Marxism and all the insanity that comes with it is directly descended from the French Enlightenment and those motherfuckers were batshit insane.
See... I've looked long and hard at this. I think we're giving them, by which I mean the Marxists, too much credit on being the progeny of liberalism. No one else gets this award, and I'm not sure how many people bothered to run for the award either. So what would this mean then if Marxism is only winning this race because Marxism is the only one claiming this? I think it means it's kinda bullshit and more people should call them on it.
Still, one of the fundamental points of American Liberalism, that all men are created equal, is simply false.
This too. I can positively smell the communist framing on this one since it just lets them have the definition of what equal means despite it transparently not being what would have applied back then. The Founders were downright elitist in a lot of respects just to start with, certainly didn't afford this to the Native Americans, and you only really see this kind of use of equality all the way into the pretext for the Civil Rights movement, injected into it by communist thought. Equality then generally began and ended at "the law," meaning they'd look at this stabbing and about the only leniency from the rope I think they'd give him is to be a guinea pig for intensive chemical restraints since those got invented after them.
Something about this reeks of someone having abused the dictionary sometime between then and now, and I'm not sure we should keep validating that.
Progressivism is Liberalism taken to it's logical conclusions once you unmoor it from Western tradition and especially Western religion.
Really? I think it's very illogical in the conclusions it gets. In one of these threads, I recommended people look at philosophy in blocks to get their contemporary big questions, and that's for a reason. You can't divorce Hobbes from the liberalism discussion as one of its best contemporary critics and contributors, that kicks Rousseau out of the conversation almost immediately since Hobbes was largely correct on human nature, leaving Locke who can survive, but not without compromises. Progressivism has to wholesale ignore this part of the discussion entirely to position itself as the progeny of liberalism, so why should we indulge them on that exactly?
Likewise, you can go further back in your philosophy and blame Marx on Kant, and thanks to a lot of old time philosophical entanglements, that puts conservatism's claims under the gun as well. That does in fact include Chesterton in addition to the veneration of tradition and religion as Kant's basically the big guy for justifying using intangible ideas over raw empiricism which conservatism really relies upon philosophically.
All this to say that I think we should really start questioning how fair it is to call progressivism a "logical" conclusion. I think too many people have accepted a fundamentally communist argument at face value and not bothered to think if someone was trying to hide something in the process. I think the something is that communists, and progressives by derivative, have oversold what liberalism is supposed to do in the first place and thus deliberately propped up this good looking strawman among a field of obvious strawmen in the hopes we'd slay all the easy targets and go home. Is liberalism even supposed to tell you what culture is a good idea, or is it just supposed to set up a fair field of discussion for the topic? The commies say the former if we ask directly, but that doesn't really square with a Hobbes-tempered Locke who'd have to lean far more to the latter when factoring in human nature.
Thus I sense treachery afoot before either of us get on our podiums. We call it liberalism, but I don't think we've been talking about it fundamentally. And that's concerning.
