Politics
Saving Liberalism: An Appeal to My Progressive Friends
I’ve never liked the words “liberal” or “conservative” to describe people because I’m both liberal and conservative in the historic meaning of the words.
The problem comes when words carry multiple meanings or change over time and end up connotating something far different than when they were first introduced.
Words are sometimes like the proverbial frog boiling in the kettle: slowly and subtlety they can change over the years and need to be either renounced due to distortion or renewed to their original context.
I want to make an appeal to my liberal, progressive friends today. Liberalism has devolved; It is in danger of becoming nothing less than brute force– which is not liberal.
Will you join with me in saving liberalism?
I’ve been thinking about this subject for some time, and this week I read an article by Michael Barone that expressed my hunches better than I could.
Barone is the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, and one of the most knowledgeable political pundits in America. He is probably the nation’s leading authority on the political demographics of the United States. Name any county or Congressional District in the nation and Michael Barone can tell you why and how they will vote.
He’s also an independent man who is not an ideologue for either liberal or conservative politics. And he’s spot on regarding the present and extremely dangerous devolution of liberalism.
Here are his recent thoughts after which I will make some suggestions about how liberalism can be saved.
How Obama is Turning Liberalism into an Instrument of Coercion
By Michael Barone
Liberals just aren’t very liberal these days. The word “liberal” comes from the Latin word meaning freedom, and in the 19th century, liberals in this country and abroad stood for free speech, free exercise of religion, free markets, free trade — for minimal state interference in people’s lives.
In the 20th-century, New Dealers revised this definition by arguing that people had a right not only to free speech and freedom of religion but also, as Franklin Roosevelt said in his 1941 Four Freedoms speech, freedom from fear and from want.
Freedom from want meant, for Roosevelt, government provision of jobs, housing, health care and food. And so government would have to be much larger, more expensive and more intrusive than ever before.
That’s what liberalism has come to mean in America and much of the Obama Democrats’ agenda are logical outgrowths — Obamacare, the vast expansion of food stamps, attempted assistance to underwater homeowners.
But in some respects the Obama Democrats want to go further — and are complaining that they’re having a hard time getting there. Their form of liberalism is in danger of standing for something like the very opposite of freedom–for government coercion of those who refuse to behave the way they’d like.
Example one is the constitutional amendment, sponsored by 43 of the 55 Democratic U.S. senators, which would cut back on the First Amendment and authorize Congress and state legislatures to restrict political speech [i.e. fund-raising).
The amendment is poorly drafted and leaves many questions dangerously open, perhaps because its sponsors know it has no significant chance of passage.
It also seems animated by a delusionary paranoia: Democrats profess to be afraid that conservatives will be swamped by a flood of rich people’s money, even though rich Democratic supporters have raised more than the other side in recent years.
Nonetheless the picture is striking. Many conservatives wanted to change the First Amendment in order to prosecute flag burning, not the Founding Fathers’ central concern. Today’s liberals, in contrast, want to change the First Amendment to restrict political speech, which is the core value the Founders sought to protect.
Or consider liberals’ recent attitude toward free exercise of religion, made plain in their reaction to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision declaring the Obamacare contraception mandate invalid as a violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The RFRA was passed, with three dissenting votes, and signed by Bill Clinton in 1993. It was prompted by a Supreme Court decision upholding the penalization of Oregon Indians for using peyote, which they claimed was a religious rite.
In passing RFRA, liberals and conservatives alike responded as Americans have often done when small groups have claimed laws infringed their religious beliefs: They put a higher priority to a few individuals’ free exercise of religion than they did to widely supported laws of general application.
Thus Congress allowed for conscientious objectors to be exempt from military service in World War II, in which more than 400,000 U.S. service members died. Even in a national emergency, when lives were at stake, Americans were willing to accommodate religious beliefs that a large majority did not share.
Today’s liberals take a different view. They want to make Hobby Lobby’s owners pay for what they regard as the destruction of human life. They spent much time arguing the owners are mistaken (actually, Hobby Lobby had a plausible scientific basis for their belief).
