from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Why Liberalism is a Reactionary Ideology

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 07:49 PM PST

The narrative that liberal pundits have constructed and
continually replayed over the last year is one in which progress minded
and enlightened liberals are working to reform America into a modern
society, while being stymied by a bunch of knuckle dragging reactionary
conservatives who are anti-Science and want to drag America back into the
dark ages. There's only one problem with this narrative, it's actually a
mirror image of reality.

When it comes to holding on to reactionary ideas or maintaining
an ideological worldview built on a reflexive hostility to modernity;
nobody can top the modern leftist or his tamer liberal cousin. If you took
away leader worship, fear of technology, the state as the solution to all
problems, the supremacy of the group over the individual and the belief
that the "enlightened" should rule over the common masses for their own
good and control every aspect of their lives-- there would be nothing left
of the modern liberal. Literally nothing at all.

The modern liberal
is wedded to a thoroughly reactionary worldview in which he worships the
institutions he control and is full of paranoia and suspicion of those he
does not. He disdains the common man and longs for enlightened leaders to
uplift him and to transform his country into a messianic vision of a
kingdom of heaven in which no one ever goes hungry and everyone is
perfectly equalized-- a pseudo-religious vision of government as religion
that is wholly primitive in its conflation of theology and
civics.

Every time a liberal pundit self-righteously trots out the
stereotype of the ignorant science bashing conservative who just won't
accept the science of the environmentalist movement, he needs to be
reminded that the entire environmentalist movement is founded on a fear of
the products of science, namely technology and modern
civilization.

Unlike conservationism, which was a genuinely
progressive attempt to address species decline, environmentalism dabbles
in pseudo-religious mysticism about mother earth, and treats technology as
the evil villain behind every global temperature change and polar bear
cough. Even setting aside environmentalism's well known links to the
"crystals and shamans" New Age movement, its mystical notion that the
human race is somehow accountable to the orbiting ball of rock and the
biological organisms on it that we call Earth, or its even more bizarre
notion that those biological organisms have equal or even greater rights
to the planet than we do-- environmentalism would still be wholly
anti-science for its insistence that everything wrong with the planet can
be reduced to technology and human civilization.

When
environmentalists demand that the government legislate against carbon
emissions, they are humorlessly replicating the Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax,
in which Penn and Teller gathered signatures from concerned
environmentalists to ban water as a dangerous element. The point of the
hoax was that public ignorance and alarmism over pollution from any
scientifically named substance could lead people to call for a ban of the
most common element on earth. But this time the liberals aren't joking in
their crusade against one of the most common elements on earth and in the
universe.

Environmentalists demand that we respect the scientific
process, except that it's only their process that they demand respect for.
and as the leaked East Anglia emails show, their process consists of
burying the original data, manipulating the existing data and silencing
all their critics. That is not a scientific process, that is Lysenkoism, a
perfect paradigm of how totalitarian leftism can create a wholly distorted
scientific theory by demanding that science align with its ideological
agenda, rather than the other way around.

Nor do environmentalists have a great track record of
respecting science, except when they can stack the deck so it comes out on
their side. When the scientific process found that there was no reason to
ban DDT, the environmentalists shrieked and marched and denounced the
experts, just as they now accuse conservatives of doing, until they got
their way. DDT was banned, mosquitoes thrived and millions around the
world died of malaria. One can hardly think of a clearer example of
anti-science reactionary behavior than using a popularized book, written
by Rachel
Carson, (who got her "start in science" penning episodes of "Romance
Under the Waters" for the Bureau of Fisheries), to generate baseless
public hysteria over a commonly used pesticide and then exploiting that
hysteria to push through a ban, even when the science showed
otherwise.

The entire environmentalist movement is one long string
of hysterical alarmist warnings that threaten us with imminent destruction
if we don't stop using technology, if we don't stop being productive, if
we don't stop traveling, using modern food packaging and production
technology and fall on our faces to pay homage to Mother Earth by crawling
back into the caves on a quest for some kind of mystical Edenistic quest
for our inner Noble Savage. But despite the fact that their prophesied
environmental armageddons have never come to pass, environmental
liberalism continues to demand that we put aside the tools and techniques
of modern science, in order to go backward in time, to rely again on wind
power, reusable packaging, pedal powered vehicles and all the other
primitive methods we left behind.

Liberal Luddites might argue that
they can't be accused of being anti-science and anti-technology, after all
they have blogs, webpages, iPhones and Twitter. But there is a fundamental
difference between the use of technology and the conception of technology.
Islamic fundamentalists make use of the same social media, even as they
work to impose a reactionary ideology that is just as anti-technology on
the world. Environmentalists who Twitter the latest claims that technology
is killing us, and we should be riding bicycles and living in a shack in
the woods, are no different than them.

Anyone can use technology,
but not just anyone can accept technology as a praiseworthy and useful
tool. Environmentalists may exploit science and technology, but only in
order to undermine it. Just as Islamic fundamentalists post Islamic
lectures on YouTube, environmentalists post videos of themselves living in
trees. Both are examples in which technology is used to advocate a society
that minimizes the use of technology.

