DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE SPEED OF PROGRESSIVISM ****
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The transformation of Chick Fil A from a fast food place that most liberals had never even heard of into the “Enemy of the People” is a reminder of the speed at which progressivism travels forward and backward in time. A few months ago the CEO of Chick Fil A would have done nothing worse than echo a consensus so mainstream that it was adopted as a campaign position by the leftiest Democrat to sit in the White House. A few months later that same position is so outrageous that it leads to mass boycotts, threats of violence and mayors of dysfunctional urban centers threatening to drive the reactionary chicken franchise out of their cities.
One of the wonderful things about progressivism is that it defies the laws of physics and history. When the Democratic Party, a once notable national party that has been turned into a red shill for the sort of people who used to hang out in cafes and plot to blow things up in between free verse recitals, adopts a progressive position, that position instantly travels backward in time to alter history and create an entirely new past.
For example when the Democratic Party decided that its future lay not with racist white gerrymandered districts but racist black gerrymandered districts, its adoption of civil rights, formerly a Republican position that good Democrats had fought tooth and nail, actually traveled back in time transforming our nation’s history.
When the Democrats belatedly decided that black people were human beings, or at least a better bet for votes than Southern white men who were in danger of deciding that they didn’t have much in common with a party of corrupt Northern elites being painted by a corrupt Northern media as saints, the energy from this decision transformed Lincoln into a Democrat, segregation into an idea that Ike and Dick came up with in between dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the Trail of Tears, and turned the Community Organizers who had been busy torching black orphanages and Republican newspapers in New York City and Boston as part of an organized wartime campaign to defeat the Union, into a lost page of history.
Governor George Wallace, three-time Democratic candidate for the Presidency of the United States, said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” The real quote though it turns out is, “Progressivism now, progressivism tomorrow, progressivism forever.” History works and is revised so that the past agrees with the present.
The Democratic Party has always been at war with racism, in favor of gay marriage, illegal aliens and killing everyone over 50 to save on health care costs. The latter position hasn’t been articulated yet, but when it is, it will travel backward through time and since what will take place in the future has already occurred, it has already traveled backward in time to alter our history so that we now know that the Democratic Party has always supported killing people over 50 to save on health care costs.
This however is only a projection. History is notoriously unstable. What was the progressive pose yesterday may be an unacceptably reactionary position tomorrow. The French Revolution and the Communist Revolution and the Cultural Revolution spent a lot of time purging comrades who had failed to recognize that the new progressive position had been adopted tomorrow and had become reality yesterday and was subject to a loyalty oath today. Like Chick A Fil many of them ended up being enemies of the people where they were subjected to worse things than the mayors of bankrupt cities declaring that anti-gay chicken was an unacceptable addition to the parts of their fair cities that aren’t on fire.
The Democrats borrowed their interest in black civil rights from the left, which was only working with urban minorities because it was hoping to include them in its revolutionary coalition of coal miners and lettuce pickers who would help overthrow the reactionary capitalist American Dream and replace it with a bunch of people shouting slogans and shooting each other. These days the NAACP does not look like a good bet for overthrowing America and the favorite progressive minority du jour actually keeps black slaves and hangs homosexuals.
That notion may seem ridiculous, but so would the idea that the party of bra burning would become the party of the hijab. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. To be a true progressive, you cannot afford to be small-minded. Every idea, value and belief is waiting to be demolished and replace by a newer more progressive idea. And if that newer more progressive idea actually seems backward, that’s okay, because progressive ideas are like buses, if you wait around long enough they’ll come right back to where they were.
Progressivism is chaos. It is a force that is constantly destroying old things to make way for new things and with so much destruction, it can’t be expected to tell the new old things and the old new things apart. Progressivism is a contrary talker, a teenager who knows everything, it doesn’t know a whole lot, but it knows that everything you know is wrong. And then off it goes in its retro clothes to shock all the adults with gay marriage, euthanasia clinics and then maybe slavery.
Progressivism violates the laws of physics because it has no past, only an eternal future. It imagines that it is always moving forward in time, when it’s actually moving backward. Its past is its future and it can’t tell the two apart because it has eradicated any understanding of history that isn’t based on its own idiotic ideological posturings. To the left history cannot exist apart from its politically correct understanding of history.
History is bunk, said Henry Ford, a man who didn’t know who Benedict Arnold was, but did know that the Jews start all the wars because some European Socialists who were active in the Anti-War movement (Circa 1914) told him so. History is bunk to progressives too who are always throwing it out, tossing it away and writing long books on how all of history was a massive conspiracy to dominate the underclass or at least prevent the progressives from organizing and then dominating the underclass.
Henry Ford’s old bunk history about a Jewish War Conspiracy was picked up in 2003 by the left, polished up and shipped out again. The Guardian was reborn as the Dearborn Independent and the rewritten versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion starring Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith. Who knows how long it will be before the Democratic Party goes back to its roots and begins explaining why slavery should be legalized to allow an inferior race to experience the civilizing influence of Islam?
Under the multicultural umbrella, Muslims terrorize Sikhs and Africans in London, and gays in New York, which like Boston and Chicago is too good for a Chick-A-Fil, but not too good for a Ground Zero Mosque or a sitdown with Calypso Louie Farrakhan and his Fruits of Islam. The burka has gone from a symbol of oppression to a symbol of liberation. Leftist activists smash Jewish stores and when the time comes will throw acid in the face of female teachers in solidarity with their Taliban brothers.
Sane people ask where the principles of the left have gone, but when has the left ever had principles? Its only principle is progressivism, its faith is in smashing things to build a better world that will also have to be smashed because it isn’t good enough. Its violent activists create anarchy and then tyranny and repeat the same cycle leading to greater barbarism each time until they have finally managed to destroy civilization and made the world safe for feudalism.
Progressivism is a destructive force of chaos opposed to the stable order of conservatism. Its rhetoric is empty, its fury is mere posturing and its philosophies are justification and celebration of its violent impulses. Like all chaos it defines itself in opposition to the order that it would destroy. Its only identity derives from the face of the man it is punching in the face or lynching on a street corner.
Right now Chick Fil A is the enemy for opposing gay marriage. Tomorrow, when Republicans adopt gay marriage as their platform, it will be the enemy for supporting gay marriage. Churches will be picketed for wanting to force gay men and women into the stifling conformity of a heterosexual institution. And the people, and by that I mean the people who always talk about who should be first up against the wall, will have a new enemy.
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