Liberalism
The city of Detroit
Says the time is right
To eradicate properties
That contribute to blight
It's true: Detroit has embarked on a crusade to demolish thousands of dilapidated buildings. Am I the only guy who wonders exactly how will they know which properties to demolish? Have you been to Detroit in the past three decades? It's the only landfill in America with schools, traffic lights, city council and a mayor, none of which are functional. How will they know when to stop once the wrecking ball gets started?
Just don't get the idea the demise of a once-great American city was some horrible freak of nature, the Motor City's very own Katrina. The destruction of Detroit was planned: methodically, systematically, comprehensively. Steven Crowder tells the story:
Many who call themselves liberals do so because they have stopped thinking. They just don't realize it. Or they don't think clearly when it comes to political labels and what they represent in fact, rather than what the labels mean to them emotionally. Some give precedence to what they feel about political issues and judge the depth of their convictions by the intensity of the sentiment they bring to any given issue. I've been there.
What continues to amaze me is how many self-identified liberals believe themselves to be champions of individual freedoms, even as they favor policies that erode those freedoms — typically policies wrapped in "good intentions." It just feels so good to think of oneself as a "liberal," as in "liberal education," even though America's leading college campuses are now thoroughly inculcated with politically-correct speech codes that sanction group-think at the cost of restricting free expression for individuals. Contemporary liberalism has become a litany of all the reasons individual freedom is dispensable (say liberals, who have taken to calling themselves "progressives") in order to establish Utopia. (Odd thing about Utopia: if it's so good, why must its beneficiaries so often be coerced to comply?)
These musings prompted by Michael Knox Beran's fantastic article at NRO:
In his 1950 book The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling said that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Liberalism was no less the dominant political tradition; a coherent conservative opposition had yet to emerge. Over the next 60 years, however, the liberal imagination lost its hold on the American mind. In October 2009 Gallup found that just 20 percent of Americans described themselves as liberals; twice as many called themselves conservatives.
What happened? Part of the answer lies in liberalism’s loss of an element that was essential both to its intellectual vitality and to its popular appeal...