ONE AMERICAN LEFTIST FINALLY GETS IT (MORE OR LESS)

Martin Peretz, a moderate American Leftist, has some remarkably perceptive comments on the state of his "liberal" brethren. Just a few excerpts:

"It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying..... Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really....

even in the morally self-satisfied Scandinavian and Low Countries, the assuring left-wing bromides are no longer believed.....

Sharpton is an inciter of racial conflict. To him can be debited the fraudulent and dehumanizing scandal around Tawana Brawley (conflating scatology and sex), the Crown Heights violence between Jews and blacks, a fire in Harlem, the protests around a Korean grocery store in Brooklyn, and on and on. Yet the liberal press treats Sharpton as a genuine leader, even a moral one, the trickster as party statesman......

virtually nothing has been done to make sure that children of color--and other children, too, since the crisis in our educational system cuts across race and class--are receiving a different and better type of schooling, in science and in literacy, than those now coming into our colleges. This is not about Head Start. This is about a wholesale revamping of teaching and learning. The conservatives have their ideas, and many of them are good, such as charter schools and even vouchers. But give me a single liberal idea with some currency, even a structural notion, for transforming the elucidation of knowledge and thinking to the young. You can't.....

This will not curb the liberal complaint. That complaint is not a matter of circumstance. It is a permanent affliction of the liberal mind. It is not a symptom; it is a condition. And it is a condition related to the desperate hopes liberals have vested in the United Nations. That is their lodestone. But the lodestone does not perform. It is not a magnet for the good. It performs the magic of the wicked. It is corrupt, it is pompous, it is shackled to tyrants and cynics. It does not recognize a genocide when the genocide is seen and understood by all. Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength....."

Belmont Club has a fuller commentary on the Peretz article and makes this excellent point:

"Paradoxically, dogmatism is rooted in relativism more than in the belief that real truth is discoverable. For as long as the truth is believed to be "out there"; it will be sought. When its existence is doubted none will venture into the dark. Under those conditions, we get exactly what Peretz describes: an illogical attachment to old formulations of the 1960s, which can be uttered only because they are hallowed."

In other words, the Leftist intellectual sickness is so great that it is the very believers in there being no such thing as right and wrong who are most fanatical in enforcing particular ideas of right and wrong -- under the banner of "political correctness". Fierce censorship is practiced in the name of "tolerance". It is the relativists who are most dogmatic. It is the supposed opponents of the "status quo" who are themselves stuck in a rut. Orwell would understand.

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