In the hit 1970s sitcom All in the Family, Rob Reiner played Michael Stivic, whose progressive countercultural 1960s sensibilities made him a perfect foil for his bigoted, conservative father-in-law Archie Bunker’s struggles to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
Now a celebrated advocate of the Democratic party, Reiner’s great artistic achievement in 2017 was collaborating with neoconservatives and intelligence community insiders to produce a jarring propaganda video featuring Morgan Freeman warning that “we are at war” with Russia. So far his masterpiece of 2018 is a tweet declaring that if you “libel” Russophobic eugenicist James Clapper and CIA torture facilitator-turned-MSNBC pundit John Brennan you are libeling America.
We never set out to become our parents. A counterculture never sets out to become the thing it rebelled against. An actor never sets out to become a twisted mockery of the character he once played. But it happens.
Did you hear Jim Carrey has condemned Facebook and severed all ties with it?
“Ahh, good!” you may be thinking. “It’s about time a high-profile celebrity spoke up about Facebook’s oppressive political censorship! Leave it up to the true artists to stick it to the man when our society needs it most!”
It is perfectly understandable that you might think that. Carrey, who played a screenwriter fighting McCarthyism in 2001’s The Majestic, is a world-renowned comedian who has been famously pursuing spiritual enlightenment and plunging himself into the task of mastering the art of painting for many years. He’s just the sort of person you’d think might bring some light into a deeply endarkened aspect of western consciousness.
But think again.
“I’m dumping my @facebook stock and deleting my page because @facebook profited from Russian interference in our elections and they’re still not doing enough to stop it. I encourage all other investors who care about our future to do the same. #unfriendfacebook,” Carrey tweeted today.
He’s not protesting Facebook’s authoritarian pro-establishment censorship campaign. He’s protesting it not being authoritarian and pro-establishment enough. And his Twitter followers love it.
Look at the worldview of the average person who identifies as a liberal and you’ll find adoration of psychopathic authoritarian intelligence agencies like the CIA and the FBI, a significantly warmed opinion of George W Bush and the neocons he ushered into power, a total apathy toward the US war machine and Orwellian surveillance network, a seething hatred of all things Russia and a hysterical McCarthyite beef with anyone who fails to fall in line with approved establishment narratives. They have become the very flag-waving, authority-cheerleading, art-killing oppressive zealots that the counterculture of the 1960s burst free from like a drowning man finally getting his head above water and clawing his way onto the shore.
I’ve been thinking about the western attitude toward Muslims a lot lately, and how we’re all having the exact wrong debate about it. The modern liberal loves to scream at conservatives for Islamophobia, as though screaming at someone not to be afraid of something has ever been useful. It makes them feel very good about themselves to do this, to scream at the “racists” and “hateful bigots” who fear violence and extremism from Muslim radicals. They will scream at conservatives over this til they’re blue in the face… but you’ll never see them screaming at the US war machine that is ultimately responsible for Islamophobia in the first place.
Endless war in Muslim-majority countries necessitates war propaganda, which will necessarily paint Muslim people as the enemy, which necessarily increases fear of Muslims. More importantly, a causal relationship has been clearly shown between so-called Islamic terrorism and western military interventionism, and a growing body of research indicates that the predominant motivating force driving people to join violent jihadist factions is seeing friends and family killed and arrested by armed forces outside their control.
Ask a liberal to fight this factory of terror by fighting for an end to US military interventionism and they’ll just stare at you like a deer in the headlights. They’d rather scream at the guy in the MAGA hat.
It’s like that all across the board. The modern liberal will squeeze every last vote out of racial identity politics that they possibly can, but try getting them to sign on to the notion of taking some actual money away from the plutocrats and the war machine and putting it toward slavery reparations and see how fast they slam the door in your face. They’ll cheer for Middle Eastern immigrants but ignore the western interventionism which creates them. They’ll allow any manner of encroachment on personal sovereignty in the form of Orwellian surveillance, increasingly militarized police forces and an increasingly corporatized prison system without so much as blinking, but don’t you dare use trans-exclusionary language when talking about gender dynamics because that would make you a Nazi.
