Tuesday, July 05, 2016

Holding themselves in high regard

In 2010 Gerard Vanderleun wrotes at American Digest,
It is no secret that classic liberalism, in the mold of FDR, JFK,and LBJ that reached its apotheosis in Hubert Humphrey, has long been consigned to the bone-yard. What has taken its place hates to be tarred with the brush of liberalism because, frankly, it isn't. It prefers to be called "progressivism" even as "a sociopathic political and social recidivism" more accurately describes it.

What now stands in the place one occupied by classical liberalism is a kind of perverted one-world idealism in which "the world as it is" is constantly measured against "the world as it should be." Classic liberalism at least had the argument that it was being done for the greater good. The new perverted progressive variant is one in which policy and plans are made because it makes the initiators yearn to "feel good" in the manner that compulsive masturbators obsess over fantasies implanted before puberty. Those that make and support these measures hold themselves in high regard, seeing each other as, in the French phrase popular when many of them were young, "citoyens du monde" -- citizens of the world.

Typically these are people who have "gone beyond" nation states in their own minds and, if they can afford it (and many can), in their personal lives as well. These are people with access to enough money to afford private jets, or enough money to pay the premium prices of hybrid car. They do not dwell in the same nation as their fellow, less-fortunate citizens. Instead they can afford to spend their time spreading a gospel whose high costs and marginal benefits are always carefully hidden from the middle middle class and those below. But this is never seen by those spreading the gospel as a kind of noblesse oblige, only as something that is "good for them."

Writ large we see this in grandiose projects like the Gates Foundation's plan to "Save Africa." Among the citoyens du monde, "Saving Africa" a noble goal of distinguished lineage. It's been around forever and promises to continue in it's need of saving for the millenium. Few can gainsay the deeply humanitarian impulse behind it, only the likely outcome of many more criminal Africans made millionaires that can leave that continent behind thanks to the Gates Foundation.

On the smaller scale, we see hundreds of efforts to spread "correct thinking and correct behavior and correct belief" in the endless bullying of small organizations by larger "clear headed" organizations such as the ACLU. It is all, their way or the lawsuit highway, which the little people can seldom afford; a kind of fiscal extortion racket.

...These erstwhile American citizens do not think of themselves as actual Americans (although they play them easily and glibly on TV), but as a new and better breed that only retain their "American" status for the present benefits. Instead they prefer to think of themselves as inhabiting a rarer, more personally fragrant realm of ideals that the rest of us do not see and cannot aspire to.

This new and more wonderful world is the Holy Realm of The Church of the Planet whose crusade goes forward under the sign of The Gleaming Escutcheon United Nations; not as grotesque assemblage of thugs and thieves that it is, but as it should -- in the perfect world to come -- be. Indeed, nothing in this realm is ever seen as it is, but only as it should be.

There are no armies in this realm, only legions of NGOs without borders. There are no Popes or Saints, only the Gates, the Obamas, the Clintons, the Gores, and those who can jet into the annual green cardinals convocation at Davos. The sweet. The elite. These are the non-elected, self-appointed and peer-selected Government of the Happy World who swap honors and awards as freely between themselves as participants in a Sexual Freedom League Fornication Festival.

In their own strangely perverse way the inhabitants of this realm, like those on the extreme lower end of the scale in imploding 3rd world countries, are still dependent on nation states, particularly the United States, for charity and scarce resources. This need accounts for much of the funding of the United Nations, an organization whose thirst for the perfect world in the very near future (We promise) is exceeded only by its thirst for American money in the here and now. Dreams do not require food and protection, only the dreamers dreaming from their unshakable sleep.

A shorthand term for these global creatures among us is "cosmopolitanism," and it is a concept that fits them like a bespoke suit. After all, what is not to admire about a person who is "cosmopolitan?" Such a person is, after all, "So sophisticated as to be at home in all parts of the world or conversant with many spheres of interest." Who among us would not aspire to such a sobriquet attached to our view of ourselves? The very concept simply reeks of a special status denied to those who are, well, the little people.

Cosmopolitan Americans tend to clump into readily identifiable groups: our media, our intellectuals, our academics, our stars of stage, screen, television, books, and magazines, our newly and fabulously rich captains of hi-tech industries, and most of all our politicians of all stripes. True not everyone in these groups conducts themselves in a "citizen of the world before a citizen of the nation manner." Many still do not, but the preponderance of the members of these groups do. The political affiliations of these groups skew heavily leftwards but not exclusively so. With the recent realignment of power toward the Democrats, the ascent of the faux-American president, and the conquest of the Democrats by their more "cosmopolitan" elements, the tendency of this group to draw more into its orbit increases, since cosmopolitans are, at bottom, always about the main chance before the hard choice.

...Because they no longer live in America but in the Happy World, they deeply and fundamentally believe that their unnameable vision will prevail, and with the defeat of the nation on which their freedom and prosperity depends, all shall ascend finally into Happy World of Obamaland where the world will leave us alone to pursue our various socialist experiments if only we leave it alone.

...Global thermonuclear war is of little matter to those whose vision dare not speak its name. They believe, they deeply believe, that with enough talk and enough retreat, and enough appeasement, and enough money, and enough bribes that it will never come to that. Of course, it always does come to that, but this time, they assert, "will be different. We promise."

At bottom, believing that a butcher's bill will never come due, the destruction of the American ideal is really just fine with these "citoyens du monde". They yearn, from their perches in their perverse cosmopolitan realms, to see their nation defeated and humbled and lowered. They yearn for it because they long ago left that nation and ascended into those ethereal realms of their own private Fantasy Island.

After all once the United States is reduced in power and prestige to Switzerland, what could possibly happen in the world that could keep their Fantasy Island from becoming the Green Utopian Earth?

It will be Brave New World set up as a corridor to 1984. What could possibly go wrong?
Read more here.

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