In his book The Snapping of the American Mind, David Kupelian asks the following painful question that millions of Americans like myself have pondered for years and will ponder for some time to come as America slowly rips itself apart. Kupelian writes, “How could it be that hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and bled – and many died – on foreign shores to contain an evil and metas-tasizing ideology variously called communism, Marxism, socialism, collectivism, or statism, and yet now, just a few years later, we would gaze up at the pinnacle of power in our own country and behold leaders in thrall to essentially the same core ideology we fought and died to protect strangers from?”
The answer to this is can be found within the culture itself and more specifically within Americas youth who have seemingly embraced the concept of socialism with little to no understanding of what socialism even is. Yet, like frogs slowly boiling to death in the cesspools that have become our college campuses, our nations youth collectively embrace the ideology that will destroy them while demanding that they be “protected” from opinions that run contrary to their beliefs. For instance, after the outspoken conservative and feminist critic Milo Yiannopoulos gave a speech at Rutgers University the college responded in a way that has become typical in the cesspools that are our academia. Writing in the Rutgers campus newspaper, The Daily Targum, Noa Halff notes:
Students and faculty gathered in the Paul Robeson Cultural Center on Busch campus to generate dialogue about Yiannopoulos’s visit and the protest that occurred during his lecture. A variety of different organizations and departments were present to listen, answer questions and show support.
Representatives from the Rutgers University Police Department, the Office of Violence Prevention and Victim Assistance, Counseling, Alcohol and other Drug Assistance Program and Psychiatric Services and the Bias Prevention and Education Committee were present. Members from the Black Student Union, the Asian American Cultural Center, Center for Latino Arts and Culture, College Student Affairs and many more were also in attendance.
In short, this official response to a conservative speaker from what was once one of America’s most prestigious universities is a damning indictment of a generation that has been primed for totalitarianism. The fact that this isn’t an isolated example is bad, but what’s worse is that these very same college students have become champions of government regulated speech so long as the speech being regulated emanates from the right. This is happening while at the same time students are actively discouraged from thinking for themselves. It’s a testament to how successful the left has been in capturing our nations schools that today analytical thinking, once the basis of our education system, is virtually gone.
It’s a symptom of progressivism to see that the supposed “college educated” today have become fierce proponents for government regulated speech, but progressivism itself is not the underlying root cause. The cause itself can be found in the ideology known as liberalism which has been carried to its logical and practical extreme, totalitarianism.
As James Burnham explained in his 1964 classic, Suicide of the West, “liberalism has always operated most naturally as a tendency of opposition to the prevailing order, to the status quo, the ancien régime, the Establishment in general or in its several parts.” Liberalism, continues Burnham, “has always stressed change, reform, the break with encrusted habit whether in the form of old ideas, old customs or old institutions. Thus liberalism has been and continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society.” What is different today though is that liberalism now controls all the powerful institutions of culture, from the media to education and everything in between, while at the same time it faces literally no opposition. The left controls the culture and given that political issues are often decided at the cultural level before they even reach the political realm, the opposition is almost always rendered defenseless. Or in the case of college campuses, the opposition isn’t even permitted to make its case.
It is outright totalitarianism that is taking place today within American society from the silencing of conservatives on college campuses to forcing Christian business owners to pay excessive fines and face prison sentences for holding true to their beliefs in traditional marriage. The nation has fractured into two separate Americas that continue to drift further and further apart with half the nation seemingly convinced that their rights stem from the government while the other from God. The former seeks not only to control the latter but to see to it that the latter is utterly destroyed. To accomplish this, liberalism functions as all totalitarian movements have functioned in the past, by subjecting individuals to unbearable stress, conflict, and crisis until each is broken. Whether the means to do so are accomplished financially, spiritually, culturally, or psychologically matters little as it always justifies the end. The end of course being the destruction of the will of each and every American so that liberalism can remake the individual from the ashes in which it has destroyed them.
Liberalism wants you to snap, it wants to challenge your sanity and destroy your belief system so that it can remold you in its image of dependency. First and foremost though, it must extinguish those institutions in which we hold dear. It is why, since his first day in office, Barack Obama has relentlessly attacked the cultural, moral, and religious institutions that those of us on the right hold dear. Yet, even Obama himself is not solely the one to blame for he represents the logical extreme of liberalism; He is a symptom of the progressive creation and his rise to the pinnacle of power in this nation represented a turning point for the worse as the government has been infused with an ideology of totalitarianism. Take a look at any government agency functioning today and you’d be hard pressed to find just one that isn’t completely politicized into attacking the ideological opponents of progressivism. In turn, you can do the same exact thing with our culture itself and you’ll find the same results. Wherever the progressives are in power, from the government to the culture to the academia and the media, the hatred of Western values dominates.
Popular discourse today sees the West in general as being “guilty of genocidal crimes against civilization” for Western values seen through the lens of liberalism represents the “greatest repository of racism, sexism, xenophobia, antisemitism, fascism, and narcissism.” As the Father of the New Left Herbert Marcuse so eloquently put it, “American society is oppressive, evil, and undeserving of loyalty.” With this notion in mind, liberalism places a new emphasis on liberating all men and women from the “evil repression” and “tyrannical values” that Western civilization was built upon. To bring this about, progressives have designed numerous strategies to discredit and smear the values that had forged and sustained the West for the past 2,000 years.
“Critical Theory,” writes Nelson Hultberg in Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America, “was the first and most important of these strategies” as it was not only critical to discrediting capitalism but also social conditions of contemporary society and existing social institutions. Hultberg explains, “Under its auspices, every tradition of Western life was to be redefined as ‘prejudice’ and ‘perverse’. And these redefinition’s were to be instilled into the social stream via devastating scholarly criticisms of all values such as family, marriage, property, individualism, patriotism, faith in God etc.”
Critical Theory precisely defines the tactics used by progressives today as they attack Christianity, capitalism, family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, loyalty, and patriotism. It is this routine and consistent attack on any and all foundations of our society in which liberalism has destroyed our culture and advanced its totalitarian agenda. The left, no matter what they call themselves today, breeds the ideology of totalitarianism as every single proposed and forced through “reforms” serves to reduce human personality to its most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex, and “God-like” aspects of human individuality. Even equality itself, while serving as a powerful appeal to the masses with its great promises of “each according to his need”, turns out to signify not equality of rights, of opportunities, and of external conditions, but equality of complete uniformity in thought and condition.
The total implementation of the principles espoused by liberalism deprives human life of individuality and simultaneously deprives life of its meaning and attraction. America isn’t at this point yet, but it is coming as reflected in a generation that is at best negligent and at worst complicit in the march towards totalitarianism. How do I know for certain that this is where we are headed? Because what iv’e been calling progressive totalitarianism is what was once called socialism. And following the basic tendency of socialism, liberalism is hostile toward human personality not only as a category, but ultimately to its very existence. In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”
Socialism masquerading as progressivism is really totalitarianism that will inevitably lead to the total destruction of the American spirit and to a leveling of America into death.
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