But the point about freedom of religion isn’t that everyone has to agree. On the contrary: Almost no one agreed with the Oregon Indians’ beliefs about peyote. They just thought the larger society should not use compulsion to bar them from practicing their religion.
Today’s liberals seem comfortable with using the force of law to prevent people from doing so.
Or consider the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn, ruling that care givers for disabled relatives paid with Medicaid funds are not state employees and thus cannot be forced into a public employee union.
Today’s liberals did this in President Obama’s Illinois to channel public money away from low-income care givers and toward public employee unions that do so much to fund and support the Democratic Party. They seem unembarrassed by this crass political motive and indifferent to the plight of the needy.
Today’s liberals seem bent on pushing people around, preventing them from speaking their minds and practicing their beliefs. It’s not just the language that’s changed.
Barone is right. American liberalism has dangerously altered course in the past century–and even in the past six years.
Noah Webster’s original 1830 dictionary summarizes the classical view of liberalism:
1. To be liberal is to be free to be generous–to give or bestow blessings.
2. To be liberal is to not be self-centered, but have an enlarged mind regarding others and their needs.
3. To be liberal is the embrace literature and sciences (as in a liberal arts education).
4. To be liberal is to desire to liberate or make people free. The word itself comes from the Latin liber or “free.”
I’m a liberal according to that definition. I wholeheartedly agree with all the meanings.
British jurist John Locke is widely recognized as father of liberalism. In his “Two Treatises of Government” which were first published in 1690, Locke taught that men had God-given rights to “life, liberty and estate (property)”–i.e. people were meant to be free–something no king, religion, or cultural tradition could usurp.
His ideas found Christian expression in the birth of America and the Declaration of Independence, and a fascist form in the French Revolution where two million people died–400,000 of them by execution. Both revolutions were based on the concept of “freedom”–but one was brought about by virtue and principle and the other by bloodthirsty force.
The founders of the American Revolution were all classical liberals, not fascists. Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism says this was due to American exceptionalism. “American culture supersedes our legal and constitutional framework. It is our greatest bulwark against fascism.”
Goldberg says that today’s “conservatives are the more authentic classical liberals.” In fact, Goldberg points out that in the past fifty years, it was been conservative leaders that have really carried on the legacy of Lockian liberalism:
“Conservatives were launching an extensive project to restore the proper place of the Constitution in American life [during the latter 20th century]. No leading conservative scholar or intellectual celebrated fascist themes or ideas. No leading conservative denigrated the inherent classical liberalism of the United States political system. To the contray, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley and other conservatives dedicated themselves to restoring the classical liberal vision of the founders.”
Yet, as Michael Barone laments, today’s liberals are turning their backs on their heritage and are beginning to behave like totalitarian fascists, not true liberals–forcing their ideas and morality down the throats of the American people.
I appeal to my progressive friends to wake up and see that your liberalism is being hijacked by a spirit of force and control.
This is not liberalism. It is coercion or bondage (non-freedom).
It’s the same spirit behind fascism, communism, militant Islam, and ISIS who recently forced all Christians in Mosul, Iraq to either convert to Islam or be killed.
We’re not that extreme yet. Our culture (exceptional Christian heritage) still prevents it. But we’re on our way, and the devolution of liberalism into force or coercion has picked up steam during the Obama years.
Let’s be true liberals through a renewal of faith, freedom, generosity–and true conservatives by preserving our culture through the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
This means anchoring ourselves to the Bible–the source of liberal ideals (freedom) as well as conservative ones (wisdom).
How the West Was Lost by a Selfie President
I’ve been thinking lately about the gasping Obama presidency–last week rocked by the Veterans Administration scandal, and this week by the Bowe Bergdahl affair where the Administration traded an army deserter for the Taliban Dream Team.
