) morality. Both understandably garnered sympathy bordering on deified hero worship. Today’s schizoid dance is just a continuation.

    As for the free pass, aka get out of jail free fiasco and farce — It’s like my neighbor who incants “I’m going green” as he and his wife drive by in their twin SUVs one pulling a boat and the other a trailer-camper with a “drain lake powell” bumper sticker. All you have to do is say the magic words…and you’re saved.

  10. Do what i say, not what i do..

    hmmm…….nothing new under the sun,,,,it´s the old age sin of hypocrisy…

    Pauvre amérique……

  11. Right on point, as usual Victor.
    By the way, does anybody know if Hugh Hefner qualifies as a pajama boy?

  12. Not to mention the various movie and rock stars who join the elite progressives to lament the horrors of capitalism while enjoying the financial benefits of a free market entertainment industry.

  13. It’s a kind of carbon credit of morality. You pay in to the ethics bank so that you can live the life to which…

  14. If the road to hell is really paved with good intentions, there is somewhere right now an eight lane freeway headed straight into it with a stop and go traffic jam of buses filled with wealthy progressives. Those few not on board buses are still on the path of ‘walk the talk’ having gone ten feet in the last few years.

  15. Excellent article, as usual, but I’ve been conditioned — maybe it’s a Canadian thing? — to cringe at the use of “schizoprenic” to mean “multiple-personality.” “Multiple-personality morality” has the added benefit of alliteration.

    I only hope that all of this exposure of Clinton leads to her losing, but all I hear from the hoi-polloi here, at least, is “Are you ready for the first woman President?”

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