I began blogging as a political blogger and I continue as one. My political position is that only egalitarian democracy and equal justice, civic, economic and social justice are the only legitimate form of government, the only legitimate economic and judicial systems, the only legitimate goals of any society. I am convinced that those can't survive if a majority of people are not actually convinced of that, that where the moral and intellectual basis of such a society and, so, such a political system can arise only when those are written on the heart of The People. I am convinced through reading history and being old enough to have witnessed and experienced some of it, to have concluded that any force, any legal theory, any kind of thing which undermines that social, intellectual and cultural substrate of egalitarian democracy must not only be rejected, but resisted.
People have equal rights, their ideas don't and should not be treated as having equal rights. There is no even logically coherent reason to not acknowledge that ideas that reject equality are not due to be held as equally deserving of the encouragement or even protection of society, of social institutions or of democratic political institutions or courts - all of which have their only legitimate function in protecting egalitarian democracy. It is one of the most lunatic of ideas on the phony imitation of a liberal left that ideas such as Nazism, as Stalinism, or Trotskyism or other democracy denying, democracy destroying ideas should be given an equal chance to gull the susceptible as the idea that all people are created equal and endowed with equal rights and moral responsibilities by The Creator.
The idea that ideas that would lead to the destruction of democracy deserved equal time to be heard and considered out of some irrational assumption that allowing such ideas to, very possibly, gain currency in the culture was "good for democracy" is sheer lunacy. I grew up with many intellectuals who puzzled, endlessly over the question of how Germany, with one of the greatest of scientific, intellectual cultural elites, could have gone for Nazism as they, themselves refused to look at the power of the most evil, insane, irrational and hate filled ideologies did, in fact, have that power to rule over such a nation and wreak the most horrible results. The fact is people, in the absence of sufficient and effective moral restraint will, too often, allow that to happen. It doesn't much matter what the details of that are. Some of our most evil ideologies, our most evil inclinations are fully in accord with some of our stronger desires and our willingness to ignore the obvious consequences of pursuing them. Allowing such ideas equal time out of some automatic and ill considered notion of "fairness" to the people who want to promote those in order for them to achieve power is worse than criminally insane, it is willfully insane.
The right to destroy or risk destroying democracy for your personal gain or even edification does not exist, any "right" that it might have to be heard is extinguished in the self-generating acid of its own denial of rights which relieves anyone opposing that idea of granting it equal rights.
I think the left was gulled into ignoring the definitive, qualitative and realistic self-condemning features of such ideas out of the daffy notion that Marxists were being treated unfairly. I think the way that Marxists achieved that was by co-opting the language economic democracy of the original socialist ideals of workers control of the means of production when, in practice, they not only wouldn't put that into practice but the anti-democratic features of Marxism would prevent that from happening. That is certainly how it has worked out in practice.
The legal theorists who pushed those notions of fairness to fascists, niceness to Nazis and the such to the red-fascists of Marxism had their own personally enriching, personally enhancing reasons for doing so. Their actual goals were not the protection, promotion and advancement of equal justice or they would not have refused to notice that the clients they were enabling were the very people who would extinguish equal justice and who would impose a tyranny that would deny the very rights they sought for everyone else.
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American liberals are the victims of their own sense of niceness and the slogans of fairness matched with an unwillingness to decide, once and for all, that some ideas are good and some are not only merely bad ideas but evil ideas with evil intentions. While there were the full range of equal rights held by the people who held those bad and even evil ideas, allowing the possibility of their evil ideas to gain hold and to exert power was as stupid as it was intellectually lazy and morally irresponsible. There was never any reason to allow any of the mass murdering ideologies of the 20th century any kind of chance to gain currency, those held to be vulgar and distasteful like fascism or Nazism or those with better PR due to the status of their supporters with college credentials.
