There’s a problem with any generalization: It limits by its expansiveness. The “All” never does justice to the “Particular.” That’s especially true of generalizing humans and humans generalizing.
Are there recognizable specific molds from which we make humanity’s casts? Sure. I probably fit into a number of them: Senior citizen, retiree, father, grandfather, and others not worth your concern. We use them often during introductions to strangers and on forms (Check “male,” “female,” or “indescribable”). That’s the human mind seeking patterns to make sense of a chaotic universe that is made more chaotic by many individuals’ needs to declare their peculiarities to a largely uninterested world.
We can’t fault ourselves for wanting to see meaning in an unfathomable universe comprised of the known and unknown. Meaning is the mother of purpose, and she wants to keep a tidy house. Think of it as “when I grow up, I want to be…” which is a reflection of seeing meaning in some set of activities that gives a life purpose. Purposelessness breeds despair and self destruction.
But at the same time we strive for recognition as individuals, we see ourselves as casts from clearly identifiable molds. So, we live in duality: Belonging and at the same time not belonging. And we complicate the chaos by making others aware of our peculiarities or the special casts we deem important.
Handed a form in the waiting room, we must select the mold from which we were cast: “Check ‘male’ or ‘female’ in this box.” And now that form becomes more complex—and thus more chaotic—by the addition of ‘other’ or some series of letters that designate the casts from very specific “gender” molds. Complex world, right? And getting more complex and thus seemingly more chaotic. What used to be a simpler and faster process easy to complete is now one that is more complex and slower. “Hmnnn, what gender should I mark? What does ‘preferred pronoun’ mean?” That new complexity arises, by the way, not from conservative, but rather from liberal minds.
It’s in the above context that I write about the casts produced by the current mold of liberalism in America (and maybe throughout Europe) and the selective impediment to people cast from a particular mold, that is, the conservative mold. Moving through life has never been easy, but it’s become harder because of slowdowns, many of them completely unnecessary and almost all of them derived from the need for identifying a special mold.
The Mold of Liberalism and the Casts of Progressive Movements
What is it about the modern liberal mind that assumes superiority over the conservative mind? Both minds are housed in human brains. Both have access to knowledge, and both can develop an ability to reason and debate. Both often rely on the same kinds of flawed thinking. Yet, the liberal mind in modern America exhibits an unwarranted hubris and folly that actually slows human achievement: Progressives aren’t as “progressive” as they believe themselves (if one can use a traditional pronoun) to be. Their supposed avant-garde thinking often ignores common sense, processes and structures that work, and true freedom of rational expression in favor of fashionable causes du jour. But if you listen to their surrogates in the mainstream media, you might believe they make, as Mussolini’s propagandists proclaimed, “the trains run on time” and turn the Ideal into the Real. They believe the flow of their movements are inhibited by a conservative slowdown cast from a mold of an inferior brain.
Neither liberal nor conservative has a lock on intelligence, but the former have somehow come to think of themselves as more intelligent, and that seems to apply to Hollywood’s “elite,” TV pundits, and to reporters who think that flybys by asteroids and arsonists’ fires are caused by global warming and that all social interactions can be reduced to perspectives driven by racial divisions. The common notion—that is, common among liberals themselves—of liberal superiority has given us a number of generations of snooty smug know-it-alls whose major arguments comprise ad hominem, ad populum, and if…then fallacies. And those fallacies make debate between the two sides as fluid as a traffic pile up on a foggy night.
Consider the following syllogisms:
Liberals favor progress.
So-n-so is not a liberal.
So-n-so does not favor progress.
Liberals have open minds.
So-n-so is not a liberal.
So-n-so does not have an open mind.
Conservatives are xenophobic.
So-n-so is not a conservative.
So-n-so is not xenophobic.
Conservative are afraid of change.
So-n-so is a liberal.
So-n-so is in favor of change.
The premises are too general and assumptive, and the conclusions are illogically derived. But if one generalizes (a mental exercise of dubious value) the division between liberals and conservatives today, he finds that each faulty syllogism represents a liberal assumption about conservative minds. To be fair in generalizing, however, I should note that conservatives often believe that liberals are also cast from an identical mold, one that rejects both tradition and common sense and one that produces casts of hypocrites.
