“The fire-breathing Rebels arrive at the party early,
Their khaki coats are hung in the closet near the fur.
Asking handouts from the ladies, while they criticize the lords.
Boasting of the murder of the very hands that pour.
And the victims learn to giggle, for at least they are not bored.
And my shoulders had to shrug
As I crawl beneath the rug
And retune my piano.”
– Phil Ochs
Karl Marx once famously said that a
specter was haunting Europe and that specter was Communism. Today,
specters are haunting the world. They are “progressivism” and Islamism.
Yet these are misunderstood because the progressives want to pretend
they are liberals and the Islamists want to pretend to be normal,
technically pious, traditional Muslims of a century or half century ago.
Islam is a religion, Islamism is a
revolutionary movement. Liberalism is a center-to-left political
movement, progressivism is a revolutionary movement.
In fact Islam/Islamism and
liberalism/progressivism are parallel in many ways. Their differences
are distracting, one as a religion and one as an atheist non-religious
ideology.
For example; progressivism and Islamism
both seek to be political monopolies and ideologies. They’re
comprehensive. Both use intimidation, though progressivism is more
verbal and Islamism is more violent. Whenever anyone takes one to task,
they insult the whole system. They are not rational systems and are not
open to debate.
Both invite large elements of opportunism
and careerism. People who see the winning side endorse them to benefit
their own careers, not out of genuine belief.
Both of these institutions should be
studied coherently. They’ve not been studied well on political terms. I
will explore Islamism further in an upcoming article.
The English Civil War from 1642-1651, the
struggle between monarchy and religious political ideologies, mirrors
what Islamism is going through now. This was the West’s struggle between
“Christianity” and “politics” which is now the equivalent of the
struggle between “Islamism” and “politics.”
This could be called a Manichean model.
One side is completely right, and one side is completely wrong.
Therefore, a democratic dispute would not be possible.
Phil Ochs, quoted above, was creatively
mocking the situation. He showed this ambiguity. Incidentally, I was his
guide at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
Here was the new professional elite: so
pompous, so arrogant. They were benefiting materially, yet were
contentious, simultaneously arrogant yet luxury-loving, but also
virtuous and well-intentioned, superior. What more perfect combination
would there be but the well-heeled Bill Ayers, the son of a senior
Detroit automaker, and yet a bombing revolutionary who did nothing to
deserve his good estate!
Imagine! Someone with a gold spoon in his
mouth made a scruffy revolutionary, and yet the recipient of hundreds
of thousands of dollars from conservative Republicans, superior to
everyone. Surely a new ruling class if ever there was one.
You get the privilege but pretend you are
the victim. You can take a lot of wealth while pretending to be the
champion of the downtrodden.
Nowadays nobody seems to know what
“progressive” means, though it is in the history books. From around
1910-1924, “Progressive” meant liberal, which was not anything like what
it is today. When Theodore Roosevelt was disappointed by his chosen
successor, William Taft, he formed the Bull Moose Party from the
Republican, often referred to as “the progressive party.”
The progressive party of that day did well among people who wanted to continue liberalism.
FDR was always conscious that the
American system might turn sharply to the left if he failed, leading to
some kind of Obamaesque situation. Remember there was large scale
violence (mostly labor related) and an extremely left-oriented culture
war. People forget that there was a looming radical threat at that time,
for example the Labor Movement.
In 1924, Robert Lafollette decided that
his party, Republican, was not liberal enough, and ran under the
“progressive” title. He actually got 17% of the popular vote, but
concluded that this was not the amount of people needed to win an
election, even though this was a rare opportunity to create a
three-party system. Ultimately, he decided that the country was not left
enough. The brilliance of President Roosevelt was in playing the
centrist view. There were communists and progressives and horrid
“reactionary republicans.”
Roosevelt, however, pitted the idea that
the far left (i.e. communists and socialists) were the only other
alternative to the “reactionary republicans.” Often, liberals said that
these were the only choices.
During the 1924 election and the 1930s,
Earl Browder and other Communist Party leaders used the word
“progressive” as a cover. In 1948, it was the name chosen by the
Communist Party for its front party.
Consider how the Communist Party approached the New Deal. Here’s that party’s leader, Earl Browder, in a 1936 interview:
“Roosevelt was being pulled by some to
the left and by the others to the right. Consequently, it would be wrong
for ‘all progressives to unite around Roosevelt as the sole means to
defeat reaction.’ …It seems that personally Roosevelt and [Republican
leader Alf] Landon look pretty much alike to Browder.”
Incidentally, I’ve never seen anyone note
that when the 2010 electoral organization’s far-left organized, it was
called Progressives for Obama. The head was Carl Davidson, the former
chief of SDS in the 1960s.
What the Obama movement did was to
combine philosophical idealism, the farthest left of the old democratic
party, and the lumpen proletariat, convincing more moderate liberals
that this more radical movement identified with them, while everyone
else was reactionary (as was done in the 1930s). Furthermore the
Republican leadership was headed by an unimaginative “rhino.”
If you want to understand Obama and his
movement, you have to go back to the 1960s and 1970s. For more on this,
see Barry Rubin, Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance (Harper Collins, forthcoming April 2014).
Article printed from Rubin Reports: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2014/01/04/ideology-a-specter-haunting-the-world/
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