Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Who we are and what we stand for

If you, like me, are a one-time liberal who looks on modern liberalism as an alien construct, you'll appreciate Richard Berry's American Thinker article about modern American liberalism. The whole article is (of course) excellent, but I was especially struck by this language:

In allying with the post-modern Left, American liberalism has broken the national compact. It has stepped outside the 230 year stream of American consensus. It rails shrilly against the American creed, civic and spiritual. It unreasoningly indicts the phenomenally successful American economic system. It heaps scorn upon idealistic American purposes in the world and, indeed, actually impedes as best it can every exercise of American self-defense. While American liberalism has morphed into post-modern Euro-leftism, the rest of America remains American, which is to say, thoroughly and congenitally anti-Left. The American mainstream upholds the American cultural tradition. The liberal-Left shills for multiculturalism. The American mainstream takes pride in America’s soaring historical achievements. The liberal-Left trashes that history and fabricates anti-historical propaganda. The American mainstream has always been and remains believingly and tolerantly Christian. The liberal-Left is aggressively agnostic and demands the de-Christianization of every American reference point, all in the guise of a false tolerance. The American mainstream is self-sacrificing and optimistic. The liberal-Left is almost comically narcissistic and devoured by bleak pessimism. The American mainstream wants to preserve and protect America and take her triumphantly into the future. The liberal-Left wants to overthrow the historical and actually existing America and replace her with the sort of Euro-Lefty utopia presently self-destructing before our very eyes in Old Europe.
This lends credence to my sense that I haven't changed much politically. It's the politics that have reoriented themselves around me.