The Soundtrack of Progressive Destruction

"2013 has been a banner year for damning self-portraits of American progressivism," writes Daren Jonescu in an American Thinker piece so delicious that it's impossible to stop quoting.

"If you like your plan, you can keep it." This is a perfect iteration of the basic lie that has fueled modernity's "progress" down the drain of history -- or History, as progressive thinkers would have it. [snip]

You have heard this lie, and witnessed the tyrannical dialectic it sets in motion, your whole life, as have your parents and grandparents. Variations on this theme have become the soundtrack of late modernity's decline. The theme remains the same; only the melodic details are changed to suit the collectivist totalitarian agenda item of the moment.

"If you like your current healthcare arrangements, you can keep them" -- except that our intention is to delegitimize, denigrate, and finally outlaw all private healthcare arrangements.

"If you like your 'negative rights,' you can keep them" -- except that the new positive rights we are gradually introducing into the political lexicon will necessarily override your life, liberty, and property, not to mention trumping all the secondary rights derived from those initial three, such as speech, association, and religion.

"If you like your individual mind, you can keep it" -- except that our compulsory school laws are designed to enforce mediocrity, retard intellectual maturation, define universal, legally binding standards of what constitutes an educated person, and replace your years of youthful enthusiasm for knowledge and skills-acquisition with the life-draining boredom of learning in abstraction from experience, and the soul-sapping conformism of collectivist indoctrination.

If you like your private family, you can keep it" -- except that public schools were expressly designed, and the school day and year gradually expanded, to monopolize your child's waking hours and energy, thus reducing the family home to a glorified dormitory, and parents to the state's free meal and entertainment service.

"If you like your free market economy, you can keep it" -- except that our regulatory bodies and corporate overseers will determine who gets to participate in this market and on what terms, in order to preserve our conception of the proper flow of goods and services, the proper utilization of labor, and the proper distribution of profits.

"If you like your moral heritage, you can keep it" -- except that that heritage is being aggressively diminished, through legislation and school indoctrination, to a mere background hue in a kaleidoscope of moral relativity in which your old standbys, wisdom, courage, moderation and justice, enjoy somewhat less than equal status with our new progressive code: submission to authority, mindless thuggery, promiscuity and parasitism.

"If you like your private land ownership (historically a fundamental principle of all civilized political arrangements), you can keep it" -- except that we are aggressively pursuing regulations to incentivize, and eventually to coerce, mass migration into urban housing, under the rubric of "sustainability," as promoted globally by our warmed over United Nations.

"If you like your private life, you can keep it" -- except that we seek to collect and store information on every "private" phone call, text message, e-mail, or financial transaction in which you participate, in the name of "security" (don't ask whose security).

In total effect, "If you like your natural freedom, self-determination, and voluntary pursuit of happiness, you can keep them," -- except that we must periodically adjust the rules just a little further, and then just a little further again, in the direction of coercion, totalitarian micromanagement, and social conditions in which your survival, your value, and any contentment you are permitted to enjoy are dependent on your universal parent and guardian, Government.

To the defenders of this progressive view of History -- that is, of the irresistible slide into universal socialist oppression, poverty, intellectual conformism and moral surrender -- I make this promise: "If you like your tyranny, you can keep it. Period."  Except that those of us around the world who still feel and think like human beings will continue to resist you, expose you, subvert you, and stab at your progressive monster when and as we can. You may have your theoretical fantasy, "History," on your side, but we have real human history on ours. And -- short term wishful thinking and Pollyanna blinders aside -- history teaches that in the long run, inexorably, somehow, nature, reason, and virtue always survive.

You may try to fight a war of attrition against reason itself. You may even feel as though you are on the brink of ultimate victory, and at the gates of your totalitarian paradise. But history demonstrates that you are not quite where you think you are. You will get yours.

Read full article: If You Like Your Tyranny, You Can Keep It.