Progressives Against Progress

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_american-liberalism.html

Progressives Against Progress
The rise of environmentalism poisoned liberals’ historical optimism.
by Fred Siegel

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist cousins, argued that with the aid of science and given the proper social and economic conditions, humanity could free itself from its cramped carapace of greed and distrust and enter a realm of true freedom and happiness. Conservatives, by contrast, clung to a tragic sense of man’s inherent limitations. While acknowledging the benefits of science, they argued that it could never fundamentally reform, let alone transcend, the human condition. Most problems don’t have a solution, the conservatives maintained; rather than attempting Promethean feats, man would do best to find a balanced place in the world.
...
American liberalism has remarkably come to resemble nineteenth-century British Tory Radicalism, an aristocratic sensibility that combined strong support for centralized monarchical power with a paternalistic concern for the poor. Its enemies were the middle classes and the aesthetic ugliness it associated with an industrial economy powered by bourgeois energies.
...
Like the Tory Radicals, today’s liberal gentry see the untamed middle classes as the true enemy. “Environmentalism offered the extraordinary opportunity to combine the qualities of virtue and selfishness,” wrote William Tucker in a groundbreaking 1977 Harper’s article on the opposition to construction of the Storm King power plant along New York’s Hudson River. Tucker described the extraordinary sight of a fleet of yachts—including one piloted by the old Stalinist singer Pete Seeger—sailing up and down the Hudson in protest. What Tucker tellingly described as the environmentalists’ “aristocratic” vision called for a stratified, terraced society in which the knowing ones would order society for the rest of us. Touring American campuses in the mid-1970s, Norman Macrae of The Economist was shocked “to hear so many supposedly left-wing young Americans who still thought they were expressing an entirely new and progressive philosophy as they mouthed the same prejudices as Trollope’s 19th century Tory squires: attacking any further expansion of industry and commerce as impossibly vulgar, because ecologically unfair to their pheasants and wild ducks.”

Neither the failure of the environmental apocalypse to arrive nor the steady improvement in environmental conditions over the last 40 years has dampened the ardor of those eager to make hair shirts for others to wear. The call for political coercion as a path back to Ruskin’s and Mishan’s small-is-beautiful world is still with us. Radical environmentalists’ Tory disdain for democracy and for the habits of their inferiors remains undiminished. True to its late-1960s origins, political environmentalism in America gravitates toward both bureaucrats and hippies: toward a global, big-brother government that will keep the middle classes in line and toward a back-to-the-earth, peasantlike localism, imposed on others but presenting no threat to the elites’ comfortable lives. How ironic that these gentry liberals—progressives against progress—turn out to resemble nothing so much as nineteenth-century conservatives.

More at City Journal.

This article interested me since it points out the leftist ruling class' environmental statist ideology. Written by a leaning-lefty, he seems somewhat dismayed by the constant push for statist rule by "liberals". This ideology quickly summed up:
1. Nature is god (whether the left believes it or it's just to get to #4 is up to the individual lefty)
2. The masses ruin nature
3. Therefore masses must be controlled (or exterminated)
4. The leaders know best and are exempt from rules for the masses

Fred Siegel's politics seem to lean left (without doing too much research into the guy), and this is shown in his ending statement.

19th Century British "conservatives" are not the same as US conservatives. Look at the top of the blog here. See where it says " helping to conserve American libertarian values"? That's US conservatism.

Conservatism within the US is often viewed as traditionalism - which is associated with religious and family groups, and while often laudible in their non-governmental efforts, conservatism is adherence to the Constitution and adherence to those principles of the Constitution. It's a document of classic liberalism - as in liberty for all, tolerance for all, and the ability for each man (and woman) to live his live how he chooses free of all but the fewest govt. restrictions.

The US is a nation of free men who came together to establish a nation of free men. They took pride in their traditions, but did not want to impose on one another. The most unifying tradition is that of a reverence for freedom.

Conservatism - as in conservation of one's original values - in other nations is a different animal. Conservatism in England may represent groups like the British National Party, which has a very pro-Anglo/pro-white/anti-everybody-who's-not-a-white-Brit bias to them. They are conserving old values of the UK, just values that are rooted in nationalism and white British ethnic supremacy.

Until a 2009 court order, they restricted their membership to "indigenous caucasian". Presumably to keep any smart-ass Chechens from joining just to fuck with them.

