The Left's Central Delusion
Its devotion to central planning has endured from the French Revolution to ObamaCare.
The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.
A never-ending source of grievances for the Left is the fact that some groups are "over-represented" in desirable occupations, institutions, and income brackets, while other groups are "under-represented."The Press and Dr. Faustus
Too late, American journalists realize their mistake.
In the old Dr. Faustus story, a young scholar bargains away his soul to the devil for promises of obtaining almost anything he wants.
The American media has done much the same thing with the Obama administration. In return for empowering a fellow liberal, the press gave up its traditional adversarial relationship with the president.
But after five years of basking in a shared progressive agenda, the tab for such ecstasy has come due, and now the media is lamenting that it has lost its soul.Vignette: '68 Revolutionaries Revisited
The illiberalism of student radicalism in the 1960s shaped the world we live in today.
It is now 45 years since that momentous year 1968, one of the turning points of contemporary world culture, if not quite of contemporary politics. Not unlike 1848–49 in Europe, 1968 was marked by events that involved student and political protests in several places. There was a dire sense of crescendo and momentum: the heightening of protest against the Vietnam War, the violent turn of the civil-rights movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the utopian libertinism of the hippies. To have been close to its center is an ambiguous experience impossible to forget.
Radicals and their sympathizers then and now have loved the parallels with 1848 and especially with 1789 — "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," wrote Wordsworth 20 years later of his revolutionary experience in France, "but to be young was very Heaven." The English writer Hugh Kingsmill was to call such people "dawnists," always on the verge of the utopian day. Yet upon realizing the outcome of the French Revolution in Napoleonic tyranny, Wordsworth repented and returned to Christianity. Few of the American "dawnists" seem to have seen that light, so different from their own.
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| SDS leader Mark Rudd at a Columbia University protest, 1968 |
You're exactly right Moira, these were indeed three great reads on this Sunday morning. Of course all three have as a backdrop the Left's self-righteousness about being in power and their blindness (hypocrisy) to the fascist methods they foist on the public when in power.
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