Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, published an article not long ago, “Why Are Progressives So Illiberal? begins: “A common theme in the tragic madness and tragedy of the past 12 months is that even as most Americans resist the leftist agenda, progressive ideology is still allowed to permeate almost all of our major institutions. …… is like how Marxism infiltrated all Russian institutions in the 1930s. To be a Silicon Valley executive, a Wall Street player, the leader of a prestigious publishing house, a university president, a network or broadcaster anchor, a major Hollywood actress, a retired general who sits on a corporate board, or an NBA superstar requires the mark of progressivism or careful suppression of all political leanings. Data show that 98% of major tech political donations went to Democrats in 2020. the censorship of Twitter, Facebook and other social media shows a deadly one-way street.”
To say that America is an ideological confrontation between liberalism and conservatism, between the left and the right, is not accurate enough. It is not liberals, but “progressives” who have infiltrated all campuses and institutions as the progressive ideology that has risen to the mainstream over the decades. The social media majors in Silicon Valley have been wilfully removing and eliminating conservative platforms, demonstrating in practice that they do not believe in either the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech or its spirit. Scholastic sticks have spoken out against Voltaire’s words that “the right to dissent is to be defended to the death. On college campuses, conservative speakers are disinvited, shouted down, and sometimes roughed up for their so-called “reactionary” views, with little fear of punishment for their rude behavior. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides that all persons shall have the right to the law, has also been challenged by politically correct ideology, and students accused of “sexual harassment” or “sexual assault” are often denied the right to confront the accuser, cross-examine witnesses, or present counter-evidence. The right to present evidence against them. They are often left to face suspension or expulsion in court to seek a lighter sentence.
The word “progressive” is not new to anyone who has lived through the history of the CCP before and after its founding. Pro-communists before the founding of the Communist Party, and even pro-communists in Hong Kong in the 1950s who organized “study groups,” also called themselves “progressives. The opposite of progressiveness is conservatism. The core idea of progressivism is to presuppose that the future is better than the present, to presuppose that a better outcome will be reached in the future. Socialism is a progressive ideology that seeks distributive equality, while welfarism and the quest for equality of color, race, creed, and gender are similar to socialism in that they override the quest for freedom with equality.
Reality is bad and must change. This is the starting point of progressivism. But there are some realities that humans cannot change, such as the fact that all people will die. For realities that cannot be changed, humans can only adapt rather than force change. There are realities that can be changed but at great cost, such as paying the price of freedom to pursue equality, or ignoring innate differences in anti-discrimination that result in reverse discrimination, change is better than no change at all. Only those bad realities that can be changed and at an affordable cost should be changed. Conservatism never denies this third type of change, which they call progress, but mainly improvement, advancement, and advancement. Progressives, on the other hand, make no distinction between the several kinds of change, and so it devolves into a great outbreak of suppressing freedom and suppressing the fairness of rules by political correctness.
Just as socialism, which pursues equality in distribution, must eventually be realized by privilege and alienated into a more unequal and privileged society, the media, which used to pursue freedom of the press, has been alienated into a media that censors and bans information; the Democratic Party, which used to be anti-monopoly, has been alienated into a political party that colludes with the monopoly of social media in Silicon Valley; and bureaucrats, business and academic elites, who claim to belong to the free world, have been alienated into a new privileged class that colludes with foreign jingoism.
The most unfortunate consequences of more than a century of progressive thinking on traditional American values will emerge in 2020. It has far-reaching effects on the United States and will certainly change the world situation. In this regard, false optimism is meaningless. Facing the reality of human degradation and adhering to traditional values may be able to identify a positive direction.
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