REBIRTH, REDEMPTION & REVOLUTION –
POLITICAL RELIGION – The Politics of MEANING
Progressive Paradise –Totalitarian Tyranny
from “LIBERAL FASCISM” by Jonah Goldberg
“Liberals hate religion because POLITICS is a RELIGION SUBSTITUTE for liberals and they can’t stand the competition” – Ann Coulter
Communists created a NEW “CIVIC” RELIGION that worshipped the creation of a “WORKER’s PARADISE”.
In Marxism, the laws of economic history were said to predestine the triumph of the proletariat and the arrival of a NEW HEAVEN ON EARTH.
Theologian Paul Tillich once said that MARX was “the MOST SUCCESSFUL of ALL THEOLOGIANS” since the Protestant Reformation – at least in terms of HISTORICAL IMPACT,if not the logical quality of his though
In an age when scientific knowledge was undermining traditional Christian belief for many people,” … large numbers turned to the “scientific laws of history” as A BARELY DISGUISED SUBSTITUTE for the TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN GOD, Marxism offers a graphic example of how secular ideas can TAKE the PLACE of traditional religion and ultimately becomea NEW, MODERN FORM of RELIGION.
Although most students of theology are familiar with the idea of “SECULAR RELIGION” … many social scientists and other professionals have given LITTLE THOUGHT to the possibility that their own professional ideas may be suffused with religious content
In the Marxist interpretation, EVERYTHING that happens in history is caused by CLASS CONFLICT everything has a material cause, like other economic religions. the underlying reality of history is entirely economic.
All ideas in the mind, for example, are a superstructure of FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS.
RELIGION is one more form of such FALSE consciousness, a byproduct rather than a driving force in history.
In effect, for Marx, the laws of ECONOMICS TAKE the PLACE of GOD and what do the laws of economics do?
They bring the triumph of the proletariat and the abolition of class conflict, of government, and of property – in other words, the arrival of heaven on earth. It is the MILLENNIUM arrived at, NOT BY DIVINE INTERVENTION in the Biblical sense, but by the workings of the laws of economic history.
It is a NEW rendition of an ancient BIBLICAL story,
Now presented in secular terms, as a scientific truth, its actual Biblical source is why marxism had/s such a powerful appeal in western civilization.
MARXISM ADAPTED BIBLICAL THEMES to “SCIENTIFIC” LANGUAGE, and in this way had conquered for a time a large part of the world.
In 1924, tens of thousands came to view the body of Lenin. Stalin decided to put Lenin’s body on “permanent display”. Stalin sought to create a SHRINE to the “COMMUNIST” GOD.
“Stalin” (“steel”) was born Josip Dugashvili in the Caucasus nation of Georgia. Schooled in an orthodox seminary, stalin understood the importance of “icons” toRussians. Icons taught often illiterate peasants icons were an important aspect of Russian culture.
The god of Stalin made lenin into an “atheistic” communist icon to “worship”.Leninwas the great god of communism. Stalin would portray himself as the GREAT DISCIPLE (learner & follower) the “GODS” of communism BECAME – marx, engels, lenin, stalin
Marx called religion the “OPIATE of the MASSES”. An opiate is a drug that relieves pain or makes on “feel good”
from “LIBERAL FASCISM” by Jonah Goldberg
In a speech she made about health care in 1993, Hillary Clinton dropped the phrase ”politics of Meaning.
STATE – RUN HEALTH CARE would provide both physical and spiritual “MEANING” and well-being for all.
Hillary Clinton’s ”politics of meaning“: “we need to RE-DEFINE what it MEANS to be a HUMAN BEING in the modern world, re-invogorate the sense of spiritual from the federal level on down.
RE-DISCOVER or find our “NEW AUTHENTICITY”, new sense of the spiritual in the public realm” giving people meaning – filling up their sense of the ‘RELIGIOUS’ THROUGH POLITICS.
State – run health care would provide both physical and spiritual“meaning” and well-being for all government is the agent to make sure we live“fulfilling” lives (the politics of “meaning”).
