Immoral Progressivism Failing Miserably By Arnold Ahlert
In England, youths are rioting. In Portugal, labor unions staged a national strike last Wednesday. A little over a month ago, France and Greece were subjected to large, violent demonstrations and riots. A common thread? In each of these countries, the unrest was engendered by economic austerity measures proposed and/or enacted by government. A far more salient common thread?
The morally corruptive nature of the progressivist ideology.
As the four recent examples, along with others occurring all over the world illustrate, a group of like-minded "thinkers" is emerging. It is a group composed in equal parts of economic illiteracy and pathological self-entitlement. Only an utter fool — or a dedicated progressive — would riot or strike because someone else can no longer afford to underwrite your lifestyle.
What part of "running out of other people's money" don't the complainers understand?
Such a complete disconnect from reality doesn't happen on its own.
It is where moral relativism, the cornerstone of progressive thinking, inevitably leads. Decades of teaching people that the state is their bottomless benefactor hasn't just ruined economies around the globe. It has ruined the people themselves. Economies eventually recover.
Can people recover their dignity and character?
Mankind has always been corrupt. We are, by nature, fallen creatures for whom doing the right thing will always be more difficult than taking the path of least resistance. Yet such difficulty is exponentially compounded by a progressive ideology that constantly encourages people to abandon character for comfort and worry about the moral ramifications after the fact. It is compounded by the siren song of perpetual victimhood that relieves the individual of personal responsibility and personal ambition. It is compounded by playing one group of people off another, without regard to individual achievement — or a lack thereof. It is not hard for people to be seduced by "we will take care of you," or maybe even more accurately, "we will do your thinking for you," once the moral component of the seduction has been calculatingly obscured.
Bottom line: A predominantly moral populace has little need for expansive government — and progressives know it. That is precisely why one of their principal targets is religion and their ongoing determination to remove it from the public square whenever and wherever possible. The codified morality religion represents is the ultimate distraction away from the progressive agenda — which is why it must also be belittled as well.
Just as importantly, people must understand that progressives' seeming respect for Islam has nothing to do with respecting religion per se. The same people calling Americans bigots for not wanting a mosque built near Ground Zero are the ones routinely bashing Christianity at every turn. Islam is nothing more than another weapon for pursuing that task — until the time comes when it too must be jettisoned to make way for the progressive New World Order. The current alliance-of-convenience is based on an old Arabic saying: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Yet the main battleground for the progressive movement is public school education. Does anyone seriously think those who champion an ever-expanding state want people being educated to think for themselves? What constitutes better clay for shaping than a semi-educated populace indoctrinated to believe, not only that the world owes them something for nothing, but that such a concept is morally justifiable?
Thus, it is no accident that the emphasis in public school education has gone from teaching kids how to think to teaching them what to feel. Nor is it coincidental that educational establishment dominated by progressives has made a student's self-esteem more important than his command of the facts. People focused on emotional self-gratification are far more pliable than those capable of independent reasoning. Progressives understand that substantial numbers of Americans taught to believe a debate on the issues can be "won" by calling someone a name, is a critical component of their power base.
Ask yourself how many times, for example, any criticism of the Obama Administration's disastrous policies has been deemed "racist" — even as that characterization is dubbed the only "logical" explanation possible. Ask yourself why almost 40% of Americans would consider it perfectly acceptable to find out what's in a national healthcare bill "after we pass it."
How many Americans have been "educated" to believe that the only path to "fairness" is one which travels through a government bureaucracy administered by an "enlightened" political class?
When such thinking reaches critical mass, all things are possible.
It is possible to believe the world owes one a living. It is possible to believe that life is fair. It is possible to believe that the human condition itself, with all its inherent shortcomings, can be legislated into submission. And, as Europe is so amply demonstrating, it is actually possible to believe one can get blood from a stone.
In America, a resistance to such mindlessness has emerged.
Progressives desperately want to convince themselves that the phenomenon known as the Tea Party movement is strictly political. They are wrong.
Politics may be the vehicle for the movement, but the enduring quality of it — and it is enduring — is its moral component. It is a blow-back against the wholesale abandonment of dignity and character by the entitlement class and its progressive enablers. It is a movement with many aspects, but all of them center around one idea: The soul of a great nation is at stake, and the progressive agenda that is corrupting it must be stopped.
Europe shows us why. A substantial portion of their population has been infantilized into believing the government gravy train never runs out of gravy, and taking to the to the streets demanding the impossible is becoming routine. Such demonstrations are a deadly combination of hubris and ignorance, egged on by those promoting "social justice," which is nothing more than a pleasant slogan attempting to rationalize many things, all of which can be reduced to one idea: Inter-generational theft is morally acceptable.
No it's not. Not by a long shot. _________________
Arnold Ahlert is a contributing columnist to JewishWorldReview.com and FrontPageMag.com
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