The Man

Those on the left agitating to tear down society with delusions of sticking it to “the man” have resorted to the very behaviors that they accuse “the man” of perpetrating on society and in the process have replaced “the man” by becoming “the man” themselves.

Those Americans born in the 1920s suffered through the hardships of the Great Depression in the 1930s and fought World War II in the 1940s defending freedom and democracy to become the Greatest Generation. Having suffered through poverty and the horrors of war, this Greatest Generation sought to shield their children from the deprivations they had experienced by providing them with everything they could possibly want. In one sense, members of that Greatest Generation were also seeking to vicariously relive their childhoods through their own children. However, their children had no idea of the psychology which lay behind the generosity they experienced from their parents. All they knew was that they were receiving everything they ever desired within the ability of their parents to provide these material things. These children, spoiled by their parents to shield them from the horrors of the world so they could recapture their own lost childhoods through them, became the Baby Boomer generation marked by petulance and entitlement displayed throughout their lives.

When the Baby Boomers came of age in the 1960s, they began to rebel against the values of their parents unable to understand why their parents had spoiled them so. Some descended into an attitude of entitlement and expectation that their parents would rescue them from whatever trouble they managed to find. Some rejected the material excess which their parents lavished upon them unable to comprehend why they should be the recipients of such a bounty. Most saw their upbringing in the 1950s as controlling and repressive unable to understand that their parents were trying to protect them from the horrors they had experienced as children, instead perceiving it as merely the expression of control and repression to keep them in line and under the thumbs of their parents.

The conservatism of the postwar years was predicated on protecting successive generations from having to experience the deprivations of poverty manifested during the Great Depression and the horrors of world war experienced by the Greatest Generation. Theirs was a childhood of want and hard work followed by discovery of horrible capabilities they could not imagine existed within themselves as they emerged into young adulthood thrust into war. In seeking to make up for this through their excessive pampering of their children, they substituted material things for the love their children craved most of all from them. After the war, the Greatest Generation was busy earning the money to provide the material things for their children that they never had as children and forgot that they were happiest as children when they experienced the love of their parents. The Baby Boomers grew up with material wealth while lacking the love they craved from their parents.

Adrift in a sea of emotions, the Baby Boomers rejected the values of their parents to throw off the training provided through societal institutions which they saw as repression designed to keep them from experiencing life and discovering their inner selves. The Boomers never realized that this societal training was designed to keep them from discovering the darkness and evil of the world which their parents had confronted during the Great Depression and WWII. Having spent their time working hard to acquire the wealth necessary to provide material things to their children, the Greatest Generation lacked the emotional connection with their Baby Boomer children which would allow them to explain why they did what they did. The attempts of the Greatest Generation to shield their children from the evils of the world failed as the Baby Boomers busy rejecting the values of their parents descended into drug use and libertine behavior which conditioned them to fail at forming lasting emotional bonds with others as they experienced the pain of multiple divorces at the expense of their Gen X children.

Politically, the Baby Boomers sought to replace the classical liberalism of the Democrat Party with a progressivism that pushed the boundaries of mainstream America. The classical liberalism which once grounded the Democrat Party was espoused by men such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and sought to redress legitimate societal grievances such as Civil Rights and protections of those without power from those with power. These classical liberals included men who fought for America in WWII, loved their country and sought its best interests at all times, and who were not afraid to call out their Democrat colleagues when they were wrong. To the progressive Baby Boomers, these classical liberal Democrats were in league with conservative Republicans in perpetrating the patriarchal system keeping them repressed and had to therefore be driven from the party. With the riots of the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago, these progressives began the purge of conservative Democrats from the party by highlighting party divisions through their riots outside the convention. The McGovern-Fraser Commission rewrote party convention rules which allowed progressives to pour into the convention process and continue their purge of conservative Democrats in 1972.

Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals as an instruction manual describing for the progressive left how to use the rules of system against the system to conduct effective protests against the system. Alinsky dedicated the book to Satan as the original radical rebelling against the establishment. The progressives taking over the Democrat Party in ’68 and ’72 were dedicated to the overthrow of the establishment which they viewed as being responsible for the trauma they perceived existed in their childhoods. This establishment consisted of their parents from the Greatest Generation who sought to protect their Baby Boomer children from the deprivations they had experienced as children. The Generation Gap consisted of the inability of establishment parents to communicate with their self-indulgent Baby Boomer children because they had spent their time acquiring the wealth that made it possible for them to spoil their indulgent children instead of forming the emotional bonds that would have made communication possible with their children.

The radical progressives viewed the establishment as controlling and repressive for the sake of keeping the radicals from discovering their true selves while incapable of seeing that the establishment was actually dedicated to preserving the innocence of their children who developed an entitlement mentality and became self-indulgent while simultaneously rejecting the materialism heaped upon them by their parents. Ironically, the radicals rejected the materialism of their parents but became obsessed with their own materialism later in life.

Having rejected the values of their establishment parents, the radicals also rejected Christianity in favor of secular humanism and its mantra that the ends justify the means. By resorting to secular humanism, the radical progressive left has come to accept all manner of evil as necessary to accomplish their goal of overthrowing the establishment. Their dedication to the truth has become the propagation of fake news to smear those who resist their agenda. Their dedication to peaceful protest and respect for all viewpoints has become violent suppression of conservatives. Their dedication to free speech has become suppression of thought through political correctness. In their efforts to overthrow the establishment and the wrongs they perceive the establishment to be guilty of perpetrating, the radical progressive left has far exceeded anything they have attributed to the establishment much as the French Revolution descended into Robespierre’s Reign of Terror which eventually claimed Robespierre himself.

In their determination to overthrow the establishment which they so loathe, the radical progressives have managed to secure one political office after another while ensconcing their acolytes deep within the recesses of the government bureaucracy until they themselves have become the establishment they reject so thoroughly. Of course, those dedicated with singular focus on the accomplishment of a goal with such fanaticism are blinded to the realization that they accomplish this goal at some point and become the very thing which they sought to replace. Such is the case with the radical progressive left which manages to convince its members that the elusive establishment is still out there waiting to be outed and removed from power oblivious of the fact that it is the radical progressives who are now the establishment waging a reign of terror against perceived enemies who no longer exist.

The members of the Greatest Generation are now in their 80s and 90s having long ago passed the reins of government and society into the hands of their successors. Those the radical left now perceive to be of the establishment are members of their own generation who eventually realized the wisdom of conservative thought in protecting the institutions obligated to developing young people into responsible American citizens. That which the radical progressives consider to be the establishment has always consisted of those dedicated to conservatism and the protection of the ideas espoused by the Founding Fathers memorialized in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It is their devotion to secular humanism and the lie that discovery of their true selves lies with the overthrow of the establishment which has blinded the radical progressive left to this reality.

In reality, the radical progressive left has become the establishment, a.k.a. the man, and their comical attempts to stick it to the man result in farcical episodes of them sticking it to themselves. Each successive wave of the radical progressive left seeks to outdo the previous wave in its attempt to move further to the left resulting in ever more absurd and unworkable ideas. The gay rights movement became the LGBT movement which is now at war with itself over transgenderism and the right of biological males to compete against women at an unfair disadvantage. Tennis champion and lesbian Martina Navratilova has been savaged by the LGBT movement to the point of being ostracized as a lesbian for daring to call out the absurdity of allowing biological males to compete against women in violation of the rules which separated their competition in the first place due to biological inequality.

The state of California serves as an excellent example of just how entrenched the radical progressive left has become and how disastrous their control has become. Democrats in California control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature with supermajorities in both chambers along with every other statewide elected office. The result of Democrat control has been the adoption of policies which have driven state taxes to the highest level in the country, excessive spending which has saddled the state with crippling debt, the highest population of homeless people in the country, and a net outmigration as citizens escape to other states no longer able to afford living the California dream.

