Stop Calling the Cancel-Cult “Liberal”
Every day, we hear of some new effort to cancel a cultural icon over some minor failure to live up to the ideals of the increasingly cultish and puritanical Left. It has been customary to refer to those on the Left as “liberals,” but there is no longer anything liberal about them. Intellectual honesty now demands a change in nomenclature. Liberals believe in freedom, of speech and expression, of religion, of economic opportunity. Liberals stick up for the little guy and fight for a fair chance for everyone. The Cancel-Cult, meanwhile, advocates economic devastation and mass poverty. They seek to control what can be said, done, and thought. The Cancel-Cult’s illiberal fascism cannot be allowed to continue to fly under the banner of liberalism.
Featured image courtesy New York Post.
From Dr. Suess to Pepe Le Pew, from Dumbo to the Song of the South, the Left is eagerly canceling and destroying the cultural fabric of America. Long ago they canceled the Framers of the Constitution and the founders of the United States. “Old white men who owned slaves,” they argued, are unworthy of our national reverence. Yet, those old white men created the freest society in history. A society that, as it evolved, granted ever-expanding rights to its citizens. Slavery was ended, the vote extended to women, civil rights won for racial minorities, religious freedoms expanded and so on. Today, even sexual preference can afford a person a legally protected status. That these rights were not granted the day the United States was founded is immaterial; they were won in a system of freedom and liberty established by the founding generation. Today’s citizenry is the inheritor of this system of liberty and the ever-expanding definition of equality and rights.
America’s political and social culture has long been divided between a conservative cultural instinct, driven by the followers of Edmund Burke, who prefer to err on the side of passing on a successful tradition to the succeeding generation, and those who follow a more Jeffersonian (or perhaps in British terminology Bentham-esque) tradition of liberalism, who are more open-minded and seek more substantial cultural change with each generation. The latter tradition in the 20th Century begot such great liberals as Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy; Justices Louis Brandeis, Earl Warren, and Thurgood Marshall; Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr and writers like WEB DuBois and Gore Vidal; and labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph (who founded the first African-American Union) and Walter Reuther (United Auto Workers). These great liberals sought not to control thought, cancel cultural icons, or force others to narrow their speech and expression, they sought to empower everyone in our society to be heard and given a fair chance.
Far from sticking up for the little guy, today’s Cancel-Cult Left is eager destroying jobs and ignoring the demands of labor. They embrace cultish policies they claim will mitigate climate change, but that cause substantial job loss and increase the cost of living for ordinary Americans; all while growing government authority and the wallets of billionaire elites. They support politicians who lead our country into unnecessary wars and oppose those who seek peace. The Cancel-Cult seeks to censor those who disagree to ensure that they are only allowed to disagree in ways and to degrees dictated by leftists. As a classical American Liberal myself, who continues to look with reverence upon the American liberal tradition, I can assure that this is not at all what liberals of any time ever sought to accomplish.
To be liberal in America today is to be on the centre-right in Donald Trump’s re-envisioned populist Republican Party. A party now dedicated to the interests of wage workers and small business owners. A party that seeks peace internationally and prosperity at home. A party that opposes censorship, thought control, and the growing fascism of the American left. It is time to call a spade a spade: the Cancel-Cult is a totalitarian movement that seeks one party rule and cultural control. They are not liberals, they are fascists. Fascists who serve the interests of the political establishment and the billionaire elites to the detriment of common people. True liberals are now aligned with conservatives seeking to preserve the tradition of liberty and freedom in America.
