Exhausted Liberalism Is Actually Dying Liberalism… or Undead

Jonah Goldberg had a good article, the other day, suggesting that liberalism (which proponents have been rebranding as “progressivism”) is “exhausted.”  He errs, though, in presuming a future for the ideology.

Meanwhile, the cultural Left has disengaged from mainstream political arguments, preferring instead the comforts of identity-politics argy-bargy. You judge political movements not by their manifestos but by where they put their passion. And on the left these days, the only things that arouse passion are arguments about race and gender.

Such critiques may seem like a cutting-edge fight for the future among the protagonists, but looked at from the political center, it suggests political exhaustion. At least old-fashioned Marxists talked about the economy.

Of course liberalism isn’t dead; it’s just resting.

I don’t know.  It was pretty obvious more than a decade ago — about when the rebranding to “progressivism” really began — that liberalism was dying.  Only fools and con artists could possibly believe the worldview on which it is built, meaning that most adherents were simply taking it on faith and not thinking it through.

Naturally, one can be a gratuitously educated fool.  If you believe you can completely construct your reality, then there are columns and arches of rationalization to support whatever structure you want to believe in, for whatever reason you want to believe in it.  As it happens, the Obama Era has been an excellent illustration of the consequences of denying reality — an illustration, that is, for everybody except for those who can’t see the world around them because the walls of their liberal temple block the view.

Arguably, liberalism is manifestly dead, but it’s also undead.  Through ritualistic lies and propaganda on a scale most often seen in totalitarian nations, the true believers of liberalism, large portions of whom hold jobs (frighteningly) in industries designed to explain to others what is real, managed to raise up the charming deceiver Barack Obama as president, and he’s striving to suck the blood out of the ailing husk of the Founders’ America.

The problem is that the arts of progressive vampirism don’t produce powerful offspring in the image of the charismatic figures who took their souls, but rather something more like zombies.  Reality simply doesn’t make sense for a society whose heart has stopped beating, and the core impetus for its re-creators is the power to control those who have been remade.

You end up with confused masses, unhinged from the old morality of the living, who exist under the influence of increasingly lunatic leaders drawn to their roles not by some lingering quest for purpose, but simply because they want to wield the power.

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