Prior to the radical progressives gaining a foothold in American society from which to launch their war on the establishment, those in positions of power were dedicated to the protection of America ideas by keeping the radical progressives in check. For any system of government to function properly, there must exist some limits beyond which its citizens will not pass or be allowed to pass. The Founders recognized the natural rights of Americans and sought to preserve and protect them in the Constitution. They also recognized the need for Americans to exercise personal responsibility to preserve their natural rights. Just because one has the right to do something does not mean that it is the right thing to do, and those who fail to exercise personal responsibility force the adoption of laws which chip away at the liberty bequeathed to us all by the Founders.

Recognizing this, there must be limits as to how far one is allowed to push the boundaries before society says enough. The Judeo-Christian concept of marriage between a man and a woman was hijacked by the radical progressive left masquerading as the gay rights movement with demands that the legal protections enjoyed by married Americans be extended to same-sex unions and blessed as marriages. Instead of stopping this absurd violation on the grounds of biological and religious arguments, the radical progressives sprinkled throughout the government and society allowed it to continue resulting in marriage being removed from the church as a holy sacrament and redefined as nothing more than a bad contract filed at the courthouse for the administration of federal benefits to be defined by the state as it sees fit. Destruction of marriage is the toppling of the first domino leading to destruction of the family unit and its influence on the development of children as they mature into socially responsible adults.

By interfering with the family unit through the redefinition of marriage and other policies which encourage broken families, the radical progressive left has created a generation of narcissistic youth boiling with rage who lack the mechanisms to properly deal with this rage and resort to violent outbursts to release this rage. Having created this problem, the radical progressive left seeks to distract attention from their part in its creation while exploiting it with calls for gun control when what is most needed is attention on the problem itself instead of its symptoms. Despite the many controls already in place including background checks, licensing, red flag laws, and purchasing restrictions, these maladjusted youth still acquire firearms which they use to commit atrocities to release their rage while the focus is on the act instead of the underlying cause.

Conservatives have long been at a disadvantage when it comes to waging the cultural wars. Their use of logic pales in comparison to the emotional appeals promulgated by the left. A principled conservative argument for low taxes and deregulation as necessary for the creation of an economic climate which stimulates business growth leading to more jobs, increased prosperity, and a higher standard of living for all is no match for the emotional appeal of a homeless family accompanied by calls for action to help the needy that tug at the heartstrings and overshadow reason with the implication that the free enterprise system is unfair while ignoring the disruption government intervention into the marketplace has on distorting the economic situation.

While it may appear that the radical progressives are winning on all fronts with conservatism in retreat, the reality is that Americans are getting a good look at the absurdity into which the Democrat Party has devolved under the influence of the radical progressive left and its embrace of socialism. Those Democrats competing for the nomination work tirelessly to outdo one another in proposing one inanity after the next. Their overconfidence leads them at times to recklessly admit the truth such as Beto O’Rourke’s admission that if elected, he would absolutely have the government coming after guns in violation of the Second Amendment. Talk like that doesn’t go over well in rural America where guns are respected and gun ownership is prized. It is honesty such as that which has O’Rourke polling at 0%. Meanwhile, Bernie is promising free Medicare for all, Warren is promising debt forgiveness, and Biden is trying to avoid political gaffes as Democrats continue to live up to the expectations conservatives have defined them with.

President Trump will be running on a set of policy achievements and campaign promises fulfilled against an eventual Democrat nominee promising to raise taxes on working Americans to fund government handouts to illegal immigrants free to pour into the country across an open border to depress wages and take American jobs. Americans won’t have any trouble distinguishing which candidate represents continued prosperity and which candidate represents financial ruin.

In their quest to overthrow the establishment and stick it to the man, Democrats have become the establishment ruthlessly resorting to every tactic they perceive conservatives committing as the establishment. For the radical progressive Democrats, fake news slandering of the opposition and violence perpetrated against conservative Trump supporters is justified as the means necessary to accomplish their overthrow of the establishment, and they will continue to resort to even greater evils locked as they are in a war which they cannot win because they are ultimately at war with themselves as the establishment.