Conservatism in Japan may represent hard nationalist policies that are very pro-Japanese and frequently anti-Korean, anti-Chinese. Conservatism in France or Iran may represent laws that preserve the language against any change or modification, or variations against traditional morality of those nations.

Pictured: elastic loaves.

The United States, unlike most nations in the world, is a collection of different ethnic groups. The US is not represented by one cardinal national group. There is no "American" ethnicity. There is a group of people who are irish, a group who are german, a group who are russian, congolese, brazilian, mexican, japanese, chinese, etc. There is no ethnicity nor ethnic culture to match the United States.

Thus Siegel makes a big mistake in assuming that this leftist enviro-statism has anything to do with actual conservatism. The difference between British monarchists in the 19th century and American conservatives is vast. The left, which are emphatically illiberal and intolerant, despite their nom de jour "liberal", are far from American conservatism. That they may want to conserve monarchical dictatorial rule is not a surprise to those who've seen the effects of disagreeing with a "liberal." (Liberal-on-liberal violence, especially.)

That some use environmentalism and some use ethnic supremacy are simply different means to the same end: power. Some are naked in their power grab based on what they perceive as an ethnic right, some grab for power by determining that they alone can save the world from an environmental apocalypse - and that all others be damned. Neither is remotely like American conservatism. Both are statism, autocracy, and dictatorship.

American conservatism is entrenched in these words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,...

Czar Wars Episode VI: Return of the Eugenicists

Well-known blogger Zombie has done a better review of this man than anyone around, and first I must give acknowledgment to that blogger (who is deep behind radical lines in San Fran):

http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/

Direct quote from John Holdren's book "Ecoscience" pg 837:

To date, there has been no serious attempt in Western countries to use laws to control excessive population growth, although there exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated. For example, under the United States Constitution, effective population-control programs could be enacted under the clauses that empower Congress to appropriate funds to provide for the general welfare and to regulate commerce, or under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such laws constitutionally could be very broad. Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society. Few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion, however.


Note also that the "usual suspects" are utilized by leftists here. The general welfare and interstate commerce clauses are cited, as well as the 14th Amendment. They're often used as end-runs around the Constitution.

The general welfare clause is limited by the enumerated powers that follow - otherwise the Constitution would just say "govt. can do whatever means well".

The interstate commerce clause, was intended to allow the federal govt. to prevent individual states from interfering with commerce. For example, if a good was being sold and shipped from Georgia to North Carolina and South Carolina chose to tax it along the way, the federal govt. could step in to ensure that commerce was protected.

I fail to see how "equal protection" includes forced abortions and sterilization, but I'm not a liberal advocating what amounts to genocide to "save the planet".

From page 838:
Individual rights. Individual rights must be balanced against the power of the government to control human reproduction. Some people—respected legislators, judges, and lawyers included—have viewed the right to have children as a fundamental and inalienable right. Yet neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce. Nor does the UN Charter describe such a right, although a resolution of the United Nations affirms the "right responsibly to choose" the number and spacing of children (our emphasis).

"Our emphasis" is Holdren & Ehrlich's.

Consider that first sentence: "Individual rights must be balanced against the power of the government to control human reproduction." Really?

The argument for abortion is that it's a woman's right to her own body. The argument against is that the fetus is a human life, and therefore deserving of equal protection under the law.

The argument here is that the woman has no right to her own body against the govt's power to murder its citizens, and the fetus has no right to exist against the power of the govt.

For once, pro-choicers and pro-lifers should have something to fundamentally agree on.

More from 838:

It is often argued that the right to have children is so personal that the government should not regulate it. In an ideal society, no doubt the state should leave family size and composition solely to the desires of the parents. In today's world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

There's quite a bit more at Zombie's blog. I direct you readers to read it there - as s/he went to the trouble of scanning pages of the book to show you exactly what was written. You can look at it in context, and read full quotes.

The man spent a lot of time seriously deliberating how to get around the Constitution to start sterilizing you and me. We're an overpopulated animal on the planet to him.

Is this the kind of man you want as the advisor and regulator on science policy? Because he's the Science Czar you have.

Much like Levar Burton on Reading Rainbow would say: "Don't take my word for it."

