SECULAR LIBERALISM has failed the test of time when it had one of the greatest of opportunities ever given to it by religious liberals of the Civil Rights Movement led by the likes of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. They, himself, his colleagues and followers, through their sacrifice, their blood, their lives, they got the passage of the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act. And they, directly or indirectly, in that spirit and by their example got other legislation passed. They inspired the later movements for real rights such as the LGBTQ rights movement and the Women's Rights Movement. The enormous opportunity for liberalism in the United States gained during Lyndon Johnson's time in office was not only squandered by the secularists, it was undermined by their deeper ideological commitments and real self-interests. If there is one thing you should be suspicious of, it is upper-class, elite reformers, especially when their "liberalism" is a product of secularist, ideological, often 18th or 19th century European romance and not a belief that we are supernaturally required to do unto others what we would have them do unto us. And that there will be terrible consequences when we don't. We are suffering just such consequences, I'm convinced of that.
That enormous effort started to founder and go off track and sputter and die as secularists, college and university instead of Church based, pushed their way to the forefront, something that had been done before. As the overtly religious motivation of the movements for equality were pushed aside, as the theories of secularism, materialism, scientism, anti-religious civil liberties legalism divorced from morality, etc. took over, things stopped, then they went into reverse. The assinine romance of Marxism, almost certainly never a majority of the "new left," either gulled a large number of otherwise secular lefties or were loud enough to provide the enemies of equality and real democracy a weapon to attack the real left. That is a factor but it is more complex than a simple statement of it can clarify. Johnson getting gulled by the Ivy Leaguers, the Bundys, the McNamaras etc. into expanding America's involvement in the war in Vietnam had some role in that as it got sympathy for communism that it didn't deserve.* The tragedy of Karl Marx is that his greatest achievement as a critic of capitalism was destroyed by his prescribing communism as the next step in his imaginary force replacing God, the dialectic. Like I said, its complex but there was never any real need for traditional American liberals to get gulled, once again, by the "Marxists" a bunch who, no one should ever forget, Marx, himself, disassociated himself from.
More than fifty years after that, no one has any excuse for maintaining the rote pities for that bunch, Marxism has been given the test of time, it ends as it begins, in violent gangsterism, from Russia to China, to Nicaragua, God help the poor of any country which falls into the hands of those gangsters. I would maintain that the least bad of those was Cuba, though I would never choose to live there just as the most devoted Stalinists and Maoists of the United States, somehow, managed to never leave the country they despised so much for their "workers paradises," excepting a few handfuls of those of marginal grips on reality.
Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat before Joe Biden to really believe in the effective left of the Civil Rights Movement, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were fully in with the secular left which turned out to really not be any left at all and for whatever positive things they may purportedly have valued, what they pursued was a corporatist agenda that was, at its bottom not ever going to really challenge inequality. Bill Clinton's betrayal of the poor in the "reform" of welfare and Obama's elitist liberalishness that never exceded the bounds of what you could expect from a president of the Harvard Law Review (one who got election by working with conservatives to shaft anything closer to real liberalism) should be considered the death of the delusion that anything but a real, sincere religious left who live with integrity according to their profession of belief, will ever really even make the effort to struggle against the evils of privilege and inequality and the tool of the oligarchs, such as racism, regional and class resentments and hatred, sexism and paranoia among those who fear the least among us will obtain their petty privileges allowed them by the elites.
That's my history of the past sixty-five years of the United States in short. And I could write a much longer one extending much farther back because the failure of secular liberalism and, even more so, the secular, anti-religious left is the longest running currently in production serial in the history of the United States. The extent to which it is a foreign import, it has its counterpart in the British Left and in other places, though never minimize the ability of Americans to make their own mistakes of that kind.
There is no past we can return to, we not only must we will inevitably move on to the future, whatever form of decency and morality and egalitarian democracy we have cannot be found in any past of our history. There are no good old days, there are no romantic programs, tactics or theories of the past that we can cling to and expect those will produce results that are different from those they already have produced. The corruption of the Republican-fascists and Roberts-Alito Court (a tautology if there ever was one) is founded in such romantic lies about the past, including those embedded in the cult of the Constitution and the fetish of the "Founders." Those have been what they were designed to be, a boon for the oligarchs, the racists, the stealers of wealth produced by others of, by and for the rich.
American traditional liberals based on egalitarianism and the common good was founded on the core of the most radical egalitarian and leveling morality that has yet to be achieved, do to the least among you what you would do for God, love your neighbor as yourself, if you have, give, etc. Compared to that every theory of governance modernism and its secularism has cooked up is garbage for the ash heap of history, they will have a small measure of success the extent to which they agree with religion on that. I think that's why Cuba was less bad than other experiments in Communism were, though it was plenty bad, too.