This latest debacle comes after:
- The NSA scandal–collecting the data of American citizens and tapping the lines of world leaders
- The IRS scandal–using the most hated government branch to silence conservative organizations
- The AP scandal–the Justice Department tapping reporters phone records
- The Ben Ghazi scandal–where Americans died, Susan Rice lied, and no rescue took place, and
- Fast Furious–where we supplied thousands of guns to crooks and a border agent was killed.
What in the world is going on?
Here’s an insightful article on how the West was lost by a selfie president.
Last week, my wife and and I watched a moving six-hour History Channel series on The Great Wars that featured portraits of the key leaders of the 20th century. The heroes from WWI and WWII—Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George Patton and Douglas MacArthur–all learned from their mistakes during WWI and courageously led the Western powers to victory over Nazism and Imperial Japan.
The villains of the Great Wars, including Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo, were molded by the horrors of the first world war but applied their lessons toward destruction–not the blessings of liberty and peace.
Thankfully, the world was saved by wise, courageous Western leaders.
(It’s interesting to note that Roosevelt never lived to see the end of WWII, but that he, Mussolini and Hitler all died within one month of each other and Churchill was voted out of office two months later.)
Now we find ourselves in a possibly more dangerous world where Russia is flexing its muscles, Iran is nearing a nuclear bomb, and communist China is the rising power in the Pacific–while our current Western leaders are taking selfies.
The following article appeared after Nelson Mandela’s December 15, 2013 funeral in South Africa. You will remember the famous selfie picture of Barack Obama, David Cameron and the female Danish Prime Minister.
How times have changed since the era of Roosevelt and Churchill! And how desperately we need to pray for and elect courageous leaders who are not enamored by narcissism and corrupted by scandals.
How the West Was Lost By a Selfie President
Michael Goodwin – NY Post columnist
My bookshelves sag with encyclopedic volumes arguing that America and the West are in decline. But proving that a picture is worth a thousand books, the “selfie” seen ’round the world ends the argument.
It’s official — the government of the United States of Obama consists of boobs and bores and is led by a narcissist. It is no consolation that Great Britain joins us in racing to the bottom.
President Obama’s flirting with Denmark’s prime minister would be shameful on any occasion. That it happened at the memorial for Nelson Mandela only adds to the embarrassment.
But the “selfie” episode also symbolizes the greater global calamity of Western decline. With British prime minister David Cameron playing the role of Obama’s giggling wingman, the “look at me” moment confirms we have unserious leaders in a dangerously serious time.
Iran marches toward nuclear weapons and already there is talk in military circles that a nuclear-armed Iran could mean mushroom clouds in the Mideast within five years.
China is flexing its muscles throughout Asia, its ships brazenly confronting ours on the high seas. Russia is expanding its writ in the Arab lands and in Eastern Europe while making casual threats about bombing America. Syria’s Assad uses chemical weapons and Obama and Cameron rattle little sabers before meekly agreeing to become his partner.
The sign-language interpreter wasn’t the only fake at the Mandela funeral. Obama and Cameron were posing as world leaders.
They will never be confused with FDR and Churchill. The fratboys stand in stark contrast to the days when the “special relationship” meant two great leaders uniting two great countries in the fight for freedom. Those leaders understood the consequences if evil prevailed and were committed to victory.
Churchill coined the term “special relationship” during World War II and used it again in his “Iron Curtain Speech” in 1946 that marked the unofficial start of the Cold War. Fearful the West would disarm again, as it did after World War I, he wanted to combat communism by maintaining the “special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.”
To him it meant our “kindred systems of society” must grow ever closer to provide mutual security and a framework for global peace. That special bond later cemented the Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher partnership that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Try to imagine any of those four embarrassing their nations by acting like indulgent teenagers while civilization hung in the balance. You can’t because they wouldn’t.
Hitler’s greatest mistake was being born too soon. If he were on the march now, would there be will in Washington and London to stop him? Would there be an arsenal of democracy to save mankind from darkness?
