The Neo Progressive Turn

From Liel Leibovitz at Tablet, The Turn:

You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.

Why? Because, after 225 long and fruitful years of this terminology, “right” and “left” are now empty categories, meaning little more than “the blue team” and “the green team” in your summer camp’s color war. You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not “for the people” if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin, or force them out of their jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies. You are not “serious about economic inequality” when you happily order from Amazon without caring much for the devastating impact your purchases have on the small businesses that increasingly are either subjugated by Jeff Bezos’ behemoth or crushed by it altogether. You are not “for science” if you refuse to consider hypotheses that don’t conform to your political convictions and then try to ban critical thought and inquiry from the internet. You are not an “anti-racist” if you label—and sort!—people by race. You are not “against conformism” when you scare people out of voicing dissenting opinions.

When “the left” becomes the party of wealthy elites and state security agencies who preach racial division, state censorship, contempt for ordinary citizens and for the U.S. Constitution, and telling people what to do and think at every turn, then that’s the side you are on, if you are “on the left”—those are the policies and beliefs you stand for and have to defend. It doesn’t matter what good people “on the left” believed and did 60 or 70 years ago. Those people are dead now, mostly. They don’t define “the left” anymore than Abraham Lincoln defines the modern-day Republican Party or Jimi Hendrix defines Nickelback.

HKO

Tablet has become a great resource for such essays representing what I call the Neo Progressives; those who combine a sense of federal humanitarianism with classical liberal values of tolerance, reason and an open mind.  They reject the wokeness which has come to dominate the meaning of Progressivism as a pejorative from the right.

The left must contend with a failure to articulate the limits of federal power, and much of the right has abandoned it as well.  Conservatism, which is based on limits to the legitimacy AND the limited competence of central power and central planning, is a hard sell.

Left and Right may have become irrelevant terms, but this is because the associated underlying behavior has tarnished them. It doesn’t matter what you call them.



Drunk on Panic

“A crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.” James Madison

Is health care a crisis?  Bruce Walker gives a great answer at American Thinker.

August 24, 2009

Infatuation with Crisis

By Bruce Walker

read the entire article here

Excerpt

There is no health care crisis, and the problems which exist in any system are being quietly, privately, addressed.  How many people have seen jars in small businesses asking neighbors to donate money from a child needing medical care?  How many millions of Americans have given money and time for such wonderful facilities as St. Jude’s Hospital or the Shriner’s Hospital?  How many congregants of churches and synagogues visit people in the hospital or do volunteer work?  Aside from the simple truth that economic markets work better than central planners, private compassion intelligently provided is often the best medicine of all.
Perhaps the most profound repudiation of the Marxist notion of capitalists acting as soulless competitors grinding down the poor is vast outpouring of private contributions and, in the case of medical personnel in private practice, donated services not just for family and neighbors, but for total strangers.  I have known neurosurgeons who performed very expensive operations for nothing, even paying for the travel costs of patients.  I have known heart surgeons who have done the same thing.

What is our health care “crisis”?  It is a crisis of government bureaucrats who take years to allow effective, often inexpensive, drugs which have been used in Europe to be used in America.  It is a crisis of rapacious trial lawyers who never heal anyone, but who transfer massive amounts of money used for medical purposes into mansions and expensive law offices.  It is a morass of federal regulation of state medical assistance programs, so that federal regulations rather than common sense dictate how state governments care for their citizens?

Despite the depictions from the left, our crisis is essentially imaginary.  Information about medical care and procedures among patients is increasing exponentially because of the internet, as well as support groups which provide real experiences and also moral support.  Miracle drugs, which cost a lot, are still miracle drugs, and the pool of cheap, good, generic drugs grows virtually every day.  Without incentives or threats, those Americans who wish to live healthy lives through exercise, diet, abstinence from dangerous habits, and so forth, make that choice.   And a profoundly compassionate American society is providing much of what is still lacking.

Crisis, to the left, means imperfect.  It pleads, in spite of history, that Utopia is heaven, rather than hell.   All life has some sickness, some injury, some loneliness, some doubt, some fear, some want, and certain, though undetermined, end.  Our planet, also, will cool or warm or someday, perhaps, be hit by an asteroid.  Life is filled with imperfections that are not crises.  The real crisis is when we stop being human and become sheep, snapped by the Border Collies of the left into an existence of endless little crises like which pond to drink from or which lane to follow.  The real crisis is when we surrender our will to those drunk on our panic.