In the past two decades it's become apparent to me that though we stick them together there is a real, mutually exclusive difference between traditional American style liberalism and the various secular sects that are (generally wrongly) denominated "the left". Any similarities between the two are in some cases based in preferences, not intellectual foundations though in many cases I think they are a tactical scheme of trying to gain power through appeals to "the masses" on the basis of a claim to care about their welfare - such as in Marxism - I think the history of such "leftists" when they gain power has shown that the results will be a gangster regime which has more in common with fascism or capitalism empowered politically.
No traditional American liberalism, based in a higher view of human beings beyond material and economic utility but as possessing a status higher than that by the will of God should be confused for the same thing as Marxism or the various anarchisms which, even more absurdly, are considered to be close to it in a linear graph of relatedness. Though not a few traditional American style liberals have made that mistake, I think Eugene Debs did, so did many who got swayed over to the materialist, atheist, scientistic ideologies that led so many an otherwise liberal astray - often during their college years when they hankered after repute more than they did the pursuit of justice.
I don't know why I've been feeling so inclined to look over the results of this publicly shared writing I've been doing for the past two decades and the extreme changes in my thinking that the fact checking of my previous beliefs have forced me to accept, driving me, as an old man, farther in the direction of that American style liberalism than I was as a secular, agnostic, socialist. Maybe its the result of the Covid 19 pandemic reminding me of the imminence of mortality.
Looking critically at the political left, criticism forced by seeing its decades of impotent failure has not been popular with lefties. But it's stupid for the American left to refuse to make that self criticism. Something is obviously wrong with the American left, the left which, though it has advocated many policies that should ensure its widespread approval has been so abjectly a failure.
It's not as if those decades of failure are unrelated to our habits of thought and action, which in the case of the American left is often inaction. And its certainly not as if the critique of us from outside, from the right, that we give up those positions of egalitarianism, of redistribution of wealth as a part of that equality, of protecting the environment, etc. that we become like them, are going to be helpful to our purposes. It's not as if anyone else is in a position to make the changes to the left that are going to make us more effective in achieving more equality, more economic and civil justice, a more livable, sustainable environment. If we reject a rigorous internal criticism and the changes necessary to do that, it's just a continuation of what got us into this political wilderness to start with. WE DID IT TO OURSELVES, GOD DIDN'T BRING US INTO THE WILDERNESS, WHICH IS WHY WE'VE BEEN IN IT LONGER THAN THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL WERE AFTER THEY GOT OUT OF SLAVERY IN EGYPT.
I didn't expect that the neo-atheist campaign would become important to my criticism of the left when I started, I resisted getting involved with it for as long as I could avoid it but it became apparent to me that that was not only typical of the self-imposed guarantees of failure, adopting ballot box poison positions and, worse, attitudes, but that materialist atheist scientism was probably the largest contributor to that failure. And that that ideology was not only unpopular, it acted as an acid corroding and eroding the very basis on which egalitarian democracy rest, that ideology inevitably leads to a debasement of the human animal into an object, one which has no transcendent nature above any object which is there for use and exploitation. Indeed, the logical necessities of materialist,atheist, scientism, in order to maintain its insistence on the material monist nature of morality will inevitably deny the reality of morality and, in the fullness of time and the necessity of academic scribblers making a name and career for themselves, leads to such self-contradictory absurdities as eliminative materialism which denies the reality of consciousness, itself. The new atheist fad of the 2000s forced a confrontation of that fact which was, I now see, essential to understanding the difference between American style liberalism and the secular, materialist, scientistic, atheistic ideologies that it was damaged by.
You can't have both. Both cannot work yoked together, they are at cross purposes in their most essential essences, the left has been a house divided and like a dysfunctional family, they have not even understood the most basic reasons for their fall.
In looking into the new atheist fad, the longer history of atheist ideological assertion, I have come to the conclusion that they have merely recapitulated in atheist scientistic terms all of the features of religious follies that atheists have used to attack religion among the shallow and ignorant. Not a few of those self-identified opponents of such things as the assertion of rightness through authority have been among its most flagrant floggers of such authority. I was reminded of that the other day when listening to the pirated online Rachel Maddow show when the Freedom From Religion Foundation had on that eminent thinker, Ron Reagan to promote atheism, the same family business that endlessly promotes atheism through fame fucking, not infrequently attributing atheism to someone who not only never advocated atheism but who actively opposed it (the research pieces I did on the death of Mozart is some of the most personally satisfying to me).
More generally the absurdity of the atheist snobs who call themselves "free thinkers" as their ideology leads so many, perhaps most of them to insist that free thought is a material impossibility completes the argument that they are no less at cross purposes in their self-contradictory claims than the worst of religious orthodoxy has been. That includes the claim that their all too human thought allows them access to a pure, unfiltered view of ultimate reality, whether through something like the Catholic integralist insistence on the character of the Magisterium as discerned by official fiat or the insistence of atheists that science is such an oracle of absolute infallibility unmitigated by the fact that all of all of this is a human interpretation of human experience as humanly processed by those minds the materialists insist aren't there. That "freedom from religion" is not a freedom from religion, it's the recreation of all of those things which religion got wrong in terms of secular, materialist scientism. It is like they're stuck in the same maze and they can't unlearn it.
But religion should never have made that mistake because as early as the book of Exodus there are warnings against the folly of thinking human beings have that kind of immediate discernment of the ultimate reality. God warns Moses that in the form of a human being, he cannot see the face of God and live (Exodus 33:18-30), though he can see the back of God. That's what he was doing while the others were getting up to mischief with a golden calf.
Human beings are able to see lots of things, they cannot, in material form have an unmitigated view of ultimate reality unfiltered through human experience and understanding. Which should lead us to humbly understand we are, none of us, supreme, we are equals. I have absolute confidence that the radical economic leveling of The Law is related to that and an expression of that humility. Which humility is so widely despised by the arrogant confidence of modernism but which is the source of egalitarian democracy and justice, most of all economic justice.
Materialist, scientistic atheism makes moon-calves of us all. It isn't the way out of that maze.
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