In fact, while Obama and Cameron were yukking it up in South Africa, the White House was denouncing bipartisan efforts in Congress to pass more sanctions against Iran. Doing so, it said, would scuttle the feeble interim deal Obama and Cameron accepted. Incredibly, administration arguments echoed Iran’s position.
Try to imagine FDR and Churchill siding with Hitler against their national legislatures. You can’t because they were the antitheses of the appeasers of their times.
World War II proved that the international order collapses when there is no one to support and enforce it. Obama himself has said that, but apparently believes talk is sufficient.
Cameron also talks a good game, but hollowed out the British military to where it is no longer capable of sustained missions.
Words don’t matter to tyrants and genocidal maniacs. They push until they are convinced there will be consequences if they go further.
Our weakness invites their aggression and makes war more likely, not less. That is the perilous state of the world, as the clown kings of the West party on.
Shutdown Over Obamacare: Be Careful Little Eyes What You See
President Obama was a part of two shutdowns that affected me this week.
First, the government shutdown that affected the nation (especially veterans trying to visit the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C.). And second, a letter I received from our insurance company saying that we had been cancelled because of the Affordable Care Act (dubbed Obamacare).
We were told to go to the “exchange” and try to get new insurance.
It crashed.
So I said goodbye to Tony, our family physician and to the company that has provided health care for us for the past ten years.
Both shutdowns involved the Affordable Health Care Act, and if you believe the mainstream press, it is the “anarchist” Republicans who are at fault. Our local newspaper had a four page spread on ACA – and one page of it was “definitions of terms.”
Here are my “definitions” of what is taking place in America right now.
My first advice is what I learned in Kindergarten: Be careful little eyes what you see.
One of the realities of life is that the same people are events can be viewed from totally different points of view, depending on your facts (or lack of them) and your faith.
Here’s an obvious example.
During the time of the Third Reich in the 1930s and 40s. the German people came to believe that they were a superior race, that Hitler was a charismatic and noble leader, and that conquering Europe and the world might be a good thing for all people.
On the other hand, in other European nations, across the English channel, and in America, people viewed the same events and leader in a totally different light. Because of their different view and faith, they did everything in their power to thwart and obstruct the mad German dictator.
So be careful little eyes what you see.
You may have the sight right on the lens of your eye, but your interpretation of what’s happening may be totally different from reality.
That brings us to the partial government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act.
Let me give my take on the sobering and confusing events of this week. I will do it through the lens of my own definitions–some of which, you may disagree with. That’s okay. Just check your facts carefully so that your eye will be filled with light (Matthew 6:22).
IMPORTANT DEFINITIONS IN THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN OVER OBAMACARE
Government Shutdown
A very partial thing. Essential services are open, Social Security checks are being mailed, and most people don’t notice much difference in everyday life. Do we really need all this government?
Republicans
The Grand Old Party goes back to Abraham Lincoln and has mostly stood for the values of Judeo-Christian culture (though very imperfectly) for the past 150 years. Republicans generally believe in limited government, God-given rights, economic freedom, restraints on morality, and a strong national defense to ward off evil in a fallen world.
Today’s R’s are divided. Some believe that secularism is triumphing in America and that they need to become “Democrat-lite” to win elections. Most of these have been in Washington, D.C. for awhile and make up the old guard. They are squishy on some issues and generally avoid confrontation.
There is a new guard of Republicans who believe that we have turned away from God, are in bad straits economically, that the ACA will only exacerbate our demise, and that we need to turn back to the time-tested ways.
The Republicans are the minority party who only control one half of one third of the branches of government (the House of Representatives). Their leader, John Boehner, is a part of the old guard. The R’s are not causing the government shutdown–but you wouldn’t know this by listening to the news.
Democrats
A noble and longest-serving party that found its voice during the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Democrats have a greater belief in government and want it to grow to take care of the needs of the people. They believe in centralized control, restraints on capitalism, complete freedom in morality, and have a general dislike of the military and its role in the world.
For many years, the core values of the Republicans and Democrats were fairly similar. In the 20th century, the party swung more into the secular progressive vision of a large welfare state, a one-world government (think United Nations), and rejection of the Judeo Christian past.
