We Used to be So Cool...and Kind

The Myth the American Left tells about its Recent Past

A large segment of the New Current Counterculture (NCC?) were self-proclaimed good solid liberals and they always voted D. In their minds this means they were open-minded, pro free speech, anti-war, feminist, and color blind. Then suddenly (a few short years, months, days, hours ago?) the culture of liberal left changed outfits. It took off its spangly coat and underneath was the garment of a humorless scold and an intransigent ideologue and these folks were caught flat-footed.

These folks invariably insist that they didn’t change, instead the Left moved further left and forgot all of the cool, sane people. Woke-ism ate the awesome world these liberals lived through in the recent past and has now turned on itself — i.e. on these very same people. On its surface, this is a preposterous narrative and it is one I have tired of seeing and hearing across the media/entertainment world. .

My contention is that nothing has really changed, the rules have just gotten a bit stricter for the NCC but continue along the exact same trajectory these same people so recently embraced. Sorry folks, it’s called a Movement for a reason. And American Liberalism didn’t jump to new positions, it took its leisurely stroll through the institutions all the way back to The Progressive Era over 100 years ago. No legerdemain nor surprise attacks just the natural authoritarian progression of the Progressive and its love of centralized control and the social pseudo-sciences.

Looking back on their beloved early 2000’s or 1990’s, they lumped all non-liberals in with Jimmy Swaggart or Rush Limbaugh or Dick Cheney. To them, that was it. Liberalism dominated their Hollywood bubble and the music they all liked. They listened to NPR and read the New York Times. But those things were totally different than now, they contend. They were once good and honest and open and true. The other side were anti- free speech demons, racists, ignoramuses. etc. And then somewhere it all magically flipped.

This is the story they tell you and themselves and it is a sad piece of self-justification and an explicit example of their own ignorance. The liberal left has been a religion for a long time. Its traditional religious texts were the New York Times, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.

Above is depicted one of the men who broke them on the cover of one of their religious texts already crowing about something known as White America with writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates already spouting racialist nonsense in 2009. The newly awakened apparently didn’t wake up until years later (Trump, Covid, Ukraine, the cadaver known as Biden?), and it was so obvious anyone could see. And apparently these are our new enlightened cultural elites.

The anti-war sentiment from the Bush years lasted just long enough for Barack Obama to collect a Nobel Peace Prize with one hand while unleashing drone attacks on US, Yemeni, Iraqi, Afghani, Syrian, Libyan, Pakistani, and Somali citizens with the other. Note the opening line of a CNN article from September 2014:

New York (CNN) — He’s the war-ending President who, as of Tuesday, has ordered airstrikes in seven different countries (that we know of).

Though this article is shocking to see from CNN in the context of today, remind me again of the popular outcries from the Left. Show me the major protests or the people refusing to go to the White House as humanitarian protest. Where was the open hatred for this office and this war time government after George W. Bush’s administration left the building. Don’t bother looking, it was nearly non-existent. Because to the Left, Barack Obama was cool, he was erudite, he was one of them. No one gave a shit about poor people in the US or abroad, they just enjoyed feeling superior after the hayseed known as W.

If you want to trace Orwellian use of the Administrative State against critics, or weaponizing Justice Departments and IRS offices, you’ll find them here along with the seeds that allowed Covid Authoritarianism to happen so easily. The Federal Bureaucracy is made for this shit.

But maybe you are one of the 90’s Democrat/liberals. And to your mind, the only crime Clinton committed was being awesome and fooling around with an intern — the feminist in you would have to ignore the history of sexual assaults and the ongoing relationship with good ol’ Epstein. On the war front, here is a solid historical analysis of the Yugoslavian adventures which tie neatly into the later war on terror from a self-proclaimed progressive publication:

And this eastward push of NATO to pressure and antagonize Russia and the use of Color Revolutions in Ukraine, fall heavily on the shoulders of Clinton and Obama. These two authoritarian asshats with their megalomania and their enthusiastic willingness to use force for personal and political reasons, are the presidents who for 16 years had these people’s heads buried in the sand. Find me a difference between the Progressive policies of the much maligned (rightly so) George W. Bush and these blood-soaked monsters other than narrative.

The point of this recounting is not some sort of Left/Right whataboutism, it is instead a reminder that this whole circus has been in full effect for a long time. When the hypnotized people wake up, they don’t get to claim that the change has been radical and swift (though it may seem so the them). They need to admit that they themselves are one of the sleeping masses who helped create the problem. Revisionist history is a handy tool but not a useful one.

And yet still so many proudly say they have always voted Blue or Democratic. In doing so, they have embraced what they believe are the good guys but instead they have supported the war between the races, between men and women, between classes, and of course murder abroad.

The internecine wars and grievance culture has kept them blind to the real truth: Power is the only thing that has ever motivated Left America while Right America is only ever a false promise made to the culturally irrelevant people who want to be left alone. All the while Uniparty rolls through crushing all in its wake while so many of the supposed awake are still asleep.