Take a Deep Breath for Some Particulars Interlaced with Some Generalizations
Egged on by a liberal media that buys into the conservative “redneck” metaphor, many modern liberals are incapable of addressing issues with pure reason. Rather, they dismiss conservative arguments as impediments to social progress that, nowadays, amounts to: 1) Putting men in women’s locker rooms and bathrooms and on athletic teams, 2) Permitting euthanasia for any reason and at any age (in liberal Canada), mocking loyalty to a country that has avowed enemies determined to destroy it, 3) Fostering drug use without restrictions that protect non-druggies, 4) Teaching little kids about sex with graphic images of oral sex to the exclusion of more hours on the three “Rs,” 5) Defunding police without a viable alternative to peacekeeping, releasing repeat criminals without reform, 6) Opening the country’s borders without guaranteeing the health and safety of citizens as well as the health and safety of migrants, 7) Forcing people to remain indoors, including assisted-living facilities for the aged, where they demonstrably spread a virus among themselves or among family members, 8) Forcing people to wear masks and follow arrows down grocery store aisles that ended with six-foot separation marks on the checkout line floor, 9) Ignoring deaths that result from fentanyl and tranq trafficking because mentioning either would entail accepting responsibility for the policies that led to the overdoses, 10) Ignoring sex trade and enslavement of minors, 11) Chasing after greenhouse gas emitters to the detriment of national and personal economies and pursuing supposed green tech that uses heavy metals and materials that will increase water pollution, and, of course, 12) Shutting down dissent on any topic they favor, including all of the above.
And all of the above are cast from the general mold of Progressivism. But are they really “progressive”? Do they really move humanity forward? Is, for example, the banning of fossil fuels that since the Industrial Revolution supported the growth of modern civilization really a progressive policy? Should we in the name of Progressivism eliminate the thousands of products, including the fuel for transportation, air conditioning, and city water pumps upon which much of modern civilization depends because Liberals fear a debatable change in climate? Is that the thinking of superior brains? Really?
Are some conservative minds and policies as equally flawed as those liberal minds and policies? Of course. Adherents of strict fundamentalism often lack open-mindedness. That some conservatives advocate book-burning and banning, acts that solve no social problem, is an identifiable intellectual flaw because both burning and banning are self-defeating as they pique curiosity and defiance (the same can be said for liberals’ war on movies like Sound of Freedom and books criticizing liberal philosophies and practices that Barnes and Noble’s sales staff, to the detriment of company sales, hid in the back of the stores while placing books by liberals up front in a blatant example of book banning).
But, as I have written elsewhere, we are given to conflating topics and ignoring hypocritical stances: No doubt there are “liberals” who own businesses that “harm” the environment and humans, just as there are conservatives who exploit the planet’s resources, including its human resources, to the long-term detriment of all humanity.
Conservative adherence to tradition for tradition’s sake can be an impediment to both technological and social progress. One might have become accustomed to using a typewriter or an 8-track player, but there’s little denying that neither is better than—or even equal to—their modern replacements. In casting off some traditions as liberals are inclined to do in the name of avant-garde policy, they rid us of the clumsy and inefficient, but it is only in replacing the old with something less clumsy and more efficient that liberals fulfill their progressive ideals. Much of what modern liberals do actually slows down civil justice in the name of social justice, for example, and that is a throwback to times when only the privileged were guaranteed justice and mercy. (Is it just, for example, to encourage unbridled migration that has become entwined with drug and trafficking cartels, the abuse of migrant children, and the growth of sex slavery?)
Are there conservatives who cannot argue reasonably? Sure. Are there extremists among conservatives? Definitely. But conservative objections to social issues like men in women’s bathrooms, graphic sex education in early elementary school grades, and dissolving a police force that serves as a check against criminals, all amount to a desire for a practical social order that works better than a system in which anyone can do anything regardless of harm to the freedom of others. The effort to slow down or stop movements that liberals espouse might just as easily be ascribed to the desire for common sense with regard to mores, government size, and national security. Objecting to cigarette and marijuana smoke, for example, is born not from a desire to restrict others from doing whatever they want with their own bodies, but of a desire to protect oneself from having to breathe on a public sidewalk a smoke deemed injurious. “You want to smoke pot? Fine. But I don’t, so go somewhere else.” Conservatives might not really object to any liberal doing anything in any manner if the act or policy does not affect them, but to argue such about conservatives requires, of course, a generalization.
Is conservatism an impediment to social interactions or individual freedoms? What of conservative objections to matters like abortion and euthanasia? Aren’t conservatives backward and freedom-inhibiting there? Yes and No. The supposed rational argument of liberals that “it’s my body” ignores the separate and scientifically provable DNA identifier of the fetus; and the supposed rational argument of “let them die with dignity” assumes in many instances a preference for economy of the healthy over life of the unhealthy or poor, as in Canada’s euthanasia system. In both abortion and euthanasia, convenience seems to be the ultimate value. So, I have to ask, “Is Convenience the guiding principle of modern liberalism?” Is it the mold from which a liberal life is cast? Does the Liberal driver steer, accelerate, and brake without regard to others sharing the same roads?
