{"id":7518,"date":"2014-06-03T08:03:07","date_gmt":"2014-06-03T15:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7518"},"modified":"2014-06-03T10:20:49","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T17:20:49","slug":"the-new-regressives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-regressives\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Regressives"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via PJ Media. Photo by EdDriscoll.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today\u2019s liberalism is about as liberal as the Hellenistic world was Hellenic \u2014 a glossy veneer over a rotten core.<\/p>\n

In the old days, liberalism was about the means to an end, not the end itself. Since the days of Socrates, liberalism enshrined free inquiry, guided by inductive thinking and empirical use of data. Its enemies were not necessary organized religion \u2014 some of the Church fathers sought to find their salvation through the means of neo-Platonic cosmology and Aristotelian logic \u2014 or government or traditional custom and practice, but rather deductive thinking anywhere it was found.<\/p>\n

Yet today liberalism itself is deductive. It has descended into a constructed end that requires any means necessary to achieve it. Take any hot-button liberal issue: censorship, abortion, global warming, affirmative action, or illegal immigration. Note the liberal reaction.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t like most of the assigned readings that now pass for the university\u2019s seminal texts of the liberal arts. But on the other hand, I don\u2019t believe in triggers to warn students of what is inside a book. Otherwise, I might insist that universities put a warning on Rigoberta Mench\u00fa\u2019s or Barack Obama\u2019s autobiographies:\u00a0\u201cTrigger Warning:\u00a0<\/b>these are fictive accounts that rely on occasional invention and adaption and so do not, as the authors have claimed, reflect actual events.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Nor would I want a written trigger for the book flap of Doris Kearns Goodwin\u2019s\u00a0Team of Rivals<\/i>, along the following lines: \u201cTrigger Warning:<\/b>\u00a0Ms. Goodwin has admitted past plagiarism in her works, a fact that may be necessary to weigh when evaluating her present history.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Readers can determine for themselves to what degree past confessions of plagiarism should guide their own studies.<\/p>\n

Nor do I favor yanking Bill Maher off television \u2014 in Paula Deen or\u00a0Duck Dynasty<\/a><\/i>\u00a0fashion \u2014 for his serial profane and misogynist attacks on Sarah Palin and other conservative women. Nor do I want a running Trigger Warning on the bottom of the screen, as Maher talks: \u201cTrigger Warning<\/b>: We do not endorse Mr. Maher\u2019s sometime misogynistic and reactionary use of slurs against prominent women with whom he disagrees.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Nor do I think MSNBC must dump Al Sharpton for his\u00a0past homophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist rants<\/a>\u00a0that have on occasion contributed to fatal violence. If they wish to put a buffoon\u00a0who cannot read a teleprompted script<\/a>\u00a0on the air, then it is their market decision to do so, and we are adult enough to make the necessary channel selections. Nor do I think Chris Rock should apologize for calling the 4th\u00a0of July \u201cwhite people\u2019s day,\u201d or for that matter Jamie Foxx making a crude joke about the joy of killing white people as an actor in the latest Tarantino film. Free speech assumes that much of free speech is crude and vulgar.<\/p>\n

Nor would I object if Hillsdale College, Pepperdine University, or any other traditional school chose to invite a Democratic or liberal graduation speaker whose views I oppose. I once attended a Pepperdine graduate school graduation address given by a liberal Los Angeles politician that was little more than an unhinged rant against George W. Bush \u2014 and politely clapped through her pathetic rambling.<\/p>\n

All that is\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0today\u2019s liberalism, which instead believes in pursuance of race, class, and gender equality\u00a0by any means<\/a>\u00a0ofintimidation and censorship<\/a>\u00a0necessary.<\/p>\n

