And that’s not good. At all. So says Gagdad Bob in a brilliant essay, via Dissecting Leftism. Here is a taste.
Being that we all live in “Christendom” — that is, a culture shaped and animated (in the literal sense of “given life”) by Judeo-Christian principles — I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that we share its underlying assumptions about the “brokenness” of man and the world. But where the progressive goes off the rails is in supposing there is some secret political formula that can reverse the fall and restore us to wholeness. Thus, the ubiquitous frenzied moral passion that always animates the left. Leftists are always exaggeratedly pessimistic about the present state of the world, but “optimistic” in a crazed and manic way that steamrules over anyone who would dare delay the immediate implementation of paradise.
From Marx on down, the leftist fallacy follows from turning spiritual Truth on its head (or “inside-out”), so that man’s spiritual crisis is seen as a material one (e.g. “robber barons,” “global warming,” “global cooling,” “nuclear power,” “income disparity,” “corporate greed,” etc.) instead of a psycho-spiritual one. This is the “fundamental assumption” which adherents of all the variant progressive systems within our epoch unconsciously presuppose.
For example, the progressive would say that Palestinians aren’t evil, they’re just poor. Which precisely inverts the truism that they are poor because they are evil (except for the few who are extraordinarily wealthy because they are evil, having been enriched by the largesse of Western progressives who give them money because they think it will stop them from being evil, when it always does the opposite, thus ensuring a constant cash flow from backward progressives).
Read the whole darn thing.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Woman Honor Thyself, Adam’s Blog, Maggie’s Notebook, Pirate’s Cove, Celebrity Smack, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, A Newt One, Dumb Ox Daily News, Adeline and Hazel, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Technorati Tags: Leftism, Progressive, Christianity, Gnostics
Wolf Pangloss 
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Here is a link to a blogger/thinker who sees the left as:
–>
My argument is that though the tradition is theologically atrophied, its moral and political positions, and its personal and institutional patterns of transmission, identify it as the legitimate modern successor of mainline progressive Protestantism. Since this is only the most powerful branch of Christianity in the most powerful nation on the planet, swallowing its claims of dewy-eyed innocence is a little difficult for me.
This heresy implies a substantial qualitative revision of reality as we know it. For example, Richard Dawkins considers himself a follower of something he calls “Einsteinian religion,” which appears to differ not at all from the aforementioned tradition. From Dawkins’ perspective, he is defending reason against superstition. From my perspective, he is prosecuting one Christian sect on behalf of another. Doh.
It’s simply unrealistic to expect to be able to make this revision, or even evaluate it fairly, without adjusting the language we use to “frame” the problem. To this end I’ve field-tested some neologisms, such as ultracalvinism and cryptocalvinism, and also satisfied myself that existing names, such as liberalism, are just as useless and confusing as they seem.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/universalism-postwar-progressivism-as.html
Here are the four points:
# Equality (the universal brotherhood of man)
# Peace (the futility of violence)
# Social Justice (the fair distribution of goods)
# Community (the leadership of benevolent public servants).