Are these generalizations worth the cyberspace they occupy? In part, yes. If we’re all on the road of life, then we should understand the vehicles we ride to our sundry destinies.
Traffic Slowdowns
Have you ever driven on a major highway? If you have, then you know that almost anything can slow down traffic: Accident, pot holes, road construction, and storms. If you drive Pittsburgh’s Parkway, you encounter yet another cause of slowdown during rush hour, namely, going through one of two long tunnels: From the east, the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, and from the west, the Fort Pitt. * Apparently, entering the tunnels, which house the same width highways that lead to the tunnels, causes drivers to slow down in a domino effect, even though there is no sign or toll booth cautioning a slowdown. Someone in the lead driving 60 mph slows to enter; the person behind subsequently slows, and behind that driver another does the same, backing up traffic. Halfway through and upon exiting the tunnels, drivers find themselves back up to speed among thinned out cars zooming toward downtown. The slowed flow is daily pain in the seated portion of the human body—but the reward of coming out of the city-side of the Fort Pitt is a spectacular view of Pittsburgh, the Monongahela and Allegheny confluence, and the wide Ohio. ** So, once out of the slowdown, drivers soon forget the slowdown. That’s the way with all of us in part, but it is especially true of liberals who cannot remember the failures they impose on society, such as stopping the border wall and opening the cities to more crime by defunding the police. The glorious Ideal Future is ever present in their minds. The failures of past policies can be attributed to faulty execution; this time we’ll get it right (an argument made by socialists, Marxists, and fascists).
It doesn’t take much to slow the line of traffic, just a single driver’s dropping speed to continue on the same size highway through the tunnels (or a single lawsuit to require yet another category on what used to be a simple and understandable form). Maybe entering the tunnel causes a perception of difficulty. But it’s only a perception. Maybe the solid double line separating lanes through the tunnels affects drivers because it forbids crossing lanes. I don’t know; I just know everyone slows down before entering and then speeds up halfway through and exits the tunnel up to speed. The only exceptions to this phenomenon are an official government car, such as an escorted limo carrying the President or a governor, or the ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars for which everyone makes a path.
Where’s This Leading? You Started by Driving My Mind toward a Discussion of Liberal Minds, and Now, You’re Talking Traffic
Granted, this might be a strange analogy. “What,” you have the duty to ask, “is the connection between slowing down to enter a tunnel for which there is no reason to drop speed and the liberal mind or modern liberalism?” Maybe not a clear one, but there definitely seems to be at least a loose connection between liberal Democrats and the slowdown. Certainly, the past years of pandemic policies inhibiting the free flow of commerce, education, and dissent relate one to the other. And now liberals want to slow the political flow of their opponents.
I think we are witnessing The Tunnel Effect in American politics at this time. We were headed toward our quad-annual election cycle as usual when every (an exaggeration) Democrat DA or AG put on the brakes, slowing and possibly even stopping that flow of political traffic except for one car, the current President’s limo. It speeds along without interruption by a disinterested Press that, among society’s drivers, actually has an obligation to slow things down by questioning both the direction and the speed of the Executive Driver.
If John Locke Were an Uber Driver
Make John Locke a modern Uber driver. Although he died in the early years of the 18th century, he drove America’s Founding Fathers toward his version of civil structure. Locke argued that the executive and legislative branches were separate. And as in Uber driver/customer relationships, the customers give their consent to allow the Uber driver to take them to their preferred destination. In particular, Locke argued against a civil structure led by an executive who also had the power of shaping law and justice.
But in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Americans have found themselves in the midst of an apparent slowdown of justice because of an ostensible control over Justice by the Executive. And that slowdown is being selectively used at this time against a political opponent—just the very thing the Founding Fathers, under the influence of Locke’s philosophy, tried to avoid.
No doubt you could think of a number of slowdown examples here, but I’ll mention a few driven by the Executive’s appointed minions in the Department of Justice: Nixon’s Watergate (John Mitchell), Reagan’s Iran-Contra Affair (Ed Reese), Obama’s Fast and Furious (Eric Holder), and now Biden’s Hunter Laptop and pay-to-play hustling that made the Bidens rich (Merrick Garland). In each instance, the Justice Department seems to have impeded the flow of justice, not expedited it, and it has done so as a surrogate of the Executive.
