Fossilized theologies of the 1960s

Historian Victor Davis Hanson notes that unlike its historical ancestors, today's liberalism

believes in pursuance of race, class, and gender equality by any means of intimidation and censorship necessary.

If science now allows a premature child to live outside the womb at 20 weeks, that knowledge must remain an irrelevant fact. Champions of abortion who used to insist that fetuses were not viable outside the womb simply have dropped that argument altogether. They are not interested any more in the issue of when life begins, but rather wedded deductively to the notion of terminating a pregnancy at almost anytime the mother might wish to do so. The unexamined career of Dr. Gosnell was not the aberration, but the logical fruition of contemporary liberalism’s unquestioned embrace of abortion.

And why, at this time of history’s greatest carbon releases, has the planet not warmed in the last 17 years? Why was data massaged to create the so-called “hockey stick” paradigm? Why sue satirist Mark Steyn for an inconvenient truth, or denigrate opponents as “deniers” as if they were some sort of Holocaust deniers, if the data is unimpeachable and speaks for itself?

When Eric Holder announces an endless affirmative action and leaves it at that, I want a classically liberal defense along the lines of something like the following: “We believe that preferences must be accorded to those of particular ethnic and racial backgrounds to compensate for past discrimination, whose legacy still makes it difficult even in the present age for particular groups to be treated equitably. And more importantly, we in the government have the ability to ascertain which groups are deserving of such preferences and which not, and also know how to determine which individuals meet precise criteria that earn them official minority status.” Instead, we get something tantamount to “either support something nebulous called affirmative action or you’re a racist.”

Then there is illegal immigration. Again, examine the philology, always the tip-off to an Orwellian rewrite. First we had illegal alien, then illegal immigrant, then undocumented immigrant, and now just immigrant. Such linguistic hocus pocus is necessary given the the present indefensible system of not enforcing the border, ignoring immigration law, and peddling the untruth that almost all illegal aliens fit the DREAM Act categories. Language must accomplish what reality cannot.

But modern-day liberalism is still stranger than all that: after crafting a system of open borders and de facto amnesty that has allowed millions of impoverished from central Mexico to reside in California, the architects of such a system then shut down almost all means to provide illegal aliens a livelihood: water diversions from agriculture, the near extinction of the timber and mining industries, taboos against fracking and horizontal drilling, a virtual shut-down of new housing construction, and on and on.

We should not use the word “progressive” or “liberal,” given that on issues like abortion, affirmative action, the environment, illegal immigration, censorship, and a host of others, the left is reactionary to the core.

In the spirit of changing words to reflect reality, I suggest that we call today’s liberals “regressives” — fundamentalists who are wedded to self-serving deductive doctrines that cannot sustain empirical scrutiny and exist mostly as fossilized theologies of the 1960s.

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