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The Democrats Gave In to Radicals and Gave Up on Common Sense - Joseph Epstein


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2020 Feb 12, 2:29pm   2,141 views  20 comments

by NDrLoR   ➕follow (3)   💰tip   ignore  

George Orwell noted the nervousness of people on the left when confronted by those even further to the left. This nervousness stems from leftists’ fear that they will be taken for impure in their own leftism, that their thought and actions don’t go far enough, that they are, finally, not really on the bus. In America during the 1930s, Communists mocked liberals for their weakness, and liberals worried about not measuring up. Hence the phenomenon of the “fellow traveler,” someone who sympathized with the Communist Party but couldn’t bring himself to join it.

Orwell’s observation remains in play. In the mid-1960s, Stokely Carmichael and other young black militants pushed the American civil-rights movement leftward, and away from its goal of integration. Liberals, unable to face down this left-wing pull toward Black Power, knuckled under. A gloriously successful campaign for equal rights based on conscience and dignity devolved into an angry, incoherent movement based on guilt and victimhood. The last thing allowed was the concession of progress of any sort in racial matters. Impressive civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and A. Philip Randolph were replaced by such dubious figures as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The movement never recovered.

The same phenomenon appeared in American universities. In faculty meetings everywhere, small groups of the most radical professors were able to get their way through political pressure.

Liberals, generally in the majority, were worried (if not terrified) of seeming to be on the wrong side. When they didn’t give in completely, they sought compromises that invariably favored the radicals. Standards and intellectual authority in universities have given way to political correctness and identity politics.

The same scenario is playing out in the Democratic Party. Since nominating George McGovern in 1972, the party has moved progressively leftward. If the Democrats may by now be said to have a center, it cannot hold, as William Butler Yeats has it in his poem “The Second Coming.” Among today’s Democrats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

By ceding moral authority to the far left, the Democrats have lost the power to counter bizarre proposals with simple common sense. When a freshman congresswoman proposes a wildly improbable Green New Deal, instead of responding as Democrats of an earlier day would have—“Whaddya, kiddin’ me?”— they now take it seriously and several adopt it. When two other freshman Democrats make anti-Semitic pronouncements, no one in a party overwhelmingly the choice of Jewish voters has the authority to tell them to knock it off. When Democratic presidential candidates propose to provide free health care for all, or eliminate college tuition and college debt, or enlarge and pack the Supreme Court, or eliminate the Electoral College, all this is taken in earnest. And the Democratic Party is being held hostage to identity politics, so that no national ticket can ever again be without a black or female candidate.


Donald Trump’s aggressive personality has hastened the Democrats’ radicalization. Party members measure the intensity of their idealism by their hatred of Mr. Trump. The tone and temper of the contemporary Democratic Party encourages— indeed fully supports—this sad condition.

Consider Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A serious and skillful politician, she was finally pushed by her party’s left wing into permitting a hopeless impeachment proceeding that violated her own sensible criteria: that the reasons for impeachment be compelling, the evidence for it overwhelming, and the support for it bipartisan. When the impeachment failed in the Senate, as she had predicted it would, it drove her to the distinctly un-Pelosian act of tearing up her copy of the State of the Union address on national television.

What is to be done? No one has a good answer. Perhaps the only hope is that the Democrats put together a nightmare ticket—Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, say, or Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris—and the party is so crushingly defeated in November that it returns to its long-lost political seriousness.



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1   Ceffer   2020 Feb 12, 2:42pm  

"Nightmare ticket" Heh, Heh! Not much to choose from a nightmare field. Too bad Obama already has all the quality snort he wants and his cathodes are burning out.

Virtue signaling one-upsmanship combined with cynical subversion and free shit posturing has it's consequences. May the best pandertarding phony win.
2   theoakman   2020 Feb 12, 3:25pm  

They've even created an environment too shame you in the workplace unless you agree with their beliefs. They've created their own reality where they have the moral high ground on every issue in their minds.
3   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2020 Feb 12, 4:53pm  

I’m CA it’s 100 insane left running that show. You are either gaying your kids or you are a bigot. That level of crazy. Left doesn’t filter their own retards, shit rolls downhill here because of that.
4   Bd6r   2020 Feb 12, 5:00pm  

OccasionalCortex says
a LOT of voters just vote for Trump as a humongous FUCK YOU retaliation against that.

ME ME ME
5   Ceffer   2020 Feb 12, 5:31pm  

Hah, Hah! Anybody named Epstein need the hashtag '#StillUnsuicided'.
6   Bd6r   2020 Feb 12, 9:05pm  

I don't like the guy, did not vote for him in 2016, I switch off TV when he talks, but because of the illogical TDS and media stupidity/bias I will vote for him in next elections, only becuase FUCK YOU and because I am fucking sick and tired of being told how I oppress the whole Universe with my existence. In 2015 I did not think anyone could get me to this state of mind.
OccasionalCortex says
7   Rin   2020 Feb 12, 9:45pm  

rd6B says
, I switch off TV when he talks, but because of the illogical TDS and media stupidity/bias I will vote for him in next elections, only becuase FUCK YOU and because I am fucking sick and tired of being told how I oppress the whole Universe with my existence. In 2015 I did not think anyone could get me to this state of mind.


I've gone way beyond you on that one ...

https://patrick.net/post/1329612/2020-01-09-rin-is-going-to-make-his-vote-for-trump-count-this-year-2020

Because of exactly the same reasons as you, I'm renting a sublet in the midwest and casting my vote there, instead of Massachusetts, my home state because my vote doesn't count in the Boston area towards the national election as it's an automatic blue state.