Any good that mid-20th-century liberalism held was damaged through the association with Marxism in ways that conservatism was not harmed by its association with fascism and even Nazism - when people were so impolite as to point that out. That is because liberalism is either for the values of equal justice, of economic justice and for the equally held moral obligation to practice those or it is an incoherent and impotent blob of rhetoric. I think the ideological program of the "fairness" fools made the resultant liberalism appear insipid and foolish, it rendered it inspid, foolish and unable to wield power. I think there are very good reasons that the strongest political figure in post-war American liberalism was Lyndon Johnson and not the figures of the North Eastern elite who were more wedded to the "intellectual" liberalism of Adlai Stevenson. I think if he hadn't been roped into the war in Vietnam - by figures from the Kennedy administration - Johnson's liberalism stood a very good chance of being effective. The Lyndon Johnson who was a ruthless, master politician as a Senator, once freed from being tied to the local interests of his state, would have been the most liberal of them all. And he was a real, genuine, anti-Communist.
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The Progressive magazine has a
strange little piece in it about the antics of the atheist "Satanic Temple" a "religious group" whose real purpose is to promote atheism through ridiculing Christianity and to claim that it is granted a privileged status. The issue is after-school religious groups being allowed access to school property and promotion among students. I always held that the Supreme Court majority was up to no good when they allowed sectarian groups access to public property, that it would lead to all manner of trouble and that liberals would bear the brunt of the consequences. And that groups like the "Satanic Temple" atheists would be the venue through which that damage was done. Grandstanding, attention getters love to use the vulgar, the immoral, the baddest of the baddest symbolism to gain themselves attention. If the atheist group had been honest as to their atheist identity, they would not have provoked the reaction they do by adopting the symbolism of evil, itself to get them attention.
That kind of attention-getting antic through intentional offense and eliciting fear is about as politically stupid as anything the play-left has been addicted to. And it is exactly the kind of thing that the Republican-corporate right has used against the real left, over and over again to rather impressive success. Impressive to anyone who really cares about making political progress, you would think - though with such lefty magazines as The Progressive stupidly and counterproductively advocating that crap, that hard reality gets blunted, in reality. That it gets publicity for the atheists of the "Satanic Temple" is, of course, their goal. They don't care if they turn off more people than they attract because democratic government isn't their real goal.
The goals of lefty self-promotion and the commercial need of lefty organizations and publications to create a buzz and get publicity have, more often than not, been more in line with making liberalism ballot box poison than not. This year, as every year, the electorally counter-productive features of the lefty magazines show that they and the poeple who run them are incapable of learning from experience and observation of recent history. My response to a lot of what they have published this year is a dismissive, bahh!
The magazine piece begins with something I'd object to, as well, but not on the same basis that the author does.
For two straight weeks this summer I noticed something odd when I dropped my step daughter off at day camp. Although the facility that hosted the camp was run by Prince George’s County, Maryland—a government entity—loud gospel music was constantly blaring from camp speakers.
I wasn't personally offended, but it bothered me that it didn't seem to occur to the camp administrators that not everyone using that facility is Christian. And, is it really appropriate for government-run facilities to spread religious messages?
What the hell is a summer camp doing "blaring" ANY MUSIC over speakers? Summer camp with canned music? What an awful thing to do to children who should be being exposed to life without background music. If I were a parent, I'd agitate to turn off the sound track. American children need to be relieved of the constant programming their lives consist of. Though I wonder what "gospel music" it was and if it was really "gospel music" and if it was "constantly blaring" from speakers. I'd like names of artists and songs before I decided the description was accurate. I would also like to know the nature of the "Christianity" the children were alleged to be indoctrinated into because I can well imagine many Christian parents would object to what passes as a lot of "gospel music" these days. Much of what I've heard are more Hollywood torch songs and TV advertisements than anything to do with the Gospel of Jesus. Blaring music from loud speakers robs or impedes the experience of observation and of thinking. I'd fight like hell to get them turned off in any public venue but especially those which are supposed to serve children.
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The easiest, cleanest thing to do would be the traditional erection of a wall of separation between even the appearance of any official government entity and involvement with religion, though that easy and clean barrier is not going to ever be achieved because the very people who are the basis of any moral authority the government has will, often, want to breech that barrier.