If science now allows a premature child to live outside the womb at 20 weeks, that knowledge must remain an irrelevant fact. Champions of abortion who used to insist that fetuses were not viable outside the womb simply have dropped that argument altogether. They are not interested any more in the issue of when life begins, but rather wedded deductively to the notion of terminating a pregnancy at almost anytime the mother might wish to do so. The unexamined career of Dr. Gosnell was not the aberration,\u00a0but the logical fruition<\/a>\u00a0of contemporary liberalism\u2019s unquestioned embrace of abortion.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have the expertise to know exactly to what degree, if any, man-caused carbon releases since the Industrial Revolution have heated up the planet, or whether the supposed heating is deleterious to the human condition, or whether the deleteriousness can be addressed by global statutes that are equitably enforced around the world without causing greater impoverishment and suffering.<\/p>\n

But I do know something about philology and the historical circumstances behind both euphemism and the constant shifting of vocabulary. Thus why did \u201cglobal warming\u201d begat \u201cclimate change\u201d that sometimes begat \u201cclimate chaos\u201d?<\/p>\n

And why, at this time of history\u2019s greatest carbon releases, has the planet not warmed in the last 17 years? Why was data massaged to create the so-called \u201chockey stick\u201d paradigm? Why sue satirist Mark Steyn for an inconvenient truth, or denigrate opponents\u00a0as \u201cdeniers\u201d<\/a>\u00a0as if they were some sort of Holocaust deniers, if the data is unimpeachable and speaks for itself?<\/p>\n

Add in the Climategate email scandals and\u00a0the green hucksterism of an Al Gore<\/a>\u00a0or the crony capitalism that leads to a Solyndra scandal, and there are liberal grounds for skepticism and ongoing debate. As for settled science, I once was told as teenager to take Vitamin C but avoid D, and now to take D but avoid C, in the manner that the PSA test was once the touchstone to diagnosing prostate cancer and now not so much, and then again in the future perhaps again essential to an early diagnosis. What most directly leads to heart disease \u2014 fatty foods, too much meat, too many carbohydrates, inflammation, or high cholesterol? Do we know yet the precise factors responsible for coronary disease when collating weight, genetics, exercise, and food intake? We know that the sedentary obese are at higher risk, but does science yet tell us why the thin with low cholesterol sometimes drop dead at 60?<\/p>\n

So when I hear the president state the science is \u201csettled\u201d and that he is prepared to act, he sounds like a Grand Inquisitioner who won\u2019t tolerate heresies such as a round Earth or heliocentric solar system. No science is ever quite settled, as more data is constantly gathered and theories of exegesis rebound off each other.<\/p>\n

When Eric Holder announces an endless affirmative action and leaves it at that, I want a classically liberal defense along the lines of something like the following: \u201cWe believe that preferences must be accorded to those of particular ethnic and racial backgrounds to compensate for past discrimination, whose legacy still makes it difficult even in the present age for particular groups to be treated equitably. And more importantly, we in the government have the ability to ascertain which groups are deserving of such preferences and which not, and also know how to determine which individuals meet precise criteria that earn them official minority status.\u201d Instead, we get something tantamount to \u201ceither support something nebulous called affirmative action or you\u2019re a racist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there is illegal immigration. Again, examine the philology, always the tip-off to an Orwellian rewrite. First we had illegal alien, then illegal immigrant, then undocumented immigrant, and now just immigrant. Such linguistic hocus pocus is necessary given the the present indefensible system of not enforcing the border, ignoring immigration law, and peddling the untruth that almost all illegal aliens fit the DREAM Act categories. Language must accomplish what reality cannot.<\/p>\n

But modern-day liberalism is still stranger than all that: after crafting a system of open borders and de facto amnesty that has allowed millions of impoverished from central Mexico to reside in California, the architects of such a system then shut down almost all means to provide illegal aliens a livelihood: water diversions from agriculture, the near extinction of the timber and mining industries, taboos against fracking and horizontal drilling, a virtual shut-down of new housing construction, and on and on.<\/p>\n

The result is that the Bay Area liberal looking down from his cupola has pulled up the stairway to his perch. He has essentially decreed that the impoverished will have very little livelihood in an overregulated state other than welfare and entry-level government jobs, and will live an apartheid existence in the Central Valley and L.A. basin, shut out from the coastal corridor where new housing is permanently on hold to any other than the top 2% of the state population.<\/p>\n