And what's amazing is that all these bitches, who hate Trump, can do the same but no ... they can't leave their posh enclaves in NYC, Boston, DC, SF, LA where men are pussified and expected to cowtow to feminazis.
8   Bd6r   2020 Feb 13, 7:21am  

Rin says
Because of exactly the same reasons as you, I'm renting a sublet in the midwest and casting my vote there, instead of Massachusetts, my home state because my vote doesn't count in the Boston area towards the national election as it's an automatic blue state.

I am in TX which is an automatic red state, despite hopes and prayers of so-called libruls for last 20 years. So my vote is not that important, but I will vote just because FUCK YOU.
What is even better, in my (academic) environment, I see people starting to waver in their anti-tRUMP stance, not because of glorious golden haired FUHRERS qualities (or more precisely lack of them), but because the opposing side is three orders of magnitude more insane. I would guess that more than a third of our faculty either will not vote being disgusted with D's and their identity politics, or will vote for Trump. Two of my naturalized Persian students will vote for tRUMP - what does that say about side that opposes tRUMP???
9   HeadSet   2020 Feb 13, 2:24pm  

They don’t love him because they think he’s perfect. They love him despite his flaws because they believe he has their back.

+1000
10   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2020 Feb 13, 2:28pm  

HeadSet says
They don’t love him because they think he’s perfect. They love him despite his flaws because they believe he has their back.

+1000


Voices of reason like that aren’t tolerated by msm.
11   Hircus   2020 Feb 15, 10:43am  

jazz_music says
What do y’all recommend? MOAR??


Seems you keep missing the point just made in this thread.

We recommend Trump, because he's much better than the alternatives.

You can try to point out minor flaw after flaw in a fit of orange man bad, but the point still stands.
12   Bd6r   2020 Feb 15, 10:49am  

Hircus says
Seems you keep missing the point just made in this thread.

We recommend Trump, because he's much better than the alternatives.

You can try to point out minor flaw after flaw in a fit of orange man bad, but the point still stands.

If Gabbard would be a D nominee, I might have voted for her. If it is a choice between tRUMP and Bloomberg/Clinton or Sanders/someone else, then tRUMP it is. At least he is entertaining...
13   MisdemeanorRebel   2020 Feb 15, 10:51am  



The Left always gets super freakin' Cocky and Obnoxious just before they nominate a McGovern.

Oh the Tears and Impotent Rage coming this November.
14   Shaman   2020 Feb 15, 11:01am  

Hircus says
You can try to point out minor flaw after flaw in a fit of orange man bad, but the point still stands.


Some people are too stupid to ever grasp the concept of common sense. Poor things should have guide dogs to make sure they don’t decide white is black and get themselves killed at the next crosswalk.
15   MisdemeanorRebel   2020 Feb 15, 4:46pm  

jazz_music says
You exist in a special world all your own and even have your own language, customs, and facts


Uhh......
16   Patrick   2021 Aug 30, 10:06am  

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/kate-clanchy-orwell-foundation-let-george-orwell-down/


The Orwell Foundation has let George Orwell down
Surely if the foundation has a purpose, it is to keep the flame of intellectual freedom alive?

August 22, 2021

So far, so predictable. As Orwell wrote in the unpublished preface to Animal Farm: ‘The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.’ At any given moment, he said, a body of ideas holds sway in the literary world and it is just assumed that all right-thinking people will accept them without question. The state plays no part in enforcing this orthodoxy; rather, it is entirely policed by the literary intelligentsia. If asked whether they believe in free speech, these intellectuals will profess that of course they do — what a ridiculous question. But if pressed on whether they’d defend the right of someone to publish a book that runs afoul of contemporary dogma — describing a child of color as having ‘almond-shaped eyes’, for instance — the answer will be ‘No’. When the orthodoxy is challenged, their commitment to free speech evaporates.
18   Patrick   2022 Jan 26, 6:18pm  

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/Not_the_Bee/status/1485735189775007750?source=patrick.net


Jesse Kelly
@JesseKellyDC
Jan 24
America isn’t losing its standing in the world by accident.

Cities aren’t releasing murderers to kill again by accident.

We didn’t take in 2 million illegals this year by accident.

The destruction is intentional. Wake up and grow up. This is all planned.

You have to understand the true evil of communism and how the communist looks at the world if you’re going to have any chance at stopping them.

These people believe everything you love is terrible and needs to be destroyed so they can rebuild the world into their utopia.

When a felon gets out with no bail and murders someone in New York City, the communist who let him out doesn’t have regrets. He doesn’t see any problem at all. He knew that guy would kill again. That’s what he wanted. So you would feel afraid.

When America does foreign policy “blunder” that helps our enemies, it’s not a mistake. It’s not some “miscalculation”. The American communist looks at America the same way our enemies do: An evil place that needs to be knocked down a peg or two.

When America is flooded with tens of millions of illegal immigrants, the communist knows it will eventually break the system. He also knows these people have no mooring to our founding and what we are.

That’s why he wants them here. It’s less work for him.

On and on and on. Every issue. The destruction is intentional. They’re not trying to fix the house like you are. This isn’t an argument over paint color. You’re worried about the paint. He’s in the living room with a bottle of lighter fluid and a box of matches.
19   AmericanKulak   2022 Jan 26, 6:48pm  

The Communists' desire to destroy the USA and Western Civ is the core of their worldview. Not concern for the working class or minorities or fairness.

There's a reason the star Student Athlete almost never becomes a Communist, but the smelly anti-social and neurotic fat emo kids do.

David Horowitz has been screaming about this since the 90s.

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