Signs Liberalism’s Slow Suicide Is Finally Complete
The far left, under the banner of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, is protesting a campus speaker again. Who is it this time? Some neo-Nazi like Richard Spencer? An unscrupulous provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos? Just a garden-variety scary conservative like Ben Shapiro? Nope, it’s the American Civil Liberties Union as represented by Claire Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia.
Students took to the stage just a few moments after Gastañaga began her remarks. At first, she attempted to spin the demonstration as a welcome example of the kind of thing she had come to campus to discuss, commenting ‘Good, I like this,’ as they lined up and raised their signs. ‘I’m going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I’m going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience.’
It was the last remark she was able to make before protesters drowned her out with cries of, ‘ACLU, you protect Hitler, too.’ They also chanted, ‘the oppressed are not impressed,’ ‘shame, shame, shame, shame’… ‘blood on your hands,’ ‘the revolution will not uphold the Constitution,’ and, uh, ‘liberalism is white supremacy.’
The moderate left has spent the past few years running interference for Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and some of us have been warning them that the far left hates the liberals, too. They’re now finding that out up close and personal, and I hope it terrifies them.
This, along with similar incidents at other universities , is a sign of the final death of American “liberalism.” It is death by suicide, because liberalism is being destroyed by the forces it unleashed and by its own inherent contradictions.
In the twentieth century, American liberalism was defined by a very specific ideological mix: advocacy of freedom of speech, political freedom, and resistance to government regulation in the field of personal morality and culture—combined with advocacy of broad and ever-growing government control over the economy.
Notice that I say American liberalism, and that I usually put “liberalism” in quotation marks. Etymologically, “liberal” derives from the Latin word for “freedom,” and historically it referred to advocates of freedom, including advocates of economic freedom. That’s still true today in some other parts of the world. In Europe, “neoliberal” is an epithet for someone deemed too accommodating toward free markets. In Australia, the Liberal Party is the center-right, more pro-free-market party.
So how is it that “liberal” came to refer to someone who advocates freedom in one area and government control in another? There is a specific philosophical answer to this, and that answer explains why today’s liberals are being eaten by their far-left offspring.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/10/11/signs-liberalisms-slow-suicide-finally-complete/
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The Latino gave the same treatment to Queen Pelosi a month or so ago...liberals stir it up, and then don't like the cocktail... but what they have done is very dangerous to our republic because they play on people's emotion and not enough of their intellect. If they had an ounce of "smarts" they would question what these people motives are and not be used as pawns in the "opposition".