I’ve just finished re-reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower — which, if you haven’t read yet, I urge you to do so — and despite the fact that Tuchman was a tired old Lefty, she still was of an era where historians relied on facts, uncomfortable though they may be. Unlike today’s crop of Newspeak toads, for whom the old adage “If the facts don’t conform with the theory, they must be eliminated” is carved into their stony little hearts.
Here’s one such fact, and it’s a quote of then-Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed (R-Maine), who said of the Progressives of his era:
It was true of Progressives back then, and it’s still more true of their philosophical descendants of today, whether politicians, Greens or the Gender Studies Brigade [some considerable overlap].
Seriously: think of Guam “tipping over”, the “trillion-dollar coin”, “defunding the police”, “anthropomorphic climate change”, “ESG”, “patriarchal hegemony”, “DEI”, “Green New Deal” and all the other modernist, oh-so fashionable tropes and tell me that these “philosophies” (actually more like religions because they rely on belief rather than substance) are not doing today exactly what Reed ascribed to the mountebanks of his era.
Actually, today’s “progressive” tropes are even more antithetical to knowledge than before, because they insist on ignoring or worse, destroying the fundamentals of civilization’s accrued wisdom — because it’s obvious that it’s only without that wisdom that their policies can survive the first question or challenge.
Even worse, when the time comes to write the history of their many failures, the historians, being of the same tribe, will almost certainly lie and ascribe the causes thereof to “fascists”, “counterrevolutionaries” (an old Marxist standby), “revanchists”, “Trumpists” or whatever their fevered little imaginations can devise — anything other than admit to the inherent fallacies of their policies and the crashing, grinding failures and concomitant miseries caused thereby.
Even Tuchman would weep.
[stupidity erased because embarrassing]