Jonah Goldberg: “In April, 1993 [HILLARY] clinton delivered a commencement address to the university of texas at austin in which she declared, ‘we need a new politics of meaning … we need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society with answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and thegovernmental ones as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel thatwe are part of something bigger than ourselves.”
The phrase ‘fills us up again’ is particularly telling – in 1969 she had talked of how we needed a politics to make ‘hollow men’ whole. Hillary’s life [and ours] is emptyand purposeless. Hillary has seemingly put pragmatic concerns ahead of everything else her whole life, but whenever she’s given a chance to express herself honestly,the same urge scome to the fore: MEANING, AUTHENTICITY, ACTION, TRANSFORMATION.
The politics of meaning is in many respects the most THOROUGHLY TOTALITARIAN CONCEPTIONS of POLITICSoffered by a leading American political figure in the last halfCentury. Hillary’s views have more in common with the totalizing Christian ideologies of pat robertson and jerry falwell than they do with the ‘secular atheism ’such Christian conservatives ascribe to her. They have more in common with the GOD-STATE progressivism of John Dewey, richard ely, herbert croly and woodrow wilson and other left-wing Hegelians.
Hillary’s vision holds that AMERICA SUFFERSfrom a PROFOUND ‘SPIRITUAL CRISIS’ REQUIRINGthe CONSTRUCTION of a NEW MANas part of a SOCIETY-WIDERESTORATIONand RECONSTRUCTION EFFORT LEADING to a NEW NATIONAL COMMUNITY THAT WILL PROVIDE MEANING and AUTHENTICITY TO EVERY INDIVIDUAL.
It is a FUNDAMENTALLY RELIGIOUS VISION HIDING in the TROJAN HORSE of SOCIAL JUSTICE that seeks to imbue social policy with spiritual imperatives.
To better understandthe politics of meaning, we should consider the career of CLINTON’S SELF-ANOINTED GURU, the progressive activist and rabbi MICHAEL LERNER.
When it became CLEAR that the POLITICS of MEANING SOUNDED TOO MUCH LIKE NEW AGE HOKUM, the press and the Clintons turned a cold shoulder.
In response, Lerner released his opus, the politics of meaning: restoring hope and possibility in an age of cynicism. The book strikes one fascist chord after another. Lerner cites a long,familiar litany of progressive ideas and causes. Lerner speaks about making the powerless more powerful, about throwing off the baggage of the past, about eschewing dogma and embracing national community, about rejectingthe overly rationalexpertise of doctors and scientists.
Lerner waxes eloquent about the various CRISES– spiritual, ecological, moral and social – afflicting western bourgeois democracies that MUST BEREMEDIED through the POLITICSof MEANING.
[Lerner] also talks about CREATING NEW MEN and WOMEN – rejecting the false dichotomies between work and family, business and government, private and public. Above all,Lerner insists that his new politics of meaning must saturate every nook and cranny of our lives by smashing the compartmentalism of american life: “Morality, politics, economics, ethics: none of these things can be separated from anything else. we must have our metaphysics confirmed in every human interaction and encounter”
In this [lerner] unwittingly echoes hitler’s belief that ‘economics issecondary’to the “REVOLUTION of the SPIRIT”.
Lerner’s preferred agenda would echo many of the guarentees from the NAZI PARTY PLATFORM of 1920, including EQUAL RIGHTS, GUARENTEED HEALTH CARE, EXCESSIVE TAXES ON the UNDERSERVING WEALTHY and CLAMPDOWNS ON BIG CORPORATIONS. The national socialist state, like the progressive and fascist ones, was based on the HEGELIAN IDEA that FREEDOM COULD ONLYBE REALIZED by LIVING in HARMONY with the STATE, and IT is the STATE’s DUTY to ENSURE that HARMONY.
Lerner argues in The politics of meaning that ‘the workplace needs to be reconceptualized as a primary locus for “HUMAN DEVELOPMENT”.