And it is inescapable that the strongest force in the United States that promotes the very morality that egalitarian democracy depends on is religious and, in most cases. that religion will be Christian in character. To the extent that Christianity is "privileged" in the United States, it is "privileged" due to the fact that it is the affiliation of the majority of citizens of the United States. That is a fact and a given. And I don't think that fact is unrelated to the achievements of democracy, such as we have accomplished. It has been, and I assert, still is crucial in the extension of rights through an assertion of equality and moral obligations.
It has been my experience that while atheist and other entities hostile to religion will be big on the assertion of THEIR rights - even as their materialism refutes the existence of such metaphysical entities and the source of them - they aren't so hot on the notion of absolute moral obligations to respect those rights. The fact is that almost all Americans who hold that most basic of political moral absolutes, that you are to treat other people as you would have them treat you, hold that in the context of their religious belief that THEIR CREATOR imposed that moral obligation on them. Where the RELIGIOUS basis of that belief has corroded, the feeling or inclination to practice that is merely a matter of exterior constraint. And, as our legal system demonstrates in a shocking number of cases, that kind of secular constraint is hardly reliable.
I doubt that it is possible or in any way desirable to try to maintain any kind of wall between the moral absolutes that democracy is based in or the religious basis of those moral absolutes, though there is the possibility of not having government in the business of establishing one denomination WHICH HOLDS THOSE MORAL ABSOLUTES over another one. It certainly doesn't have any kind of realistic legal requirement to not distinguish between those which do hold those values and any religious or ideological entity which denies or rejects them and which work to undermine them. It certainly has a moral obligation to not allow their promotion using public property. The anti-religious Hitler Youth movement or its equivalent in Stalinist Russia translated into American English, using American symbolism should certainly never be allowed access to the public schools. Any "liberal" who would hold that such stuff should be allowed is an idiot, an ass or a willing tool of the anti-democratic ideology that such a group is pushing, no matter how long they've worked with any alleged "civil liberties" group which has, in fact, done such damage to democracy.
I don't think that any country in which some religion which holds that moral absolute is NOT a requirement imposed on us by GOD will attain, practice or retain democracy. Nothing else suffices, even when it is an absolute moral assertion of religion it is hardly something you can count on happening at any given time. And that is a religious holding, there is, literally, nothing in atheism to make that out of, there is everything in materialism, especially in neo-Darwinian materailist dogma, that undermines that as a real, effective force in human society. The high priests of that atheist creed, from Ernst Haeckel to Richard Dawkins* have admitted that, the high priests of its
physics based sect sometimes do as well.
Like it or not, in the United States, democracy is intimately and inseparably connected to the belief in religion. In most cases that will be Christianity, though I am fully comfortable with any religion that holds, firmly, to the position that our Creator endowed us with those rights and moral obligations could achieve and sustain democracy. I think secularism, as an ideology and as a cultural norm corrodes democracy through weakening and destroying an effective belief in them and their manifestation as a cultural and, so, political phenomenon. Vulgar consumerism is the self-centered religion that generally replaces it under the tepid, self-interested secularism that has been promoted in the post-war period.
* I have written many posts on that topic, you can find them by searching this blog using appropriate search terms.
Update: Well, while I don't say that I'd go so far as to an accusation that The Progressive magazine has a purpose of promoting atheism through attacking Christianity, I do know that back when I had a subscription, the mis-spelling of my name on my address label from them started appearing on entirely unsolicited"Skeptical Inquirer" and "Freedom From Religion" junk mail. It was one of the reasons I dropped my subscription to that magazine before I did some of the others. That junk mail in my pre-computer years was my first introduction into the actual nature of the Paul Kurtz-Corliss Lamont myriad of groups which were actually anti-religious, especially anti-Christian promotions of atheism. I hadn't read enough to understand its actual connection to Stalinism through Lamont, the trust fund Last Stalinist who managed a somewhat hostile takeover of the Humanists when they fell on hard times, launching the Kurtz empire through that smokescreen. That's where neo-atheism got its start.
