I SUPPOSE I'LL ALWAYS have to point out that in rejecting "modernism" I am not any kind of advocate of the daffy idea of returning to some imagined past. And every idea of the past is the product of imagination. I doubt there is any past period of human history which the majority of those who experienced it didn't want to get to a better future, fast. You can't return to the past and I don't believe you're supposed to try to return to it. It can't be done, for a start, and yearning for it is silly romance based on a fantasy of the past. It is a foolish kind of imagining up stuff. I remember back when supposed "channeling" of imagined past lives was popular with Hollywood types inclined to that that there were an extraordinary number of those who had been royalty or nobles or aristocrats in their past lives. Probably a lot more of those than had ever existed in the real human past. People didn't seem to much remember being slaves in their past lives, or oppressed Women or babies left to die of exposure because they weren't wanted. The hankering after the Constitutional status quo of the 1790s or before the 1930s or before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are exactly the same kind of stupidity with a generally far more evil motive, and such bull shit dominates the Supreme Court and much of the legal orthodoxy of our day. Not that I buy for a second that any of them actually believe it, such "originalism" or "textualism" is a mere pretense of them reinforcing the oligarchy of the rich, the white, the Republican-fascist, as overtly partisan and self-interested as the actions of the slave holders on the Supreme Court before the emancipation proclamation and the dominant coalition of white-supremacists and financier-class servants for almost all of the rest of that court's sordid history. A history that has been covered up with blatantly dishonest public relations and romantic bull shit of a related kind.
No, I don't want to return to any past because not only is it impossible to do that, I don't think we're supposed to want to do that. I think if we were meant to hold any part of the human past as a steady state, that would have happened. I think God intends for history to go forward because life is change and that change is for a reason. I think our and every other state of being has been contingent and a product of choices we have made, that we are always given a choice between what is right and what is wrong to the extent we can know that and that, as well, is a part of the working of history. It is clear from the terrible history of the 20th century we went through, a prelude to the perils of the 21st century, that we are allowed to make the wrong choices and suffer the consequences. That not a little of that evil was a result of the romantic notions of glorious national and racial pasts accounts for much of the worst of the past and the present. Nazism was a mixture of the theory of natural selection mixed with daffy, romantic period notions of linguistics and the snobbery of vainglorious ethnic identity, the cheap self-esteem of nationalism and parochial patriotism. Communism was a mixture of similar things under the guises of patriotism and nationalism, sometimes minus the Darwinist content. Personally, I never knew a Marxist who wasn't a conceited snob and either rather stupid or amoral. Other fascisms and the more criminal behaviors of the so-called "liberal democracies" trafficked in the same kinds of romantic notions of pasts, often overt and transparent lies sold through show-biz and PR, two of the greatest venues of lying in the history of our common species. I think that, as well as learing the evils of facism, Nazism, Communism and Marxism, we are supposed to learn the evils inherent in "classical liberlism" the libertarian liberalism of "liberal democracy" the kind of democracy that, in the American context had both genocidal land stealing and slavery and male supremacy as integral parts of it, parts that were not extingushed in the altered liberal-democracy from the Warren Court years. Indeed, some of those rulings considered the greatest boons such as the permission given to the mass media to lie with impunity, has been the major engine in the resurgence of our own overt form of fascism, white-supremacy and its allies in the billionair-millionaire financed and mass media promoted benefit for the richest among us.
I have always been a leveler, favoring total human equality on every basis, sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, bodily condition, . . . and, most radically of all, since it encompasses all of those, economic justice based on economic leveling. Concentrations of wealth are one of the greatest dangers to equality, democracy and a decent life for all. So, you see, I'm not only a radical, I'm the most extreme kind of radical there is. One who believes all People are not only metaphysically equal but rightly made equal at the highest material, economic and spiritual level of equality that we can attain, leveling billionaires and millionaires out of existence and treating People as equal, protecting egalitarian democracy from all dangers, including the ideas of those who would destroy equality and democracy.
The ACLU, Holmes-Roberts Court notions of protecting ideas while leaving People and their lives at risk from fascists, Nazis, white supremacists and those who have no real chance of gaining power in the United States, Marxists, out of the daffiest notions of "justice" and "fairness" only enables the rich to destroy equality and democracy, the goal of the Roberts Court which will have the rote acquiescence of the "liberals" on that court out of some of the stupidest orthodoxy in human history. I can be both an anti-communist and an anti-anti-communist, basing the later on their anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic intent. So, I am consistent in that. That's a lot better reason for opposing them than the vulgarity and sleaziness of those who mounted the red-scare campaign and that Hollywood movies tell you the old white-collar commies who scribbled for the movies were some kind of heroes. Since just about every one of them supported Hitler's rival and perhaps record-holder of most People killed, Stalin, as his crimes were being accurately reported, they were no heroes. They were in many cases, the exact moral equivalents of the American Nazis. The old-line anti-communists were really the precursors of today's Trumpian Republican-fascists a few old-line Democratic dupes of that thrown in to that mix. I am very much over the Kennedy mystique, not least of which on the basis of their anti-communism but for other reasons, as well.