Editor’s Note: We offer another fine article by our friend, Adam Piggott, the Gentleman Adventurer. The article is also posted on his site. We encourage you to visit his blog and read his other though-provoking material.
I was reminded this week of how far the Right has shifted towards the Left over the last twenty years when I saw good old Hillary Clinton’s quote from almost twenty five years ago – “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.”
Rare is of course the key part of this little snippet of deception. In the quarter of a century since this blather the USA has set up a government offshoot in Planned Parenthood which is in the business of encouraging women to have abortions. The Left has shifted position from one of assuming that abortion is only a matter of last resort to one where it is now promoted as a lifestyle choice. This is the old “slippery slope” argument that the Right has constantly warned against but in the process has succeeded in doing exactly nothing about.
But not only has the Right done nothing to combat orthodoxies such as this, it has over time assumed the position of the Left on so many issues. Now a statement that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare would not be out of place coming from the lips of conservative leaders. In fact, I have little doubt that they would be attacked by the Left if they uttered this phrase today. The Left’s own platforms that were seen as radical just a quarter of a century ago are now so conservative as to be unacceptable in polite latte-sipping society.
Progressives are incapable of creation. All they are good for is to take our culture down into a death spiral in the name of progress and modernism. Leftists cannot hold to their own platforms of recent history because they are in a constant competitive race to see who can be the most radical and outlandish among them. Witness the following tweet:
Is this real or is it a piss-take? The fact that we are unsure is evidence enough that we are on a fast train going down a mountain and the brakes are gone. The alt-right are classified as extremists not because we are extreme but because our culture has degraded so quickly that conservative statements that would have been seen as reasonable twenty five years ago are now classified as hate speech.
Of course it is always the Left that gets to determine what is hate speech and what is not. Whoever gets to define hate is the one with the power. But the Right has been so terrified of being labeled as racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever else the hate-defining morass comes up with that the end result is a complete capitulation of former conservative values.
The other attack that progressives utilize with great frequency is that anyone holding on to traditional values is “old fashioned”. The assumption is that modernity is good and has value in of itself, so that anything they come up with today is not only brilliant but automatically superior to anything that humanity invented in the space of human history. The only two exceptions to this progressive rule are a couple of chaps called Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.
This constant state of change which as I mentioned earlier is competitive, has as its end result the public lunacy that we witness today in our previously venerable institutions. It is competitive precisely because it offers its adherents moral rectitude. The progressive left consider themselves to be good people because of what they believe in. They have mistaken change for progress, and progress for virtue, and virtue for ethics. And along the way they have succeeded in distorting the definitions of those terms to the point where conservatives have trouble understanding what they mean. That they are neither virtuous nor ethical is irrelevant due to the fact that they have been conditioned to believe that a rigorous and frenzied state of change will confer these traits upon them by default.
This is why a progressive today can no more hold to Hillary Clinton’s previous line on abortion than a fish can ride a bicycle, for want of a better metaphor. Since change is their almighty they are then beholden to its worship for its own sake, regardless of the effect the change has even on themselves. They will convince themselves that the most debasing actions are wonderful for the sole reason that they are sure that it confers virtue. Thus, persuading a young woman to have an abortion is not just right in their eyes, it is moral.
This type of behavior can only result in the snake consuming itself by eating its own tail. Conservatives would have done well to step back and let them destroy themselves. Instead they got on the train in an attempt to curry favor with what they assumed was the only way forward. They fell for the lie of change and progress. But the only progress that has been made is a line pointing straight down.
Change Is Not Necessarily Progress
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… and the question with “progress” is always “towards what?”
Yeah. I saw an article on how to attract Millennials to church and the first point was to not place value on tradition. I stopped reading after that. There isn’t a generation that ever existed that didn’t think they knew better than those before. The Hippies said don’t trust anyone over 30. I say anyone under 30 has shit for brains.
As much as I loved the movie ‘Logan’s Run’, we all know exceptionally well that instead of a futuristic Utopia, all of those children would be living in caves and eating grubs.
What always gets me is the way progressives assume that the lifestyle, the dream of ease and lack of physical hardships, and the standards of living that exists today is due entirely to their ‘social progress’.
But it’s entirely false. Our standard of living, our easy lifestyle, is due entirely to technological progress… a technological progress that requires meritocracy, profit, individual accomplishment, and the rewards excellence and a firm grasp of reality have to offer to exist. All of the things that progressives try so very hard to stamp out and eliminate from the human psych.
In a very real way, the ‘social growth’ that they so proudly claim as being responsible for progress has actually retarded that progress…hugely. If not for our technological progress, our nation…and quite possibly every other technological nation on earth, would be vastly behind all others. in every possible way.
Imagine, if you would, a society with the technological progress we have experienced for the last 50 years, WITHOUT being saddled by an ever-increasing welfare state… Without having our progress directed by the needs of socialism, without every erg being devoted solely to the wasted effort of tending to a burgeoning set of ‘special needs’ and social butterflies.
The Internet was inevitable… but what if our resources had been devoted to more important and valuable pursuits, without the albatross of entitled ’empowered females’ driving all of our intellect into irrelevant commercialism? Would we have already resolved interstellar travel? stamped out polluting industrial processes, or finally crafted a truly efficient energy storage medium? What if were capable of truly protecting ourselves from low-technology terrorism, making things like an earth-to-orbit elevator not only possible, but feasible?
What if the medical expertise used to produce fertility drugs, viagra, and sex-change medication had been devoted to conquering geriatrics or cancer? microminiaturization that could enable us to cure otherwise inoperable conditions, and what if the trillions we spent on programs to ‘level the playing field’ in a bergeron-esque struggle to lower the ability of the excellent in order to allow the useless to ‘compete with them’ had been withheld and left in the hands of the middle class… the true innovators and inventors, so that many more people could afford to send their children to a truly affordable private higher education that had to compete to provide the best and most relevant schooling for the future?
What if we were able to produce and afford a truly exceptional military, one that could keep us from the depradations of would-be overlords, but was advanced and trained enough that we wouldn’t have to constantly spend such a huge portion of our product in order to stay ‘barely ahead’ of our enemies? One that was not so concerned with ‘fair hiring’ and was instead devoted to the training and equipping of the best possible trained and equipped defenders? A populace that could similarly afford to equip and train themselves so that they could respond to violent crime and reduce it, without the need for an all-encompassing police surveillance state and the accompanying burnout that causes atrocities among otherwise good men that have been exposed for far too long to our ‘catch and release’ violent offenders methodology?
What if our families could afford to spend the time it takes to raise their children properly? Without the requirement of devoting such a huge part of our intelligence product to constantly evolving schemes to entertain people into soul-dead stupidity? If children could play outside without constant parental fear and the negligence demanded by constant competition with globalist manipulators destroying their earning potential to subsistence level locking them into their homes to be brainwashed into another generation of useless consumers and welfare leeches?
Where would we be now? Where would our country be… and where would the world, with the trickle down of advanced technology that always accompanies progress?
5
Very good post. Conservatives believed that they could tame, moderate, and arbitrarily restrict liberalism. This has been an essential flaw of the conservative movement. Liberalism cannot be contained; it must be pulled up by the roots and rejected at its very foundation.