Liberalism becomes fascism

There are several opinion pieces today which really say this far better than I can.

First, Austin Petersen's podcast from Tuesday, "The Death of American Liberalism", starts the discussion:



But Petersen's podcast stems from Shelby Steele's Wall Street Journal editorial, "The Exhaustion of American Liberalism":

The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.

All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?

America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.

The problem with modern liberalism is that it extracts a social price from innocents.

I was born in 1965. The majority of people alive in America today are my age or younger. We had nothing to do with racism, Jim Crow laws, or slavery, and yet liberalism expects us to atone for sins we never committed. If we don't, we are branded with a scarlet "R" and become social pariahs.

Most white people refuse to take the blame for the sins of previous generations of people who happen to be white. If forced to choose between anti-black racists and modern liberals who are anti-white racists, most white people will choose the former. Why would you blame them?

However, the true answer is to side with neither. Racism, regardless of who it is directed against, is a sin, period. Unfortunately, the Left is wearing very narrow blinders. They fail to see how they have swung the pendulum too far, and are now guilty of the very sins of which they accuse those on the Right. They are the very fascists they fear.