Democrats control the US Senate, the White House, and probably–slightly–the Supreme Court as evidenced by Chief Justice John Robert’s decision to approve the individual mandate found in Obamacare. They are backed up by a very liberal academic world at many universities and liberal stars in Hollywood.
The Mainstream Media
Once an independent voice to keep the government in check, the current mainstream media has simply become the media arm of the Democratic Party. They share the secular progressive vision for social democracy in the United States and the ascendancy of the United Nations (think climate control).
Let’s be clear about the major players: (you need to watch for their by-lines to be aware of the bias you’re getting). The New York and LA Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC. Others include the Politico, the Huffington Post, and MoveOn.org.
This vast media empire is currently blaming the Republicans for the government shutdown. Our local newspaper (which is very liberal) came out with this headline on Tuesday: “Republicans Shut Down the Government.” There was a large and unflattering photo of John Boehner, and a smaller and thoughtful photograph of President Obama.
The message was clear: R’s are bad and the president is doing his best to help the situation.
Compromise or Bi-Partisanship
This used to mean that when the two parties come to the middle to produce law that the entire country can live with.
Today, compromise means that the Republicans give in to the desires of the Democrats.
What just happened over the past two weeks of negotiating the Continuing Resolution and ACA? The Republican House offered to fund the entire government except Obamacare. The Democratic House said no. Then the Republicans offered to delay Obamacare a year and cut the tax on medical devices. The Democratic Senate said no. Then the R’s offered to give people the option for a year as to whether to join the ACA (just like Big Business was given a year’s waver). Again, the D’s said no.
The Republicans have tried numerous compromises (and a willingness to accept many programs and taxes in the CR which they steadfastly oppose) and the Democrats have said nyet.
No. Nada. No compromise.
But their mainstream media arm tells the unthinking American public that the Republicans are the anarchists, terrorists, rapists, etc.
However, in secular progressive America, the message is becoming clear: It’s our way or the highway.
Transforming America
After five years of governing, we now know the meaning of the chant “Yes We Can!” The secular progressives believe they can cordon off faith in the US, destroy the traditional family, re-distribute wealth to those whom they choose, and control the American populace through the ACA law which gives them power over one-sixth of the American economy (to be enforced by the increasing hated IRS).
For the sake of argument, let’s say that their motives are noble. They think it’s fair to take from the rich, give to the poor, and control most of life from cradle to the grave.
I don’t think all their motives are that pure (or they are that stupid), but maybe some are. So what?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. If they succeed, we will go the way of Europe and maybe even end up like the Soviet Union–the ideal socialist utopia. All we will find in that land is universal, serfdom and poverty.
Obstructionists
Any person or party that tries to resist the progressive re-making of America. According to this definition, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the German pastors resistance movement would have been labeled obstructionists by the Nazi regime.
Ted Cruz
One of the new guard Republicans who believes in faith, family and freedom, and was willing to speak for 21 hours straight on the Senate floor to desperately wake up the nation to the problems Obamacare will bring.
Harry Reid
The water boy of the current Administration who didn’t produce a budget for four years and is directly responsible for the government shutdown. I believe he is one of the worst Congressional leaders in all of American history.
Barack Obama
Our twice-elected president who is a fabulous campaigner and great speaker. But he has a problem with telling the truth and has weakened America at home and around the world. He is the true leader of the secular progressive movement.
Lucifer and his Demons
The invisible spirit beings that are indirectly responsible for the chaos, venom, bad policies and potential disasters that could be coming to America and the world. Their goal is to “Kill Jesus” in all of Western culture.
Suckers
The American people who don’t understand or want to understand what is happening in this battle of worldviews and differing faiths.
Revival
Only an act of God in The United States can awaken His Church, bring millions into his Kingdom of love and light, and transform our nation through his truth and power. It’s happened three times before.
This is our greatest need.
So be careful little eyes what you see.