In another book, spirit matters, lerner writes that under his new ‘movement for emancipatory spirituality’ the ‘government needs to be reconceptualized as the public mechanism through which we all show that we care about everyone else, and “government employees should be evaluated, rewarded and promoted only to the extent that they are able to make the public come away from those interactions with a renewed sense of hope and a deepened conviction that other people really do care, and have shown that by creating such a sensitive and caring government.
Lerner’s ideal is the israeli kibbutz, where even plucking chickens has transcendent meaning for the laborer. he pines for a way to recreatethe sense of shared purpose people feel during a crisis like a flood or a natural disaster. Or, as the nazis said more pithily, ‘work makes you free”. Freedom… is reconceived in a dewey-an sense toward communal social ‘construction’.”
Under the politics of meaning, allof society’s institutions are wrapped around the state like kicks around the fascist blade. Every individual isresponsible for maintaining not only his own ideological purity but that of his fellow men.
Lerner is, in effect, the ideologist of the liberal gleichschaltung, the naziidea of coordinating every institution in society. Lerner writes that all government agencies and private businesses should issue ‘annual ethical-impact reports’, which would assess ‘their effect on the ethical, spiritual and psychological well-being of our society and on the power of people who work in and with these institutions. This is really no different from the bureaucratization of ideological loyalty that requiredgerman businesses and institutions to constantly provide documentation SHOWING THEIR ASSERTIVE LOYALTY to the SPIRIT of the NEW ERA.
Spiritual slackers in 21stcentury america would no doubt find suchscrutiny fascistic – albeit in a very caring and nurturing way. Lerner believes it is the job of EVERY PROFESSION –COORDINATING WITH the STATE – to ‘REFLECT’ ON ITS OWN CONTRIBUTION to the SPIRITUALand PSYCHIC HEALTH of the NATIONAL Volksgemeinschaft.
Lerner writes that the 1990s are witnessing the riseof ‘fascistic’ right-wing movements and that they can only be countered by his politics of meaning.
IF THERE IS EVER A FASCIST TAKEOVER IN AMERICA, IT WILL COME NOT in the FORM of STORM TROOPERS KICKING DOWN DOORS BUT with LAWYERS andSOCIAL WORKERS SAYING, ‘I’M FROM the GOVERNMENT and I’M HERE to HELP”. – Ronald Regan
Ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. rather, it claimed. The statewas the natural brainof the organic body politic. statism was the route to collectivism. GOVERNMENTwas merely the place where the SPIRITUAL WILL of the PEOPLEcould be translated into action.
One consequence of this view is that institutions and individual that STAND APARTf rom the state or the progressive tide are INHERENTLY SUSPECT and LABELED SELFISH,SOCIAL DARWINIST, CONSERVATIVEor, most ironically, FASCIST.
In a PROPERLY ORDERED PROGRESSIVE SOCIETY,the STATE wouldn’t take over Harvard or McDonanlds, but it certainly ensure that the harvards and mcdonalds had their priorities straight”
The politics of meaning is ultimatley a THEOCRATIC DOCTRINE because it SEEKS to ANSWER THE FUNDMENTAL QUESTIONS ABOUT EXISTENCE, answers that itCAN ONLY BE ANSWERED COLLECTIVELY, and insists that the STATE put those ANSWERS into PRACTICE.
norman lear: “our obsessionwith numbers, the quantifiable, the immediate has cost us our connection with that place in each of us that honors the unquatificable and eternal. Ourcapacity for awe, wonder andmystery; that place where acts of faith in a process larger than ourselves, prove ultimatley satisfying in the fullness of time”
Lear’s cri de coeur is an almost pitch-perfect restatement of the NEO-ROMANTIC OBJECTIONS to MODERN SOCIETY that inspired fascist movements across europeandthe SEARCH FOR “a CAUSE LARGER THAN OURSELVES’ of the American Progressives. Lear’s people of the american way is second perhaps only to the ACLU as an enforcer of the liberal gleichschaltung. People for the american way serves as a tireless mason
in the construction of the wall between church and state, shrinking the public space for traditional religion and building the foundation of a secular counter-church of liberalism”
Lear is an adamant proponent of SPIRITUALIZING POLITICS; butthere’s no room for traditional religion in his ideal political system, for it is the PROGRESSIVE PRIESTHOOD – no churches or synagogues – that MUST SANCTIFY the QUEST for MEANING and SPIRITUALITY. Independent sources of moral faithare ‘divisive’ and need to beundermined, walled off. excludedfrom our common project. This means that liberal churches are fine because they are perceived to have SUBORDINATED RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE TOPOLITICAL DOCTRINE”
As John Deweyput it in his brief for a SECULAR RELIGION of the state:”
“If our nominally religious institutions learn how to use their symbols and rites to express and enhance such a faith, they may become useful allies of a conception of life that is in harmonywith knowledge and socialneeds”
What appears is the continued unfolding of thesocial gospel tapestry to reveal a RELIGION WITHOUT GOD. Cafeteria liberals aren’t so much inconsistent christians asconsistent progressives.
