Marxism

Islamic radicalism may be creating a “clash of civilizations,” but sexual radicalism is undermining the social foundation of all civilization.

“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” — George Gilder, 1986

Four decades into the boldest social experiment ever undertaken in the Western democracies, the full impact of what was once quaintly known as “women’s liberation” is at last becoming clear. The political class of both the Left and Right have colluded to limit the debate to a series of innocuous controversies: job discrimination, equal pay, affirmative action. Only abortion has any depth, and that debate has been mired in stalemate.

Meanwhile, beneath the political radar screen, the real consequences are finally emerging: a massive restructuring of the social order, demographic trends that threaten the very survival of Western civilization, and perhaps least noticed, an exponential growth in the size and power of the state — the state at its most bureaucratic and tyrannical.

Feminism has now positioned itself as the vanguard of the Left, shifting the political discourse from the economic and racial to the social and increasingly the sexual. What was once a socialistic assault on property and enterprise has become a social and sexual attack on the family, marriage, and masculinity. This marks a truly new kind of politics, the most personal and thus potentially the most total politics ever devised: the politics of private life and sexual relations.

Read the full article here.

I really enjoy reading the work of converts -- people who were formerly on the left but through some epiphany became conservatives. They have the most keen insights into what animates leftist thought, and they also understand the tactics that the left uses to advance their causes. David Horowitz, who edited Ramparts in his youth, is probably the best known.

Janet Daley of the UK Telegraph is another such voice. She has a wonderful column this morning that wraps up the Obama administration's response to the economic crisis, and pairs it with Gordon Brown's leadership.

She notes that while Obama may not meet the textbook definition of a doctrinaire socialist, he meets her own practical definition, one with which Great Britain, particularly in the 15 years before Margaret Thatcher, became all too familiar:

You may quibble at my use of the word "socialist" to describe people who generally present themselves as friends of the free market, and who have repudiated full-scale nationalisation (even of the banks at a moment when that option might have appeared irresistible). So, as someone who spent her formative years on the Left, let me make clear that I am using the word to designate those who accept the primary tenet of Marxist ideology: that the economy can and should be controlled by the state.

Like Krauthammer last week, she calls Obama on the odd, revisionist story he told during his speech to Congress, a statist vision of the causes of economic upheaval:

...he actually seemed to suggest that the present crisis had been caused by America's failure to develop a universal health care system and to attend to the impending environmental disaster of global warming ("we made the wrong choices"), and that by focusing on these matters a way can be found out of the country's economic problems.

Is he quite mad? Does he really believe that the banking crisis and the recession were some kind of divine retribution for the absence of universal health care, and excessive carbon emissions? Or is he suggesting that a practical solution lies in spending money on health care and the development of alternative energy sources?

No, not "quite mad," just clever, in a ham-handed way.

I grew up with the Left and what this looks like to me is a power grab: a seizing of the moment by the forces which always believed in state domination. The Left sees an opening here, first for telling a critical lie about the historical origins of this crisis, which was propelled as much by the Left-liberal determination to spread prosperity through easy credit to the poor, as by the greed of bankers. And then, out of the wreckage, to restructure the economy along the lines that it always wanted, complete with central controls over the pay levels in private financial institutions.

We are being led to believe that public debate should be all about economic mechanics when it should really be about political principle: just how many freedoms do we want to lose while governments pretend that they are the solution?

On the lighter side, another UK voice worth reading is James Delingpole, whose book, Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work!, is a real hoot. Delingpole is no convert, but he understands the Obama attraction well, and has good fun comparing it to the Blair years to let us know what's ahead in the former colonies. It'll make all but most humorless Obama acolytes laugh, too. Among other things, he chronicles the left's campaign to ban fox hunting, "the only sport," he notes,  "FACT - where alcohol actually improves your performance."

(CHICAGO) -- Just when we thought we had seen our share of fantastic and colorful ideas for 2009, Representatives Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) and Ted Poe (R-TX) are hoping you won't mind just one more to add to the list.

Titled the SAFE Act ("Security and Financial Empowerment"), H.R. 739 intends to promote victimhood and allegations of domestic violence by granting lifetime job security to anyone who makes a claim of Domestic Violence, creating powerful incentives for highly conflicted spouses and intimate partners to file false abuse charges, which would trivialize real problems associated with domestic violence, while marginalizing actual victims of physical abuse that need and deserve the attention of law enforcement and the courts.

H.R. 739 seeks to prohibit employers from refusing a job to any person who claims to have suffered from domestic violence or "substantial emotional distress or psychological harm" – words that can be interpreted to mean just about anything.

And, as hard as it is to believe, no actual evidence of domestic violence is required to receive these benefits. The "victim" only has to sign a sworn statement or get a restraining order, which are notoriously easy to get because of the low standards of proof and weak definitions of domestic violence that are currently used to destroy intact families.

Furthermore, judges are reluctant to deny applications for fear of being blamed if something bad happened following the denial. A family or household member of the Domestic Violence "victim" is also entitled to the same benefits.

H.R. 739 also allows any person who "is, has been, or may be the subject of abuse" to qualify for lifetime health insurance coverage.

The "victim" would also be entitled to 30 days of emergency leave as well as unemployment compensation. The bill amounts to a lifetime guarantee of job security and availability of employer-subsidized health insurance for any person who claims to be a victim of domestic violence or psychological abuse, or for any family member. And the person who allegedly inflicted the abuse has no right to refute or appeal the charges.