People are driven to embrace progressive value systems by that sacred spark which lives in all of us which knows that it is natural for us all to get along and help each other out, but people in power figured out how to manipulate that impulse in a way that has turned its once bright-eyed idealists into a bunch of stuffy, artless church ladies who’d be right at home in J Edgar Hoover’s America. That spark burst out of the oppressive McCarthyite gray world of the 1950s into the cultural revolution of the 1960s with a gasp of relief, and to this day it still has the potential to save us all, but instead it’s been strapped down to a steel table and hooked up with wires by the propagandists and manipulators of the US-centralized power establishment.
The progressive drive toward real change has been warped and twisted into a drive toward good manners. The push toward solving problems by equitable distribution of money and power has been neutered by the fairy tale that you can solve problems with a “Resist” hashtag and a rainbow flag. Rob Reiner has become a weird mutant Archie Bunker, an Archie Bunker who still has all his old, obsolete, establishment-friendly ideologies in place, but knows never to assume someone’s gender.
Wake up, little spark. I know you’re still in there.
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15 responses to “Modern “Liberals” Are 1950s Authoritarians”
Luv!
Brilliant!
True!
When I a see a celebrity freak out like they have been doing, I wonder what sicko events are in their past and or present?
Because imo it is the fear of exposure that is causing this relentless three alarm level of hysteria . I am supposed think Mr Meathead cares about democracy this much, particularly as he would have no problem over turning it to have his way?
The more hysterical, they are , the more secrets they have.
You know, a simpler explanation is that most of the outspoken liberals are simply cynical shills who will say anything to promote the current DNC Narrative. At heart though, they love them some government power! If a Liberal Democrat rails against McCarthyism or Blacklisting, it is only because those things worked against them. Not for the principle of it. If White South Africans were illegally immigrating here, they would be against it. Because those people will likely be conservative. But if illegal Hispanics can get the vote, they will be all for it because they will likely vote for Democrats.
As I have said many times,
“Expecting logical consistency, morality,truth, or principles from Democrats
is like expecting fair play from a bad, cheating, metal-folding-chair-using
wrestler. If you ask the bad wrestler if he feels bad for whomping the good
wrestler over the head with a folding metal chair when the referee wasn’t
looking, he will not have a clue what you are talking about. All he cares
about is that he has the Championship Belt.
It is the same with Democrats. They will say anything or do anything to win.
Nothing else matters.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
I sit reading this, astounded. I think the statement that really identifies this piece as exactly what it claims to hate – generalization of an entire people – is this:
“[The modern liberal]… They will scream at conservatives over this til they’re blue in the face… but you’ll never see them screaming at the US war machine that is ultimately responsible for Islamophobia in the first place.”
Utter nonsense, complete bullshit, and ridiculous. Every day I hear from modern liberals, and they almost all detest the was machine that has made enemies of former friends through brutality, betrayal of promises, and interfering when America should not have. This article has some good points, but then slips right onto the critical judgmental BS that frequently comes at liberals: if we aren’t being liberal the way you think we should, we are wrong. How is that any different that Rob Reiner? That’s right – its not.
I think you have progressives confused with liberals.
It came as a breath of fresh air for me. Took me back to the period, the era, when I in my twenties was fully involved in the struggle – free speech, anti-vietnam, GPCR, Proletarian Revolution, .. discovering and debating and dialoguing and…
It may sound nostalgic but it’s not. Humanity took a step forward.
And yet, one looks around today and is dismayed. Hard reality strikes, and we find ourselves “two steps back”!
A merciless taking stock, as to what went right, what in fact didn’t go right, why truth is more and more pushed to the fringes, and why it’s fashionable to “talk” about Russia and Trump, and get away with it, while at the same time support oppression in effect and in fact, …is the overdue need today perhaps.
Wow, Caitlin, what a profoundly spot-on essay.
My jaw hit my toes when I first watched the Reiner/Morgan Freeman psyops ‘war’ propaganda video. It was like a parody —1984 invades the Idiocracy.
