Eric Bohlman wrote:
"Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com" wrote in
oups.com:
This is where liberalism really bugs me. Liberals are the poison
paranoia people. Somebody finds some kind of politically correct
"poison" like thimerosal, and regardless of the evidence for, or
against, liberals will try to hamstring a program that will save 3/4
million kids a year, to keep it from being used. Unintended
consequences. They don't care. If the solution doesn't fit their
utopian vision, they'd rather *prevent* a reasonable version of it
used at all.

Don't tar all liberals with the same brush. The subset you're correctly
railing against are largely motivated by Romantic ideology and would more
correctly be described as "pseudo-liberals" just as many authoritarians
have been described as "pseudo-conservatives."

COMMENT:

Thanks for the thoughtful message.


Don't tar all liberals with the same brush. The subset you're correctly
railing against are largely motivated by Romantic ideology and would more
correctly be described as "pseudo-liberals" just as many authoritarians
have been described as "pseudo-conservatives.

COMMENT:

I'm of course using the words conservative and liberal as we use them
in the US, which is not the same way they are used in the UK or Canada
(say). I don't think the US conservative even has a counterpart in
politics in most places (maybe the Israeli Likud). The US liberal in
most places would be a called conservative, and the liberal of Canada
and the UK, would be closer to a US socialist. The John Stuart Mills
classical liberal (my own affiliation) is nowadays called a
libertarian, and isn't understood by any major party, except in bits.

"Conservative" classically means somebody who harkens back to the past,
but if we're stuck in post-modernism, it's rather difficult to tell
what conservatives are supposed to believe in. You can call properly
them reactionaries, since they are usually to be found opposing the
"progressive" ideas of the progressives, where the progressive idea is
usually to make the central government responsible for it (whatever it
is), at some cost in your taxes. Note the "conservative" politicians
can have "progressive" ideas, with the classic one here in the US being
Bush's idea to have the Feds more closely control K-12 education (now
there's a brilliant idea-- Feds on your schoolboard). Mostly in the
US, we just use the term "conservative" for religious Christians who
don't trust the government, but (as with that Bush K12 initiative, not
to mention Homeland Security) they can be confusing when they get into
office. Our "conservatives" often don't include the Roman Catholics,
who may be religious and Christian, but who have as much faith in
government as Teddy Kennedy or author Tom Clancey does. Which is a lot.
Teddy is not a conservative. As for Tom Clancey, who knows? He does
have the Catholic love of, and faith in, bureaucracy, including
military bureaucracy, so is hard to place. Teddy has the same, but
hates the military, so is easy to place.

One similarity is that they tend to view third-world people in "noble
savage" terms, worrying greatly that their "traditional ways of life"
might come to an end. They never seem to ask the objects of their
concern whether or not they *want* to continue living the same way they
did millennia ago (I'm reminded of a quote from a woman in Africa who
said she wished she could afford (gasp!) *herbicides* to spray on her
crops. When asked why, she said she wanted her children to go to school
and learn to read and write instead of spending their days stooping in
the fields picking weeds). They consist largely of upper-middle-class
women, but they idealize societies in which women spend most of their
time barefoot, pregnant, and completely at the mercy of men. They take
at face value the claims of the most reactionary and authoritarian
elements of any "oppressed" society, oblivious to the fact that those
"leaders" are simply third-world equivalents of Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson (www.butterfliesandwheels.com discusses this in great detail).


COMMENT:

Yes, yes. But I think you're wrong to view this as "pseudo-liberalism."
It's real gold-standard liberalism, a part of the maternalistic
liberalism of Hilary "It takes a village to raise a child" Clinton and
a lot of others. And sure, they're reactionaries when it comes to
technology--- that doesn't mean they're not "progressives" when it
comes to everything else. But that doesn't make them pseudo-liberals.
Ralph Nader is not a pseudo-liberal. Nader didn't split the Republican
party in the 2000 election, he split the Democratic party. He split the
liberals and the Left. The Right paid no attention to him at all,
except to thank Jesus for him.


This branch of the Left really consists of reactionaries in
progressives' clothing.

COMMENT:
Nah, it consists of progressives who happen to be reactionary when it
narrowly comes to matters of technology, because they don't understand
it. And, often, because being female they are missing any love of
technology for its own sake (which I think is written into the genes of
most men). But that's it. I don't think they distrust technology
because they're romantics. As often as not, they're romantics for
entirely different reasons (like the Nazis) and *would* be lovers of
technology if they had the gonads for it (like the Nazis).

Romanticism has historically rather quickly led
to authoritarianism, even fascism. It contains a streak of anti-urbanism
that often has a sub-streak of anti-semitism.


COMMENT
Oh, that's WAY overgeneralized. A romantic moment was part of an
authoritarian process in France, Germany and Italy, but not in England
or America. Peoples have their own personalities and make each
influence their own. Every country has its romantic movements in the
arts or politics. Sometimes it leads to violence and authoritarianism,
and sometimes not. Certainly fascism was built on a peculiar
romanticism in Italy and (if you insist on calling Nazis fascists) in
Germany also. But the emotionalism and idealism of romanticism is
merely a way of controlling the masses and getting the votes,
especially when times are hard and the past is easy to look to.
Romanticism is also a way of resurrecting any country or people from
the past. Romantic movements gave us modern Poland, and some of those
same Romantic Poles gave us modern Israel.

As for antisemitism, I would argue that it was most often a feature of
German romanticism merely because the Germans themselves were so often
antisemitic. So if the German romantics happened not to like Jews, like
Wagner and Wagner's major fan Hitler, you find it in their work. But
you don't find it in Nietzsche, and I don't think it's particularly
somehow necessary or promoted by Romanticism. Yes, you'd think it would
be natural in pastoral movements to vilify urbanites like Jews. Thus
I've heard Rousseau accused of antisemitism, and it's a good myth, but
as I read him there's no truth in it.

Ultimately, it stems from
the conviction that humans are inherently evil. How it came to be seen
as part of the Left is unclear, though it appears that a lot of it
entered through the 1960s counterculture; old-school leftists and their
ideological descendants don't seem to be much affected by such nonsense.

I've become convinced that when neo-Romantics talk about "health,"
they're actually talking about achieving a sense of personal *purity*. I
think much of the "poison paranoia" is actually a feeling of being
ritually unclean

COMMENT:

Ritual unclean if the paranoics are Jewish, but just "unclean" if they
aren't. Yes, indeed, it's handwashing-type personal purity. We hear of
people who worry if the inside of their colons aren't clean. Clearly
nuts. But how did this get to be part of the Left? Because there was
no other place to put these folks. These people usually think of
themselves as progressives, and what else do you call them? Are you
going to argue with them? Asking people about nuclear power or
pesticides is nearly a perfect litmus test for which side of the
political spectrum they're going to be on. The same with liability law.
When somebody sues his way into being a governor like Sid McMath, or a
Senator like John Edwards, he's never a Republican. Injury lawyers are
not high on the list of people Republicans admire.

It isn't the evangelicals that form the core of the right who seem to
be too worried about being detoxified and having poisons in their
environments. They are washed in the Blood of the Lamb, don't you know,
so they don't need the EPA. I can only conclude that they've been
inoculated against such fears by their particular brand of
protestantism. Neither Catholics nor Jews, and certainly not
secularists, trust providence to protect them from this stuff. And
that's the left-right divide in the US: Do you really believe in an
imminent god, who's good against toxins? Or do you actually have to
(tikkun; Kashrit) "do-it-yourself"?

SBH