Would Locke exhibit some road rage over the slowdown in the progress of justice? If we read him correctly, he might be at least more than a little perturbed at what Classical Liberalism has become. Liberals in control of the speed of information and the speed of justice today appear to stand in contrast to his “ideal” liberals. Those latter would, under Locke’s tutelage, be at the very least tolerant (Tolerance was the subject of one of Locke’s famous letters--Letter Concerning Toleration). But when we look at the Jew-Catholic-Black-hating KKK emerging from the Southern Democrats, the obviously liberal Deep State members of the FBI who handcrafted the Russian Collusion Hoax and who wrote directives in an FBI office to infiltrate traditional Catholics and to recruit “spies” in their churches, we see little evidence of a tolerant government facilitating the free flow of justice. Liberal intolerance is apparently as far right as any fascism can get as evidenced by a Justice Department’s Merrick Garland’s letter identifying concerned parents as domestic terrorists and supporting an armed contingent’s midnight raid on a family of pro-lifers over a scuffle on a sidewalk that the local DA refused to prosecute. All these examples of a corrupted government occurred under a media’s dismissive “look-the-other-way-because-it’s-not-us” prejudice against any dissent by perceived enemies of the current administration. Goodness! Locke, who was a 17th-century physician would have found himself fleeing once again to Holland to avoid persecution for questioning Dr. Fauci’s shutdown of America. Was any liberal slowdown more telling than that of the pandemic?
Austin
But Democrats continue to slow down true progress toward “civilizing” humanity. Look at Austin, Texas, for example. The defund-the-police movement led to a $150 million cut in police support. The city now has under 1,500 cops when it could easily use 2,000 for its growing population. Did the city’s liberal council achieve the “progress” they hoped to achieve? Crime appears to have increased across all categories though the cause-and effect relationship between the policy and increased homicides might be difficult to prove. Certainly, detectives pulled from solving cases assist in answering 911 calls inhibits their police work. Given the rise in crime, the council appears to have made driving toward the tunnel slower and getting to the beautiful city a longer process. And as the voting citizenry will probably show, few seem to understand that halfway through the tunnel of folly, their lives have become less “progressive.” How is a policy that enhances crime progressive? How is a return to barbarism progressive?
We’re Not in the Tunnel; We’re in the Traffic Leading to the Tunnel
The part of the Tunnel Effect I find interesting is that once people enter the tunnel, they usually realize they can resume the speed of their travel. They discover there was no physical cause for the slowdown. Drivers just unconsciously slowed their vehicles after the leading driver applied brakes, causing the chain reaction traffic backup. All the drivers seem to have acted in unison, forgetting their individuality and their freedom to move at reasonable speed. For the liberal drivers, thinking becomes a common cast from a mold shaped by government and media. They consent to drive at the speed they are forced to drive by the leader, and they go where the leader leads. And yes, before you object, there are also conservatives who drive where their leaders want them to go. But look at Austin. The drivers drive slowly toward, through, and out of the tunnel of modern liberalism. The time it takes to reach the destination of progress has been lengthened by the progressive policies of modern liberals.
Is there any more blatant example of traffic slowdown than the election of John Fetterman, the inarticulate stroke victim who began his debate with an articulate doctor by saying, “Goodnight,” or the elections of a VP who can only cackle and speak in childish tautologies and inane explanations, or in a President who believes weather phenomena should dictate a decrease in energy supply that led to energy dependence on foreign powers? Is there any more blatant subservience to a political party than the Democrats re-electing the same people whose regressive policies in the name of “ideals” and “trends” led to increases in crime, drug deaths, and international weakness? Seems to me that cars driven by Democrats stay in reduced speed even halfway through and all the way through the tunnel. Are their EV batteries charged enough to make the journey to their ideal city?
Consider this summary of a principle of Locke’s written in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “If the rule of law is ignored, if the representatives of the people are prevented from assembling, if the mechanisms of election are altered without popular consent [as they were during the pandemic], or if the people are handed over to a foreign power, then they can take back their original authority and overthrow the government” (Locke, Two Treatises. 2.212–17). *** Locke’s conclusion justified the American Revolution in the eighteenth century. Today, under the established Constitution of the United States a peaceful act of voting could overturn the regression if those voting drivers recognize that their leaders are not truly progressive.
Let’s hope that modern Liberals can wrap their minds around a real freedom of movement and expression that the originator of Classical Liberalism was driving at. But that’s just a hope. I’m looking at a line of traffic backed up many miles and at a driving time lengthened by the slowdown leading to the tunnel.
I’m trying to get to the other side of the tunnel, where I can resume my speed toward a beautiful city, where humans cooperate to make progress without interference by agendas executed without their consent. In the contradictory “liberal” mold, liberation is not a universal right; it is cast by liberals for liberals only. Its leaders seek more to control where we go and the speed at which we travel there.
And, yes, I know that is a generalization.
*A third tunnel, the Liberty, carries drivers arriving from the south, but those have a gauntlet of traffic lights on routes 19 and 51 that prohibits highway speeds.
**See YouTube under the title “Fort Pitt Tunnel into Pittsburgh Pa.” The video reveals the slowdown at the western entrance to the tunnel, a slowdown that backs traffic far up Green Tree Hill.