Another collection of info on John Holdren can be found here, including a video of Holdren at an event advocating zero-growth:

http://www.lonelyconservative.com/2009/09/08/dont-forget-about-radical-science-czar-john-holdren/

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Now, why is all of this terrifying? Well, according to the leftist propaganda site Media Matters, which is funded and supported by major leftist groups, this is all smear and taken out of context.

Except you can go and read it in context. All of it.

The man's written a blueprint of how he thinks - everything from advocating forced sterilization of women to releasing sterilizing chemicals in the water supply to a global regime to mandate the population.

May as well just get these ready:


If any one of us - you, me, JBH, any member of your family, your friends, your boss or your teacher - were to write a 900-page scholarly treatise on how a certain race needed to be exterminated, we'd probably have difficulty getting a government job. If your name were attached to "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment and Eskimos", we'd be done for. You couldn't advocate extermination of a race. Sure, Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright, who married he and his wife, can say vile things about "the JOOOOOS", and that's okay. But were he to actually write a 900 page book on how the Danes must be sterilized by poisoning their drinking water, he probably would've encountered some difficulty.

John Holdren escapes this by being in academia. Academia is notable for being insulated from the real world, as academics are funded by grants and free money, where all they have to do is talk to earn a living. Their ideas are tossed around, and are mostly meaningless, and they're insulated from the effects of their nonsensical ideas due to being subsidized by alumni and those seeking tax breaks on their grants; and of course by govt. grants that never have any strings attached. Also of note, when discussing something in great detail that doesn't matter one whit, folks will use the phrase "It's all academic anyway" - saying that it's a meaningless discussion with zero effect on reality or decisionmaking.

But when these eerily progressive ideas get out, they rapidly metastasize into something far worse. The "academic" ideas of phrenology and eugenics back in the 1800s and 1900s led to the conclusion that there were "superior races" and led to continued injustice against blacks in the US, who were considered subhuman by "scientists" like John Holdren. These crackpot theories dreamed up by men of letters led to entire schools of racial purity in Europe, and beyond the murder of 6-12 million and a war that killed millions more, there were also the forced abortions and sterilizations of "undesirables."

John Holdren, like many leftist tyrants, believes in equality. All races are equally worthless to him - and he believes in egalitarian misery.

His statements of a shrinking world and Malthusian overpopulation are from the world of a zero-sum mindset. There are only so many resources and they must be divided equally, so says he - to the point that growth cannot be sustained and populations must be culled to manage resources.

Mankind are not deer on a hunting ranch or cows on a feed lot. This ignores the free market, where the individual has limitless capacity to produce and benefit everyone else in the system as well. The only limits on resources available for production (or consumption) are those placed by government.

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

Go and read it all.
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/

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A while back I got into a discussion with someone over government health care. I was in the midst of reading a lot about government control of people's lives, and rather than bring up how rationing of resources results in poorer care, I mentioned the power aspect of it. You can have "know what's best for you" monsters in charge with government-run health care, and that of itself is terrifying.

We now have one such monster as science czar.

The main problem is one that is endemic on the left - it's a worldview that sees life as a zero-sum game. It sees overpopulation as a problem and children as a punishment -

- and the world as "lifeboat" with fixed resources.

This cynical, cold worldview is one that allows leftist/statist/collectivists to believe that they are best to be in charge because they should distribute the resources. The cynic among them is watching out for himself and putting himself in a position of power, and the do-gooder believes himself above the masses and in need of the indulgences he takes by being in power as necessary for the "greater good". Both of them concur that they are more important than "the masses" and thus they should dictate how the world will run.

But murdering millions is of course, for the greater good - according to such masters of men.

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Reality check, folks: this shit is real. We have a man who's entirely similar to the mass-murdering supervillains in both Tom Clancy's novel "Rainbow Six", who seek to obliterate humanity (except for themselves) for the good of the planet, and the water-poisoning semi-spoof supervillains of "The Tuxedo".

The difference is that John Holdren is a real person in a real position of power to really impact your life (or the termination thereof) through his mandates. He's already looked for end runs around the rule of law to get away with it so that he can't be punished.

Everyone everywhere who's ever been the victim of this kind of madman has said "it can't happen here". Then when it happens, "there's nothing we can do about it."

Spread the word. Raise your voice. Get this man and all his enablers, supporters, and his appointers removed from any office of power.

I don't want to be saying "I told you so" and wandering the wasteland looking for gasoline for my Pursuit Special.