No more thoroughan explication of the liberal fascist agenda can be found in hillary clinton’s best-selling book, IT TAKES A VILLAGE”.
All the hallmarks of the fascist enterprise reside within its pages. The fascist nature of it takes a village begins with the very title. it draws from a MYTHIC and MYTHICAL PAST.
“It takes a village to raise a child’ is SUPPOSEDLY an AFRICAN PROVERB whose authorship is lost in the mists of time – from the ‘ancient african kingdom of hallmarkcardia’,according to p.j. o’rourke. Clinton invokes this premodern image as a source of authority in order to reorganize modern society. The metaphorof the villageis used in precisely the same way that the symbolof the fasceswas the differrence is that the fasces were a symbol for a martial age; the villageis a symbol for a MATERNAL one.
In mrs. clinton’s telling, villagesare wonderful, supportive, nurturing places where everyone is looking out for one another: from ‘everything in the state, nothing outside the state’ to‘everything in the village, nothing outside the village. The village, ‘can no longer be defined as a place on a map, or a list or organizations, but its essence remains the same: it is the network ofvalues and relationshipsthat support and effect our lives.
In hillary’s village, the concept of civil society is grotesquely deformed. Traditionally, civil society is that free and open spaceoccupied by what burke called ‘little platoons’ – independent associations of citizens who pursue their own interests and ambitions free from state interference or coercion. That is not hillary’s civil society. In a book festooned withencomiums to every imaginable social work interest group in america, clinton mentions ‘civil society’ just once.
“’Civil Society’ she writes, is just a ‘term social scientists use to describe the WAY WE WORK TOGETHER FORCOMMON PURPOSES’ No, no, no. C‘ivil soceity’ is the term socialscientists use to describe the way VARIOUS GROUPS and FAMILIES WORK FOR THEIR OWN PURPOSES, the result of which is to make the society healthily democratic.
Civil society is the RICH ECOSYSTEM of INDEPENDENT ENTITIES – churches, businesses, volunteer and neighborhood association, labor unions and such – that helps regulatelife OUTSIDE OF STATE CONTROL.
Bowling leagues, thanks to the harvard social scientist robert putnam, are the archetypal institution of civil society … not mechanisms for working together for ‘common purposes’ in clinton’s village … there is no public square where free man and women and their voluntary associations deal with each other on their own terms free from the mommying of the state there are not private transactions, just a single ‘spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose’ managed by the state. this is the volksgemeinschaft rebornas a social gospel day-cay center clinton uses a velvet hammer to beat it into the reader’s head that togetherness, partnership and unity are the only means of america’s salvation
When clinton tried to impose her health care plan … hillary’s response when it was pointed out to her that HER PLAN WOULD DESTROY COUNTLESS SMALLER BUSINESSES:
‘I CAN’T BE PART of the SOLUTION, WHO CARES IF THEY HAVE PROBLEMS”.
“The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to IMPOSE DECISIONS ON OTHERS WITHOUT PAYING ANY PRICE THEMSELVES“ – Thomas Sowell
“Liberals hate religion because POLITICS is a RELIGION SUBSTITUTE for liberals and they can’t stand the competition” – Ann Coulter