Like Lysenkoism, the
environmental movement is built on bad science created around an ideology.
It is not scientific, it is inherently anti-scientific because it
transforms science into a tool of dogma and then suppresses the views of
everyone who disagrees. When liberals insist that their opponents are
anti-science, they mean that in the same way that they mean their
opponents are anti-democratic-- because in their minds once they have
appropriated an institution, be it scientific or political, they also feel
that they now own its name as well. Accordingly when liberals denounce
their political opponents as anti-science or anti-education or
anti-democratic, or for that matter racist or misogynist, they are not
only accusing others of their own sins, but treating entire fields, ideas
and billions of people as their wholly owned property in whose name they
alone can speak.

But the reactionary nature of liberalism does not
begin or end with its quasi-mystical faith in Gaia. Liberalism does not
simply demand that we cast aside modern technology, it also demands that
we cast aside modern ideas of individualism, nationalism and economic
freedom... in favor of submitting to the power of an overriding state that
will care for us for our own good.

When liberal pundits accuse tea party protesters of longing for
the good old days, it is in fact the pundits themselves who in true
reactionary fashion long for the good old days. Not just the good old days
of the USSR, but the good old days when the common people kept their heads
down and listened to their betters. To hear the MSNBC talking heads bewail
the danger of the armed mobs at Town Halls, you might think that you were
listening to royalists bemoaning the French Revolution. But theirs
is an equally elitist worldview in which power comes not from the voice of
the people telling their representatives, but from the people listening to
their representatives telling them what to do.

The American
experiment was based on the radical progressive notion that the people as
individuals were best suited to conduct their own lives. Socialism by
contrast is a reactionary ideology that rejects individual freedom in
favor of a rule of the enlightened elite. The pundits who swoon over
Obama's intelligence and speechmaking, make a point of drawing a contrast
with their perception of the backward crudity of a George W. Bush or Sarah
Palin who in their minds represent those hopeless commoners sticking to
their guns and their religion. To hear the adulation wash over Obama, is
to hear an echo of the slavish worship of the Sun King or a divinely
appointed emperor. It is not simply messianic, a vein of political
mysticism long common among liberals, but royalist in nature. Obama's own
emphasis on his lineage rather than his political accomplishments, the
leader worship of his ubiquitous stylized portraits and a press that has
transformed itself into the bewigged and perfumed courtiers of an European
monarchy is a sight both repugnant and reactionary. A window looking back
on ugly centuries of rulers and servants, of kings and tyrants who are to
be flattered and worshiped for their benevolent wisdom, no matter how
naked they might be.

Like the kings of old, liberals pledge to
rule the people for their own benefit, while at the same time fearing the
people. Even as they designate themselves the "Protectors of the People",
they set up endless barricades against the will of the people. Because the
essential idea of socialism is that the people are incapable of caring for
themselves, that they need a thousand benevolent dictators overseeing
their lives and protecting them from their own foolishness and from being
exploited by the capitalists and imperialists.

By promoting
socialism in America, liberals are engaging in a reactionary campaign to
stamp out the American experiment in favor of yet another all-powerful
state that intervenes in every aspect of the lives of its citizens. While
the Tea Party protesters are fighting for a fundamentally progressive
cause, the right of individuals to lead their lives as they see fit,
liberals are fighting for a reactionary cause to impose an overriding
government on the people against their will. And there can hardly be
anything more reactionary than the tyrannical belief that the will of the
people must be subservient to the will of their rulers.

The
socialist dream is the ancient dream of a supreme state, that is somehow
all-wise and all-benevolent, whose rulers are somehow more enlightened
than ordinary people, and who supply everyone with their needs. Such a
vision is wholly reactionary and at odds with modernity itself which vests
power in the individual and with thousands of years of history which have
demonstrated conclusively that no class of rulers can be wiser or superior
to those they rule.

Nevertheless the reactionary program of
liberalism has been to remove autonomy from the individual and vest it in
state and party institutions. To place the individual into economic and
racial classes, and to provide provide political representation to those
classes, rather than to the individual. This tribalism, this caste system
revived in the false guise of progressive politics is what liberals have
used to try and stamp out democratic representation. This is the heart of
their battle cry, "power to the poor", "power to the Latinos", "power to
the unions", power to every subdivided and conquered group, but not power
to the individual.

The denial of the individual is the great
liberal reactionary crime against the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution, against a form of government specifically constructed to
restrict government authority and to liberate the individual from the
legislative chains of its authority. Liberalism and socialism are an old
form of tyranny in flashy new clothes. But the flashy new clothes cannot
disguise its reactionary totalitarianism, its distrust of popular
elections and legislative authority vested in the people, rather than in
an enlightened elite.

When its flashy clothes are stripped away, liberalism stands
revealed as a fear of modernity. There is nothing progressive about
liberalism, it is the ideology of a political, cultural and economic elite
that reviles everything modern, that longs for a mystical right of kings
and well ordered oligarchies, denounces technology as the tool of the
pollution devil, distrusts all science that is not in the service of its
ideology and is threatened by any sort of debate or
opposition.

Today liberalism is the second most backward, most
paranoid, most reactionary and totalitarian ideology in the West after
Islamism. Both are based on the fear of the modern, the fear of the
liberated individual, technology and the nation state. Their great dream
is the same, a vast mystical world-state ruled over by the enlightened and
providing an inhumanly perfect justice for all. Both believe that the only
solution for mankind is to go backward, to crawl instead of walk, to fear
instead of know and to obey rather than think. That is Liberalism and
Islamism in a nutshell, two reactionary ideologies walking together into
the dark ages.