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Why Are Liberals So Illiberal?

At my age you can start to reference things by saying “At my age” thanks to a long enough timeframe to see significant changes that have taken place in a given nation. You can see this at work when you look at millennials who seem baffled at the notion that what they have experienced in their life doesn’t sum up human history, like there is the last ten years and before that was the Civil War. My wife and I were laughing at this story the other night:

Grease was released in 1978 and is supposed to be set in 1958. According to these absolute idiots in the U.K., the movie is a problem because:
– There are too many White people in the school
In the 1950s the U.S. was almost 90% White and blacks were still concentrated in the south and a few large northern cities. I went to a decent sized high school in Ohio in the late 1980s and we had one whole black kid in the entire school, two grades older than me. It would be very common in many parts of the country to have no black kids in a school system in 1978, much less in 1958. 
– There are no homosexual characters and at one point boys and girls at a dance are told there can be no same sex couples dancing.
Again, this is supposed to be in 1958. In high school in the 1980s there wasn’t a single openly homosexual student in my school, much less some boy dressing like a girl. That would have been a great way to get your ass kicked every day. Double so in the 1950s. Most of American history wasn’t a place where you were required to pretend degenerates were not freaks and perverts.
– The movie is apparently also “sexist”/misogynistic 
See points one and two above. Until relatively recently, girls in high school tried to look their best. They wore nice, clean clothing, they fussed about their hair and worried about their weight. It wasn’t unusual in my high school in the 80s for girls to wear a pressed blouse, skirt and nylons and heels to school. Girls wanted to attract boys and vice versa. The awkward dance between boys and girls was a major part of teen life and this movie like so many others reflects that reality. Also as part of this was the supposed “slut shaming” in Grease and again, sounding like a broken record, being a slutty girl wasn’t a compliment for most of American history. Girls who took the shortcut to male affection by putting out were rightly shamed in high school. What happens in Grease is more or less exactly what would have happened in real life.
Remember when movies reflected the era they were set in rather than trying to shoehorn today’s bullshit into the film? You might also recall that movies were infinitely more enjoyable when you weren’t being hectored non-stop. The funny thing is that Grease could really be considered, for it’s time, to be a very liberal movie that mocked the stuffy conservative morals of the day.
Anyway, that is just one example. The people commenting were infuriated that the BBC would even show such a movie. The horror! 
Here is where things have changed in my lifetime. 
Being a liberal used to mean things like concern for workers being exploited by big business, staying out of wars, free speech and expression and of course loosened sexual morals. They were always yammering on and on about stuff, arguing with conservatives and each other. They believed in what they were saying and they wanted to tell you why you were wrong if you didn’t believe the same thing. The hippies and the music counterculture of the 60s and 70s was all about “fighting the man” and struggling against the prevailing culture. Even as recently as the early 90s when I was in college, liberals were still game for an argument.
Then something began to change. 
More and more Americans went to college and their professors were increasingly monolithic in their far left ideology. At the same time teachers in public schools were being taught less about teaching and their subject matter and a lot more about “justice” and various groovy theories about teaching that have led to a precipitous decline in educational standards. The entertainment world shifted hard to the left. These are all well known and lamented but less well considered was a different change: corporate America joined forces with their one time enemy on the Left. Today what you hear from the largest corporations and what you hear from far Left activists is virtually identical. 
In short, liberals have become what they once hated and don’t even seem to realize it. They are not the counter-culture, no matter how much they talk about “resistance”. How can you resist the very system that you are deeply invested in supporting and that in turn supports you?
What is more important, liberals today have nothing interesting to say. They are mostly middle or upper class Whites, deeply embedded in corporate consumerism, talking endlessly about racial justice. They use terms like “Latinx” that no actual mestizo uses or recognizes. They throw rocks through the windows of the same Starbucks they patronize in the name of black Lives Matter but go out of their way to not live anywhere near black people. They talk about communism but would die in a matter of days without the machinery of capitalism to provide them with their every want and desire. 
They used to think censorship was the worst thing in the world but now are the biggest advocates of censoring political speech, to the point where offering an opinion they dislike sends them into paroxysms of agony and is considered to be literal violence. The people you once could never get to shut up now are incapable of engaging in even the most mild debate over the most innocuous topics.
Far from the supposedly free spirits of the Vietnam era, today’s liberals are the most illiberal, violently angry and censorious people around. Their brand of secular leftist legalism puts the most conservative Christians sects to shame.
I still use liberal to describe people on the Left even though they are the most illiberal and intolerant people in America because it is lazy and the accepted term, just as I use conservative to describe people on the Right even though they never conserve anything. Still, it is worth noting that the two terms used to categorize all of our political discourse are essentially meaningless today. Our political world has shifted far from where it once was and we are entering a very different, very dangerous new world that really demands some new definitions.