These were filmmakers I once admired, and now they’re doing Leni Riefenstahl style puff pieces for the CIA? While holding hands with Neocons who want nothing more than endless war….
If only they were doing this in isolation—it would be tragic and a little funny. But they are part of a gibbering stampede. Weird reality in the 21st century; very dismaying.
Thank you for bringing a little humor and illumination to a crazy age.
(P.S. You should post a Litecoin, etc. address, too, as Bitcoin transaction fees way too exorbitant for moderate donations.)
This is wonderful. I had no idea you had a real web site until I found a link to this post on nakedcapitalism this morning.
I’ll just say in response to Jessica above I think genuine progressives are not now nor have ever been a ‘threat’ to liberals. And they never will be as long as they are Democrats. As long as they do not reside in a party with genuine democratic principles and process. I think progressive have long been as helpful to liberal/D’s as the tea party has been to R’s in recent times. One doesn’t live inside a D party for decades on end and get away with false hope of changing from within much more actually not being a liberal Democrat above all else. Caitlin’s writing makes that clear in so many ways most every day. And this post comes to mind:
https://godsandradicals.org/2018/01/11/the-democratic-party-is-not-what-you-think/
Caitlin, very well done! You have a great talent of using words to exactly express what you observe. Most do not allow themselves to really see, it is painful. I choose to see and brave the pain as I cannot un-see. It allows me to move out of the prison of illusion created by the lies of culture.
This comment is exactly how I’ve felt for 2 years now. The pain is devastating but, I never want to go back. Eyes, mind, & heart open.
Liberals are like this now because the rise of genuine progressives threatens their place in the US power structure.
With the transition from industrial capitalism to knowledge capitalism, our ruling elites no longer have any function. With no purpose, they have nothing holding them together other than the desire to cling to power, however destructive that is to the rest of us.
In order to maintain their purposeless power, they have tasked the ever larger ranks of knowledge workers to hide the obsolescence of the elites. This is the task knowledge workers must fulfill above all others. This is the driving force behind increased credentialism and the explosion in the number of administrators in universities and health care. It is why platforms siphon money from those who do the real work and those they do it for.
Those knowledge workers who serve the elites rather than knowledge are paid quite well. Think university presidents and hospital chiefs. Many of those who actually serve knowledge, not the elites are paid far less. Think adjuncts.
The purpose of much virtue signaling is to legitimize the control of the top knowledge workers over public discussion, a control they exercise on behalf of the elites.
That power is horded by a parasitic zombie ruling stratum and that the purpose of all the virtue signaling and liberal discussion is to prevent the majority of the population that has serves useful functions for us from maturing and taking the power that only they can put to good use, this above all must be kept secret. Even from those in charge of keeping that secret. Precisely from them above all.
This is why when truth threatens to peak through, our liberal elites and those aspire to serve them and eventually take their place in the ranks of minions go crazy. Like the zombie rulers they serve, our liberal elites are reduced to chanting two words: “Russia” and “Trump”.
Oh, and Caitlin, thank you.
The article is right on although I think using the term ‘democrat’ instead of ‘liberal’ would have been more appropriate. The democratic party has hijacked the term ‘libearal’ and using it synomously with democrat plays into their game.
Spot on.. Hijacked terms and labels are the “in” thing right now.
Spot-on , as usual.
As it turns out , Archie Bunker was right about Mike : He is a Meathead.
Having lived through that McCarthyism era, even though I was a child at the time, your article hit the nail on the head. Narrow mindedness thinking never worked then and certainly doesn’t work today. J.Edgar Hoover was a very prejudiced paranoid individual who never even appreciated what Einstein brought to the US freely as he had him followed and wiretapped for everything.
Paranoia is easily spread by creating a fear of the unknown. Little did Hoover know that his secret relationship would be so accepted as a norme today versus his time era.
Maybe today’s young need to have conversations with us boomers to see how close we actually are in thinking and how foolish it is to follow the crowd.