***Online at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/#ConsPoliObliEndsGove
Are there recognizable specific molds from which we make humanity’s casts? Sure. I probably fit into a number of them: Senior citizen, retiree, father, grandfather, and others not worth your concern. We use them often during introductions to strangers and on forms (Check “male,” “female,” or “indescribable”). That’s the human mind seeking patterns to make sense of a chaotic universe that is made more chaotic by many individuals’ needs to declare their peculiarities to a largely uninterested world.
We can’t fault ourselves for wanting to see meaning in an unfathomable universe comprised of the known and unknown. Meaning is the mother of purpose, and she wants to keep a tidy house. Think of it as “when I grow up, I want to be…” which is a reflection of seeing meaning in some set of activities that gives a life purpose. Purposelessness breeds despair and self destruction.
But at the same time we strive for recognition as individuals, we see ourselves as casts from clearly identifiable molds. So, we live in duality: Belonging and at the same time not belonging. And we complicate the chaos by making others aware of our peculiarities or the special casts we deem important.
Handed a form in the waiting room, we must select the mold from which we were cast: “Check ‘male’ or ‘female’ in this box.” And now that form becomes more complex—and thus more chaotic—by the addition of ‘other’ or some series of letters that designate the casts from very specific “gender” molds. Complex world, right? And getting more complex and thus seemingly more chaotic. What used to be a simpler and faster process easy to complete is now one that is more complex and slower. “Hmnnn, what gender should I mark? What does ‘preferred pronoun’ mean?” That new complexity arises, by the way, not from conservative, but rather from liberal minds.
It’s in the above context that I write about the casts produced by the current mold of liberalism in America (and maybe throughout Europe) and the selective impediment to people cast from a particular mold, that is, the conservative mold. Moving through life has never been easy, but it’s become harder because of slowdowns, many of them completely unnecessary and almost all of them derived from the need for identifying a special mold.
The Mold of Liberalism and the Casts of Progressive Movements
What is it about the modern liberal mind that assumes superiority over the conservative mind? Both minds are housed in human brains. Both have access to knowledge, and both can develop an ability to reason and debate. Both often rely on the same kinds of flawed thinking. Yet, the liberal mind in modern America exhibits an unwarranted hubris and folly that actually slows human achievement: Progressives aren’t as “progressive” as they believe themselves (if one can use a traditional pronoun) to be. Their supposed avant-garde thinking often ignores common sense, processes and structures that work, and true freedom of rational expression in favor of fashionable causes du jour. But if you listen to their surrogates in the mainstream media, you might believe they make, as Mussolini’s propagandists proclaimed, “the trains run on time” and turn the Ideal into the Real. They believe the flow of their movements are inhibited by a conservative slowdown cast from a mold of an inferior brain.
Neither liberal nor conservative has a lock on intelligence, but the former have somehow come to think of themselves as more intelligent, and that seems to apply to Hollywood’s “elite,” TV pundits, and to reporters who think that flybys by asteroids and arsonists’ fires are caused by global warming and that all social interactions can be reduced to perspectives driven by racial divisions. The common notion—that is, common among liberals themselves—of liberal superiority has given us a number of generations of snooty smug know-it-alls whose major arguments comprise ad hominem, ad populum, and if…then fallacies. And those fallacies make debate between the two sides as fluid as a traffic pile up on a foggy night.
Consider the following syllogisms:
Liberals favor progress.
So-n-so is not a liberal.
So-n-so does not favor progress.
Liberals have open minds.
So-n-so is not a liberal.
So-n-so does not have an open mind.
Conservatives are xenophobic.
So-n-so is not a conservative.
So-n-so is not xenophobic.
Conservative are afraid of change.
So-n-so is a liberal.
So-n-so is in favor of change.
The premises are too general and assumptive, and the conclusions are illogically derived. But if one generalizes (a mental exercise of dubious value) the division between liberals and conservatives today, he finds that each faulty syllogism represents a liberal assumption about conservative minds. To be fair in generalizing, however, I should note that conservatives often believe that liberals are also cast from an identical mold, one that rejects both tradition and common sense and one that produces casts of hypocrites.