25 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    Speaking of movies that can't possibly be made today…

    I love the scene in Driving Miss Daisy wherein all the do-gooding affluent White women gather at a venue for the advancement of civil rights in the south, leaving their black chauffeurs outside guarding their expensive automobiles. Although it devolves into a typical Whites-who-have-seen-the-error-of-their-ways morality play, the movie is a wonderful portrayal of the unctuous, virtue-broadcasting White Liberal Lady safely removed from the reach of those nasty sub-human creatures whose cause she adopts.

    The stepin fetchit servant who eventually wins over lily-White Miss Daisy, played by the godly Morgan Freeman, is a testament to pure Hollywood hokum (right down to his character's name, 'Hoke'). It wasn't quite Wakanda-worthy, but I am sure that every homeboy and -girl walked out of the theater after watching that treacly twaddle feeling all kinds of self-righteous and morally superior.

    And Canadian comedian Dan Aykroyd as a southern gentleman was quite a hoot.

    TBC

  2. jl

    Way back when I used to consider myself liberal for all the reasons you stated. As a young man in the 80's I thought the Reagan Party/Moral Majority folks were nothing but oppressors and I wanted nothing to do with their ilk… Of course as a teen you don't know what you don't know and everything is seen through a teenager's lense. I was 10 years old when Grease was released and was not allowed to see it due to its PG rating and strict evangelical parents. When I finally got around to seeing it 10 years later, to see what all the fuss was about, I was utterly underwhelmed. But compared to today's Hollywood excrement, its a freakin' masterpiece. The very idea that some people are offended by that film just goes to show how the modern era has eliminated most "serious" problems. The only reason they can complain about this kind of crap is because their lives are so damn easy. Let's see how many wokeness deficiency problems we have when everyone has to work the fields 10 hours a day to simply feed themselves. If anyone should be "cancelled" its these bleating dumb, wet babies.

  3. Justin_O_Guy

    IOW, Grease is a movie about normal people who were celebrating their young lives and the cast were what would have been the norm for the time.
    If someone made a movie about the writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights , would they be expected to use gender confused people and a cast that were some happy percentage of minorities and women to satisfy the butthurt snowflakes of today, rather than just go with an historically ACCURATE cast??

  4. Anonymous

    NOT "progressives" these THUGS are REgressives. They want to return to a FEUDAL, TOTALITARIAN, AGRARIAN, grubbing-in-the-dirt lifestyle . ….. for YOU.
    Communism/Socialism is a reversion to a TRIBAL, AGRARIAN life style from thousands of years ago. Look where the PROGRESSIVE USSR went, Mao's CCP, Pol Pot, such PROGRESS.
    It is a huddling together of superstitious, terrified of the darkness, ignoramouses.
    "progressives"??? In what way is sexual misconduct and Bigoted hate of American Freedom "progressive"? WITCH doctors and tree worship are regression.
    "progressive"? WHERE are they "progressing"???? to another Bolshevik Holodomor?
    Progressing on the SHORT bus?
    Progressively handing out PARTICIPATION TROPHIES?
    The Founding Fathers were well versed in the Classics of Western Civilization and Law.
    These "progressives" cannot even grasp the simplest rules of evidence and "innocent until PROVEN guilty".
    They are PROUD of being stupid — watch them tear down ANY statue they see because reading the plaque is TOO HARD.
    it is now considered progressive to ban a feminist because she offended a man.
    Their ONLY redeeming quality is Socialist/Commies always kill off the "educated-elite-teachers" that created them with their muddle headed "deep thots".

  5. CPL Antero Rokka

    Me either – we RARELY go to the cinema, if at all. Flicks today are pure rubbish and Commie propaganda.

    PS I attended public schools in Ohio in the 1950s. Cleveland–there were blacks – BUT – 80% of them had INTACT FAMILIES! Black fathers attended their sons sports, met their classroom teachers, helped their kids with homework! A lot of the black fathers had served in WW2 and came back to Ohio slowly integrating.

    Hey! Hey! LBJ–whadaya do to destroy the black family today? The Dems needed voting "slaves."

    PPS I was a HS teacher in one of Cleveland's ghetto schools in the 1970s. My HS English honors class responded to my lesson on great literature as follows: "Shakespeare? WHO DAT DUDE?"

    …"honors class" back in the 1970s–it only took less than 20 years to destroy black family cohesion. You can imagine what goes on in PS today.

  6. Jimmy the Saint

    "corporate America joined forces with their one time enemy on the Left. Today what you hear from the largest corporations and what you hear from far Left activists is virtually identical."

    Corporations exist to make money – they chase the markets that they think will make them the most. They've bet on what the future will be and who will control it. Looking at the course that the US and the West have taken over the last 30+ years, it's hard to argue that they're wrong, unfortunately.

  7. Yes Huahuahua! Yes YESSS!

    Unlike many of my fellow leftists, I will promote your right to freedoms of speech/expression anytime, any place- with few exceptions: violent threats, bomb recipes, cp, doxing.. I think thats it. I was building a system where you could comment on any webpage in existence (and even ones that don't exist yet) but got distracted by an online-only church project I'm working on.