Some readers might wonder if we're exaggerating when we say all this, but we're not – see RADAR's analysis of the bill here: http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARanalysis-HR739-SAFE-Act.pdf

Suffice it to say, this bill is prime example how the feminist mantra of victimhood has spun out of control, and how even Republican lawmakers are being co-opted by them.

Over 1 million restraining orders are issued each year in which partner violence is not even alleged. This so-called "SAFE" Act is the last thing we need. Take action today!

 Our last two alerts targeted VAWA funding in the stimulus bill. Although we were not fully successful in removing it, we did succeed in eliminating $75 million from the final package – $325 million instead of $400 million. Thank you for helping expose how VAWA has spiraled out of control because of the lack of an honest debate!

Act Now!

Rep. Ted Poe

's sponsorship of this bill is clearly out of step with his party's stand on economic policy. Please contact his office and ask him to withdraw support for H.R. 739.

As always please remember to be polite.

Rep. Ted Poe (R) Texas, 2nd Congressional District Phone: 202-225-6565 Fax: 202-225-5547 Webform: http://poe.house.gov/contact/contactform.htm

If you or someone you know would be interested in working to stem the growing tide of feminist-dominated agendas that are designed to destroy intact families and parent-child bonds, please write to us at: info@illinoisparentsandchildren.org.

If you support our efforts, please be sure to forward this message to others within your personal and professional networks.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Michael Burns

President/Co-founder

Illinois Alliance for Parents and Children

Chicago, Illinois

"Building a More Empathic Human Context"

There's a great pressure mounting on the Left right now regarding Obama's commitment to strip retroactive immunity from the House FISA bill.  The problem is, he's stopped short of promising to filibuster the bill.

According to the Washington Post's The Trail: 

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) today announced his support for a sweeping intelligence surveillance law that has been heavily denounced by the liberal activists who have fueled the financial engines of his presidential campaign.

In his most substantive break with the Democratic Party's base since becoming the presumptive nominee, Obama declared he will support the bill when it comes to a Senate vote, likely next week, despite misgivings about legal provisions for telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program of suspected terrorists.

Obama missed the February vote on that FISA bill as he campaigned in the "Potomac Primaries," but issued a statement that day declaring "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty."

Some on the Left are opining that this will affect Obama's contribution levels (which we may already be seeing, as in Patrick's post on McCain nearly outraising Obama in May.  Others are much more agitated, such as LivinginReality on the Daily Kos:

More and more, I do not believe that "change" can really happen through the ballot box in this country.

There are other ways that change can happen.  But I've pretty much lost all faith in our electoral system ALONE to bring it about. 

Rather, our electoral system is designed to take the desire for change, absorb it like a lighting rod, and then channel it into nothingness as it dissapates into the ground.   Without some sort of mass movement that exists outside of the electoral system--like militant labor unions, organized civil rights boycotts, or massive anti-war protests that shut things down--the electoral system will, at the most, promise change . . . while changing little or nothing in so far as furthering the interests of the "little people" it is supposed to represent..

In the 1960's, this type of dialogue was discussed openly on camera in the latest technological medium of that time:  television.  Most famous for his "Ballot vs. the Bullet" speech was Malcolm X, who was no stranger to exploiting the media to communicate his message.  In his wake came the 60's radicals preaching revolution on a sliding scale from relatively non-violent "community organizing" to all-out terrorist nihilism (with examples like Saul Alinsky on the forward end and Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on the rear end of that spectrum). 

Eric Hoffer, in his book The True Believer, sees Marxism as one of the chief examples of a mass movement which offers The True Believer a glorious, yet imaginary, future to compensate for the frustrations of his present. Such movements need people to be willing to sacrifice all for that future, including themselves and others. To achieve this aim, such movements need to devalue the past and present. This is not only a criticism of communist tenets specifically; Hoffer's other chief examples are Fascists, Nationalists, and the founding stages of religions.

Marxism has been described as a closed system.  Closed systems, like certain re-emerging fundamentalist religions, have several common threads: they claim to represent a universal truth which explains everything and can cure every ill; they can automatically process and reinterpret all potentially damaging data by methods of case-based reasoning. While a principle-based approach might claim that lying is always morally wrong, the case-based approach would argue that, depending upon the details of the case, lying might or might not be illegal or unethical. Closed systems are emotionally appealing and beyond common logic; and can invalidate criticisms by deducing what the subjective motivation of the critic must be, and by presenting this motivation as a counterargument. An example of this last feature might be the disregarding of such concepts as the free market or self determination as instances of false consciousness engendered by bourgeois [or infidel] ideology.

In the Wall Street Journal's Potomac Watch, Kimberley Strassel laments the death of the [culturally conservative, free market economist] New Democrats.  Efforts are visibly afoot in Open Left and other "Progressive" websites to eliminate the Bush Dogs in 2008.  There can be very little doubt that those left holding the reigns in the Democratic Party will constitute Hoffer's True Believers.  And if the ballot does not fulfill their perfect vision of a glorious future, what will they be capable of?  If the chilling possibilities do not galvanize the Republican Party to reform and reinvent itself, who will meet their challenge?  Young Conservatives, it's time to read your history.  Older Conservatives, put aside any differences and align together against a very real potential threat from within the two most dangerous True Believers allied together within and outside the country:  Fundamentalist Marxism and Fundamentalist Islam.  I truly think that if we underestimate any aspect of this partnership for any reason, it will be a very grave error.