Take a Deep Breath for Some Particulars Interlaced with Some Generalizations
Egged on by a liberal media that buys into the conservative “redneck” metaphor, many modern liberals are incapable of addressing issues with pure reason. Rather, they dismiss conservative arguments as impediments to social progress that, nowadays, amounts to: 1) Putting men in women’s locker rooms and bathrooms and on athletic teams, 2) Permitting euthanasia for any reason and at any age (in liberal Canada), mocking loyalty to a country that has avowed enemies determined to destroy it, 3) Fostering drug use without restrictions that protect non-druggies, 4) Teaching little kids about sex with graphic images of oral sex to the exclusion of more hours on the three “Rs,” 5) Defunding police without a viable alternative to peacekeeping, releasing repeat criminals without reform, 6) Opening the country’s borders without guaranteeing the health and safety of citizens as well as the health and safety of migrants, 7) Forcing people to remain indoors, including assisted-living facilities for the aged, where they demonstrably spread a virus among themselves or among family members, 8) Forcing people to wear masks and follow arrows down grocery store aisles that ended with six-foot separation marks on the checkout line floor, 9) Ignoring deaths that result from fentanyl and tranq trafficking because mentioning either would entail accepting responsibility for the policies that led to the overdoses, 10) Ignoring sex trade and enslavement of minors, 11) Chasing after greenhouse gas emitters to the detriment of national and personal economies and pursuing supposed green tech that uses heavy metals and materials that will increase water pollution, and, of course, 12) Shutting down dissent on any topic they favor, including all of the above.
And all of the above are cast from the general mold of Progressivism. But are they really “progressive”? Do they really move humanity forward? Is, for example, the banning of fossil fuels that since the Industrial Revolution supported the growth of modern civilization really a progressive policy? Should we in the name of Progressivism eliminate the thousands of products, including the fuel for transportation, air conditioning, and city water pumps upon which much of modern civilization depends because Liberals fear a debatable change in climate? Is that the thinking of superior brains? Really?
Are some conservative minds and policies as equally flawed as those liberal minds and policies? Of course. Adherents of strict fundamentalism often lack open-mindedness. That some conservatives advocate book-burning and banning, acts that solve no social problem, is an identifiable intellectual flaw because both burning and banning are self-defeating as they pique curiosity and defiance (the same can be said for liberals’ war on movies like Sound of Freedom and books criticizing liberal philosophies and practices that Barnes and Noble’s sales staff, to the detriment of company sales, hid in the back of the stores while placing books by liberals up front in a blatant example of book banning).
But, as I have written elsewhere, we are given to conflating topics and ignoring hypocritical stances: No doubt there are “liberals” who own businesses that “harm” the environment and humans, just as there are conservatives who exploit the planet’s resources, including its human resources, to the long-term detriment of all humanity.
Conservative adherence to tradition for tradition’s sake can be an impediment to both technological and social progress. One might have become accustomed to using a typewriter or an 8-track player, but there’s little denying that neither is better than—or even equal to—their modern replacements. In casting off some traditions as liberals are inclined to do in the name of avant-garde policy, they rid us of the clumsy and inefficient, but it is only in replacing the old with something less clumsy and more efficient that liberals fulfill their progressive ideals. Much of what modern liberals do actually slows down civil justice in the name of social justice, for example, and that is a throwback to times when only the privileged were guaranteed justice and mercy. (Is it just, for example, to encourage unbridled migration that has become entwined with drug and trafficking cartels, the abuse of migrant children, and the growth of sex slavery?)
Are there conservatives who cannot argue reasonably? Sure. Are there extremists among conservatives? Definitely. But conservative objections to social issues like men in women’s bathrooms, graphic sex education in early elementary school grades, and dissolving a police force that serves as a check against criminals, all amount to a desire for a practical social order that works better than a system in which anyone can do anything regardless of harm to the freedom of others. The effort to slow down or stop movements that liberals espouse might just as easily be ascribed to the desire for common sense with regard to mores, government size, and national security. Objecting to cigarette and marijuana smoke, for example, is born not from a desire to restrict others from doing whatever they want with their own bodies, but of a desire to protect oneself from having to breathe on a public sidewalk a smoke deemed injurious. “You want to smoke pot? Fine. But I don’t, so go somewhere else.” Conservatives might not really object to any liberal doing anything in any manner if the act or policy does not affect them, but to argue such about conservatives requires, of course, a generalization.
Is conservatism an impediment to social interactions or individual freedoms? What of conservative objections to matters like abortion and euthanasia? Aren’t conservatives backward and freedom-inhibiting there? Yes and No. The supposed rational argument of liberals that “it’s my body” ignores the separate and scientifically provable DNA identifier of the fetus; and the supposed rational argument of “let them die with dignity” assumes in many instances a preference for economy of the healthy over life of the unhealthy or poor, as in Canada’s euthanasia system. In both abortion and euthanasia, convenience seems to be the ultimate value. So, I have to ask, “Is Convenience the guiding principle of modern liberalism?” Is it the mold from which a liberal life is cast? Does the Liberal driver steer, accelerate, and brake without regard to others sharing the same roads?
Are these generalizations worth the cyberspace they occupy? In part, yes. If we’re all on the road of life, then we should understand the vehicles we ride to our sundry destinies.
