As a general rule, Spot avoids reading Craig Westover. Or maybe not so much avoids as it doesn't occur to Spot to go to the sites where Captain Fishsticks hangs out. However, one of his recent columns was mentioned over at Across the Great Divide, so Spot did go to read The Problem with Progressives. Charlie already did a nice job on Sticks, summing up the context of the column, but Spot has a couple of more thoughts. Go read Charlie, though.
Sticks' argument can be summed up as, You can't trust those progressives; there is no limit to their rapacity. For example:
Progressivism is politics as religion. Left-leaning progressivism strives to impose values on society every bit as aggressively as the Christian right pushing a moral agenda of "family values." Whether the supreme authority over individual liberty is a secular state or a religious one, the operative word is "supreme." Progressivism is ultimately about total control.
Progressivism is immune to restraint; it respects no constitutional limits on government. The progressive may prefer the near-sacramental word "holistic" to describe the effort to create a better world, but, as National Review's Jonah Goldberg reminds us, Mussolini coined the word "totalitarian" for the progressive vision — a society where everyone belongs, where everyone is taken care of, where everything is inside the state and nothing is outside the state, where there are no hard trade-offs.
By quoting Jonah Goldberg as a source, of course, the esteem in which Sticks is held plummets dramatically. But when he quotes Jonah Goldberg who is in turn quoting with approval Benito Mussolini, Spot has to wonder if Sticks has finally slipped the surely bonds of earth and, well, just floated off, a shiny mylar balloon advertising Mrs. Paul's products.
Yes, when the definitive history of twentieth-century Italy is finally written, no doubt it will contain chapters dedicated to the study of how the Black Shirts valiantly fought off the Progressives.
It is so nice when one doesn't have to make the fascist analogies because they make themselves.
Sticks wants you, boys and girls, to think that all progressives are just a bunch of utopian dreamers. But they aren't, any more than all conservatives are like Sticks!
In fact, Sticks, and Davey Strom, and King Banaian all come from a completely different branch of the evolutionary tree from Harold Stassen, Elmer Anderson, Arne Carlson, and Dave Durenberger.
No comments:
Post a Comment