    I find that values have changed from right to left and back every decade or so, but each time is increasing (on both sides). Kind of like a kid riding a bicycle, who over-corrects a few times before crashing said bike. Certainly the Church has lost power- for instance the Church of England granted itself the official responsibility to burn heretics and witches alive in the year 401AD, and only had that power robbed from it a few hundred years ago. On occasion, schismatics (offshoot faction priests) were tortured for 14 years before allowed the mercy of being burnt alive. Castrating and then raping choir-boys was common-place by the Roman Catholics, and pederasty was one of the things Martin Luther complained about in his famous "I'm not lying to you" letter. He may have been a shrill and schizophrenic alarmist, but by burning his followers alive Catholics should have lost all their moral authority for centuries, in my book. At the same time, Protestants and specifically Evangelicals could dial back their hate toward "teh gaze" a few centuries after mass-murdering them alongside the Jews and socialists during the Holocaust. Er.. well technically the socialists were eliminated first, especially within the SA leadership (Rohm, etc.) during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Conservatives typically say the Nazis were socialists, and forget (or were never taught) that that the leftists / socialists / communists were murdered or kicked out in 34. If you doubt that, google "Niemoller First they came for"- and while you are at it "Nazi Religion". Niemoller is a hero of mine, as is Einstein and MLK Jr. All non-violent socialists, I should add- showing my colors. 😛 Believe it or not, they weren't evil people. Nor were they delicate snowflakes.

  8. Yes Huahuahua! Yes YESSS!

    As a liberal, I can't deny that. I've never seen Hamilton, though, just heard about it. In terms of the Founding Fathers, I'm more a Thomas Jefferson kind of guy. Sure, he had 600 slaves and had the little ones beaten if they didn't produce 5000 nails a day for him, and maybe bought 14 year old slave in Paris to breed 7 times over the next decade (when he was getting close to 50)- but none of that stuff was wrong back then. It was the status quo. There was no minimum age of consent in general- when they first put that in to law, that age was 7 years old in Delaware. Times have changed.. now Epstein is perhaps equally hated to Hitler due to the pompous outrage of #MeToo and the ex-Satanic-Panic crowd (who trickled into Pizzagate crowd and then Q-worship-go-allers, from what I can tell.) Talk about strange bedfellows- #MeToo and Pizzagaters! 🙂

    If anybody is a delicate snowflake, it was the kind of guys who created the "anti white slavery laws" aka (this was/is an actual real thing: "The Mann Act". 😛 Its funny, because slavery- as you may know, was already quite illegal. You didn't need another law to make it "especially illegal". The laws were a way to prevent black men from being able to have sex with consenting white women, and also to marry them- or even to sleep under the same roof! If that isn't some profoundly intense sexual insecurity of the delicate snowflake variety, I don't know what is.

    This isn't to say that the right didn't have men of achievement over the past century. Lt Calley and his men may not fit the PC mold of typical heros because they raped, mutilated, tortured, and killed 11 year old girls- but they were fighting the malnourished proxies of the country that wiped out 80% of the Nazis.. so by definition they have the moral high ground.. at least according to Senator Joe McCarthy and the also J Edgar Hoover, who ran the FB Eye as a deep state sexual blackmail operation after first getting himself blackmailed by Meyer Lansky,
    Jewish Mob Boss extraordinaire. (Who is linked with ex-President Trump by Roy Cohn, his apprentice of sorts. Roy was a nasty piece of work and full-blown McCarthyist.)

    Both President Nixon and future-President Carter loved the guy, and did him huge favors… like getting his sentence reduced to 3 years of house arrest (eg shelter at home.) 90% of the country thought he was awesome even after learning of what he and his men did to about 500 women and their children, and were upset the coverup eventually failed. Imagine Clinton and Trump sticking by Epstein during the trial and then working together to get him off the hook. That is how popular Calley was. –

    My bold claim: thats pretty messed up. Fast forward to the mid 2000s, and some dude gets 20 years in prison for watching a lewd cartoon, because it offended the morality of some activist judge in Virginia (and also John Ashcroft.) My bold claim: that's messed up in the other direction. You shouldn't get 7X the sentence received for butchering/raping a mountain of people for watching/uploading a cartoon. Am I wrong?

  9. Itajara "Goliath Grouper" Online

    A dude who went by the name George Orwell wrote

    "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for **DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM**."

    This is in his essay titled "Why I Write" that can be found all over the place. He continues:

    "…My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, I am going to produce a work of art. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose."

    You are correct to think that he hated Communism. Why? This blew my mind.. I found it on his Wikiquote page. In the preface for Animal Farm (the old Ukrainian edition):

    "In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement."

    Sadly, the libertarian/democratic socialists like Orwell, Einstein, and MLK Jr are in short supply these days, far more seem to be pursuing the mainline Stalinist cult of stupidity that goes by the moniker "the new left" in some circles. The only oldschoolers I know of are Noam Chomsky, the Dalai Lama, and maybe Slavoj Žižek. Crazy as it sounds, it was the libs who founded the Free Speech Movement, while Nixon & then Reagan tried to shut it down.

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