Traffic Slowdowns
Have you ever driven on a major highway? If you have, then you know that almost anything can slow down traffic: Accident, pot holes, road construction, and storms. If you drive Pittsburgh’s Parkway, you encounter yet another cause of slowdown during rush hour, namely, going through one of two long tunnels: From the east, the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, and from the west, the Fort Pitt. * Apparently, entering the tunnels, which house the same width highways that lead to the tunnels, causes drivers to slow down in a domino effect, even though there is no sign or toll booth cautioning a slowdown. Someone in the lead driving 60 mph slows to enter; the person behind subsequently slows, and behind that driver another does the same, backing up traffic. Halfway through and upon exiting the tunnels, drivers find themselves back up to speed among thinned out cars zooming toward downtown. The slowed flow is daily pain in the seated portion of the human body—but the reward of coming out of the city-side of the Fort Pitt is a spectacular view of Pittsburgh, the Monongahela and Allegheny confluence, and the wide Ohio. ** So, once out of the slowdown, drivers soon forget the slowdown. That’s the way with all of us in part, but it is especially true of liberals who cannot remember the failures they impose on society, such as stopping the border wall and opening the cities to more crime by defunding the police. The glorious Ideal Future is ever present in their minds. The failures of past policies can be attributed to faulty execution; this time we’ll get it right (an argument made by socialists, Marxists, and fascists).
It doesn’t take much to slow the line of traffic, just a single driver’s dropping speed to continue on the same size highway through the tunnels (or a single lawsuit to require yet another category on what used to be a simple and understandable form). Maybe entering the tunnel causes a perception of difficulty. But it’s only a perception. Maybe the solid double line separating lanes through the tunnels affects drivers because it forbids crossing lanes. I don’t know; I just know everyone slows down before entering and then speeds up halfway through and exits the tunnel up to speed. The only exceptions to this phenomenon are an official government car, such as an escorted limo carrying the President or a governor, or the ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars for which everyone makes a path.
Where’s This Leading? You Started by Driving My Mind toward a Discussion of Liberal Minds, and Now, You’re Talking Traffic
Granted, this might be a strange analogy. “What,” you have the duty to ask, “is the connection between slowing down to enter a tunnel for which there is no reason to drop speed and the liberal mind or modern liberalism?” Maybe not a clear one, but there definitely seems to be at least a loose connection between liberal Democrats and the slowdown. Certainly, the past years of pandemic policies inhibiting the free flow of commerce, education, and dissent relate one to the other. And now liberals want to slow the political flow of their opponents.
I think we are witnessing The Tunnel Effect in American politics at this time. We were headed toward our quad-annual election cycle as usual when every (an exaggeration) Democrat DA or AG put on the brakes, slowing and possibly even stopping that flow of political traffic except for one car, the current President’s limo. It speeds along without interruption by a disinterested Press that, among society’s drivers, actually has an obligation to slow things down by questioning both the direction and the speed of the Executive Driver.
If John Locke Were an Uber Driver
Make John Locke a modern Uber driver. Although he died in the early years of the 18th century, he drove America’s Founding Fathers toward his version of civil structure. Locke argued that the executive and legislative branches were separate. And as in Uber driver/customer relationships, the customers give their consent to allow the Uber driver to take them to their preferred destination. In particular, Locke argued against a civil structure led by an executive who also had the power of shaping law and justice.
But in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Americans have found themselves in the midst of an apparent slowdown of justice because of an ostensible control over Justice by the Executive. And that slowdown is being selectively used at this time against a political opponent—just the very thing the Founding Fathers, under the influence of Locke’s philosophy, tried to avoid.
No doubt you could think of a number of slowdown examples here, but I’ll mention a few driven by the Executive’s appointed minions in the Department of Justice: Nixon’s Watergate (John Mitchell), Reagan’s Iran-Contra Affair (Ed Reese), Obama’s Fast and Furious (Eric Holder), and now Biden’s Hunter Laptop and pay-to-play hustling that made the Bidens rich (Merrick Garland). In each instance, the Justice Department seems to have impeded the flow of justice, not expedited it, and it has done so as a surrogate of the Executive.
