Tuesday, September 26, 2017

VDH: The Progressive Octopus

This is so good. Read the whole thing.

So many good nuggets, can't really pick a favourite.

Sample:

"...culturally, the progressive octopus continues to recalibrate popular life according to the new orthodoxies shared by a minority of the population. Indeed, the octopus has formidable and far-reaching tentacles that reach into every crevice of modern American life. Our progressive mollusk is big, and he swims with us everywhere."

"Most Americans are quite willing to concede spheres of partisanship — but not lawlessness. Some colleges, such as Evergreen State or UC Berkeley, while public and tax-supported, are, by definition, leftist in the manner that a private Hillsdale College or Saint Thomas Aquinas are traditionalist and conservative. But whereas the latter are calm and tolerant of dissent; the former, with public monies, are hysterical and often Stalinist when confronted by opposing views. That disconnect is unsustainable."

"But what is bothering half the country is not such ideological birds-of-a-feather tribalism per se. The rub instead is the progressive attempt to undermine all shared public institutions by turning them into left-wing megaphones and in the process condoning the use of violence, obscenity, and racialism."

"So it is not quite accurate to complain of the “politicization of everything,” given that the phenomenon is largely a progressive project in which nothing is much sacred from left-wing political hectoring — our vocabulary, the very cars we drive, even the TV shows we watch."