Tuesday Open Comments

The state of American journalism and commentary is reflected in the sad fact much of the best insights into our culture and society are from foreigners or those not born here.  Meet Steve McCann, an orphan of WWII in Europe adopted off the streets there by a family in the southern United States. He is currently the CEO of an international company based in the U.S. and the UK.

I also introduce you to Neema Parvini, a Shakespearean scholar and political and philosophical researcher at the University of Surrey in England.

Steve McCann at the American Thinker:  

The Permanent Adolescence of the American Left

Donald Trump’s remarkable and unpredicted victory in 2016 unleashed perhaps the pinnacle of all unintended consequences.  By their ongoing nonsensical reaction to the Trump victory, the American left has exposed and validated their irrationality, obliviousness, and immaturity.  As an immigrant to the United States, and thus a sideline spectator of the panorama that is American society, and someone who has spent most of his adult life in the field of international finance, I have been fascinated by the characteristics of the American left as compared to its counterparts in the rest of the world – and why the vast majority of Americans, who are essentially conservative or moderate, not only tolerate, but acquiesce to the left’s temper tantrums and manipulation of the culture.

On the surface, there may appear to be similarities to the left in other nations; however, when it comes to the motivation and personality quirks, it is only the left in Britain that bears any resemblance to the American left.  In fact, the American version consistently denigrates “old white guys” as the scourge of humanity while ostensibly promoting the philosophy of “old white guys” such as Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx.  In reality, American leftism is a unique amalgamation of socialism, Darwinism, and oligarchism requiring an army of foot soldiers who dwell in a state of permanent adolescence.

Neema Parvini at Quillette:

The Prison-House of Political Language

Let us look at some facts. Of America’s Top 100 newspapers, only two endorsed Trump in 2016. Since January 2017, Trump has not polled higher than 50% with any of the major polling outlets. Major award ceremonies now seem dedicated to venting celebrity hate with the President as Emmanuel Goldstein. At the same time academics (who, remember, tend to be Democrats rather than Republicans at ratios as high as 132 to 1 at the 66 most elite universities) found that in his first 100 days, Trump was covered by the major news networks three times more than any other President, without a single instance in which the coverage was more positive than negative. I’ll admit this does all look somewhat Orwellian, but the “Ministry of Truth” does not seem to be working for President Trump.

George Orwell once said that the “English intelligentsia…can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism…So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” Having experienced the reality of totalitarianism first-hand, Orwell knew all too well the ways in which people far removed from it employ “soothing phrases” to disguise more sinister ends. Of course, he would later coin the term “Newspeak” in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). This was the totalitarian language created to meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism under Big Brother.

Read them both.

RTWDT x 2