Would Locke exhibit some road rage over the slowdown in the progress of justice? If we read him correctly, he might be at least more than a little perturbed at what Classical Liberalism has become. Liberals in control of the speed of information and the speed of justice today appear to stand in contrast to his “ideal” liberals. Those latter would, under Locke’s tutelage, be at the very least tolerant (Tolerance was the subject of one of Locke’s famous letters--Letter Concerning Toleration). But when we look at the Jew-Catholic-Black-hating KKK emerging from the Southern Democrats, the obviously liberal Deep State members of the FBI who handcrafted the Russian Collusion Hoax and who wrote directives in an FBI office to infiltrate traditional Catholics and to recruit “spies” in their churches, we see little evidence of a tolerant government facilitating the free flow of justice. Liberal intolerance is apparently as far right as any fascism can get as evidenced by a Justice Department’s Merrick Garland’s letter identifying concerned parents as domestic terrorists and supporting an armed contingent’s midnight raid on a family of pro-lifers over a scuffle on a sidewalk that the local DA refused to prosecute. All these examples of a corrupted government occurred under a media’s dismissive “look-the-other-way-because-it’s-not-us” prejudice against any dissent by perceived enemies of the current administration. Goodness! Locke, who was a 17th-century physician would have found himself fleeing once again to Holland to avoid persecution for questioning Dr. Fauci’s shutdown of America. Was any liberal slowdown more telling than that of the pandemic?
Austin
But Democrats continue to slow down true progress toward “civilizing” humanity. Look at Austin, Texas, for example. The defund-the-police movement led to a $150 million cut in police support. The city now has under 1,500 cops when it could easily use 2,000 for its growing population. Did the city’s liberal council achieve the “progress” they hoped to achieve? Crime appears to have increased across all categories though the cause-and effect relationship between the policy and increased homicides might be difficult to prove. Certainly, detectives pulled from solving cases assist in answering 911 calls inhibits their police work. Given the rise in crime, the council appears to have made driving toward the tunnel slower and getting to the beautiful city a longer process. And as the voting citizenry will probably show, few seem to understand that halfway through the tunnel of folly, their lives have become less “progressive.” How is a policy that enhances crime progressive? How is a return to barbarism progressive?
We’re Not in the Tunnel; We’re in the Traffic Leading to the Tunnel
The part of the Tunnel Effect I find interesting is that once people enter the tunnel, they usually realize they can resume the speed of their travel. They discover there was no physical cause for the slowdown. Drivers just unconsciously slowed their vehicles after the leading driver applied brakes, causing the chain reaction traffic backup. All the drivers seem to have acted in unison, forgetting their individuality and their freedom to move at reasonable speed. For the liberal drivers, thinking becomes a common cast from a mold shaped by government and media. They consent to drive at the speed they are forced to drive by the leader, and they go where the leader leads. And yes, before you object, there are also conservatives who drive where their leaders want them to go. But look at Austin. The drivers drive slowly toward, through, and out of the tunnel of modern liberalism. The time it takes to reach the destination of progress has been lengthened by the progressive policies of modern liberals.
Is there any more blatant example of traffic slowdown than the election of John Fetterman, the inarticulate stroke victim who began his debate with an articulate doctor by saying, “Goodnight,” or the elections of a VP who can only cackle and speak in childish tautologies and inane explanations, or in a President who believes weather phenomena should dictate a decrease in energy supply that led to energy dependence on foreign powers? Is there any more blatant subservience to a political party than the Democrats re-electing the same people whose regressive policies in the name of “ideals” and “trends” led to increases in crime, drug deaths, and international weakness? Seems to me that cars driven by Democrats stay in reduced speed even halfway through and all the way through the tunnel. Are their EV batteries charged enough to make the journey to their ideal city?
Consider this summary of a principle of Locke’s written in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “If the rule of law is ignored, if the representatives of the people are prevented from assembling, if the mechanisms of election are altered without popular consent [as they were during the pandemic], or if the people are handed over to a foreign power, then they can take back their original authority and overthrow the government” (Locke, Two Treatises. 2.212–17). *** Locke’s conclusion justified the American Revolution in the eighteenth century. Today, under the established Constitution of the United States a peaceful act of voting could overturn the regression if those voting drivers recognize that their leaders are not truly progressive.
Let’s hope that modern Liberals can wrap their minds around a real freedom of movement and expression that the originator of Classical Liberalism was driving at. But that’s just a hope. I’m looking at a line of traffic backed up many miles and at a driving time lengthened by the slowdown leading to the tunnel.
I’m trying to get to the other side of the tunnel, where I can resume my speed toward a beautiful city, where humans cooperate to make progress without interference by agendas executed without their consent. In the contradictory “liberal” mold, liberation is not a universal right; it is cast by liberals for liberals only. Its leaders seek more to control where we go and the speed at which we travel there.
And, yes, I know that is a generalization.
*A third tunnel, the Liberty, carries drivers arriving from the south, but those have a gauntlet of traffic lights on routes 19 and 51 that prohibits highway speeds.
**See YouTube under the title “Fort Pitt Tunnel into Pittsburgh Pa.” The video reveals the slowdown at the western entrance to the tunnel, a slowdown that backs traffic far up Green Tree Hill.
***Online at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/#ConsPoliObliEndsGove
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