We should not use the word \u201cprogressive\u201d or \u201cliberal,\u201d given that on issues like abortion, affirmative action, the environment, illegal immigration, censorship, and a host of others, the left is reactionary to the core.<\/p>\n

In the spirit of changing words to reflect reality, I suggest that we call today\u2019s liberals \u201cregressives\u201d \u2014 fundamentalists who are wedded to\u00a0self-serving deductive doctrines<\/a>\u00a0that cannot sustain empirical scrutiny and exist mostly as fossilized theologies of the 1960s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media Today\u2019s liberalism is about as liberal as the Hellenistic world was Hellenic \u2014 a glossy veneer over a rotten core. In the old days, liberalism was about the means to an end, not the end itself. Since the days of Socrates, liberalism enshrined free inquiry, guided by inductive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[511,844,92,187],"tags":[1079,964,1082,527],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Xg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13818,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-traditionalist-the-plague-of-liberalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":7518,"position":0},"title":"The Traditionalist: the Plague of Liberalism","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 27, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Art19 and Just the News https:\/\/art19.com\/shows\/the-victor-davis-hanson-show\/episodes\/30cd21af-2522-46c0-b43d-3acc14cfdb6c","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-traditionalist-the-plague-of-liberalism\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10828,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/disruptive-politics-in-the-trump-era-yuval-levin-or-victor-davis-hanson\/","url_meta":{"origin":7518,"position":1},"title":"Disruptive Politics in the Trump Era: Yuval Levin or Victor Davis Hanson?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 16, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By John Fonte| December 15, 2017 American Greatness The crucial question for the American Right today, as it has been for at least 60 years, is: What is the nature of its confrontation with modern liberalism? Is it a policy argument over how to achieve the common goals of liberal\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7198,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/illiberal-liberalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":7518,"position":2},"title":"Illiberal Liberalism","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The left's disdain for ordinary Americans has deep historical roots. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas\u00a0 During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama let slip his disdain for the middle-class when he explained his lack of traction among such voters. \u201cIt\u2019s not surprising then,\u201d Obama said, \u201cthat they get bitter,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/482px-Presidentwoodrowwilson-241x300.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":494,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/graffiti-on-trees-high-speed-rail-to-nowhere-the-wages-of-liberalism-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":7518,"position":3},"title":"Graffiti on Trees, High-Speed Rail to Nowhere: The Wages of Liberalism","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 31, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Last week, while reading about an insolvent California\u2019s insistence on going ahead with the first leg of a proposed high-speed rail line (total cost of the system: an estimated $100-$300 billion), I heard the following story on a local ABC news affiliate about a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Left"","block_context":{"text":"The Left","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/liberalism\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2412,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/liberal-psychoses\/","url_meta":{"origin":7518,"position":4},"title":"Liberal Psychoses","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 25, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media How are we to make sense of flash mobbing, the London rioting, more hatred expressed for the Tea Party, more calls for ever more debt and spending, and Barack Obama\u2019s dive below 40% approval in the polls? Let me backtrack a bit. Paleolithic Liberalism\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Left"","block_context":{"text":"The Left","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/liberalism\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1476,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/liberalism-and-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":7518,"position":5},"title":"Liberalism and Islam?","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 31, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Top Muslim cleric Qaradawi urges western Muslims to 'liberalize' outwardly, anyway. by Raymond Ibrahim PJ Media A\u00a0recent episode\u00a0of the popular Arabic show\u00a0al-Sharia wa al-Haya\u00a0(Law and Life), which airs weekly on Al Jazeera and features renowned Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, addressed the important yet little known Muslim concept of\u00a0taysir\u00a0(pronounced \"tey-seer\").\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Raymond Ibrahim"","block_context":{"text":"Raymond Ibrahim","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/raymond-ibrahim\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7518"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7518"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7526,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7518\/revisions\/7526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}