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It is a mistake to have members of Congress, the President, Supreme Court "justices" and others take an oath to protect and defend The Constitution. The Constitution is a terrible document which was sired by slavers and brought to term by financiers. Though, since they were all wealthy, white males, no Women involved, that analogy to birth is inept. No living American ever voted to accept it, its adoption was never by a majority of The People even when it was being adopted. It was never the product of considered adoption or rejection by any majority of People living under it, not People of Color, not Women, no one who was not born in the 18th century.** Only a very small minority of whom were allowed to vote on those who would approve it and even those elections were timed and made inconvenient so even a small percentage of even the propertied, white men of age participated in the process. Slavery and anti-democratic features were embedded in it at the start, maintained in it and have not in any way really been abandoned in it. That was made far worse by the extra-Constitutional innovations of the Supreme Court in usurping the functions of both the legislative and executive departments of the government and the corruptly born and filled Senate which, since it was the anti-democratically chosen and constituted part of the government, was given the power to approve of the Supreme Court which has, throughout its history, proven itself to be a cesspool of corruption - the Roberts-Alito Court we have now is typical of it, the Warren Court was its sole outlier and they proved to not be exactly wise in their decisions, acculturated as they were in Constitutional lore and law, bound by that thinking.
Louis Boudin pointed out that under the Court's usurped powers that the Constitution means whatever the sitting Court says it means and the present day Court has certainly proved that to be the case.
It is sheer idiocy for anyone to believe the Constitution means anything since they have definitely shown that what previous Courts have said it was was less solid than the ink those decisions were made in. The foul thing is next to impossible to really and basically reform even when its present state is murderous in its effect, even when Supreme Courts make that reform vital to the survival of the People of the United States and of anything mimicking democracy. It was it a contraption set up for the benefit of oligarchs and slavers and it has become, through most of our history, more that than anything else. The short periods when something better in it is asserted, that has, in terms of the history of the country, eventually and effectively been crushed. That was made obvious during the Jim Crow period, in the period after the great struggle for Civil Rights started to be turned back. A terrible Civil War and its aftermath, the experience of the WWII generation, the Great Depression, that terrible war the enormous and far from finished Civil Rights struggle which produced the greatest reform in the history of the country has been turned back using the very mechanisms provided by the Constitution to thwart equality and, so, democracy.
They should be required to swear an oath to egalitarian democracy,to The People of the United States if to anything, not that absurd and abstract idol which is meaningless by its very terms as its own black-robed high-priesthood of thugs allowed UNDER IT to become. It is ridiculous for anyone, especially those who have studied it and its history to play that kind of let's pretend about it anymore because it is the deadly enemy of the safety, the equality of and so the legitimate freedom of the American People.
If The People of the United States allows the Roberts Court to get away with what they are doing, it's all over and we will have earned the murderous tyranny they will bring us to - NO, AS THE DEAD IN UVALDE, SANDY HOOK, ETC. ETC. ETC. HAVE SHOWN WHICH WE ARE ALREADY LIVING UNDER!- those who tolerate that and, especially, the secular liberals of the media who whose feet of clay washed away in 1968. They will not save us. We are coming to the time when only those who look to God for salvation should be considered the realists among us. And under the degradation that Christianity has come to under corporate religiousity, much of that is as bad as the secularism that underlies it.
* The one and only achievement of American communists is suckering liberals into feeling sorry for them, they are the biggest whiners and criers in the cultural history of the country. Liberals, encouraged by Hollywood and Broadway (the real source of such education) were successfully gulled with the cheapest of drama into feeling sorry for people who were, in every way, the moral equivalent of America's domestic Nazis and Hitler admirers, those who lied that Mussolini made the trains run on time. Stalinists, Maoists supported some of the champion mass murderers in human history, they deserve to be exposed as that and the fraudulent fictions shattered. All of the Hollywood 10 were in that category either when they were prosecuted or in their past.
** Jefferson's fantasy that there should be a new one every 20 years was certainly not the road taken. I've become more interested in how the Founders who lived into the 1820s and 30s, as they saw the abysmal moral cesspool they had founded, might have written or talked about that in their more candid moments. I was surprised to find that unremarked on much, some of them seemed to think things were less than wonderful. Madison seems to have become remarkably cynical in the few things I've read from him in the 1830s, and he was plenty more cynical from the start than the civic piety of my youth claimed him to be. So was Jefferson. Not officially a founder but certainly a front row witness of it, John Quincy Adams certainly came to regard the Constitution with far less than piety. The cult of the Constitution is for the majority of Americans what the cult of the poor, blacklisted commies is for the secular left, a dangerous lie. Only it's more dangerous because the commies never stood a chance of taking power in the United States.
I, by the way, no more believe any sitting member of this or any other Supreme Court really maintains the sham of piety in regard to the Constitution that their priestly duties requires them to pretend they do. Not to mention the members of Congress or Trump, does anyone believe Gatez, Green, Boebert, etc. really meant it when they took that oath? Especially the Republican-fascists on the Court whose cynicism about it far exceeds even that of J. Q. Adams whose private declaration that it was a "menstruous rag" was a product of his moral outrage at what it produced in regard to the slave power. Behind the Roberts Court majority is just more cynicism, including the gal from Notre Dame.
I fully believe Adams expected his journal would be published, as he had so recently seen Madison's papers published, after he was safely dead and could not be made to suffer for his candid opinion. I've got nothing to lose so I say it out loud.
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