Daniel Greenfield article: The Progressive-Traditionalist War
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The Progressive-Traditionalist War
Posted: 18 Jun 2012 09:34 PM PDT
The main weapon that progressives wield against traditionalists is their ability to break down the values that make up their worldview by challenging norms of behavior and thought, with the goal of using cultural friction to slowly replace traditional values and mores with their own.
This is a weapon that progressives have explicitly disavowed using against Islam. In Europe there are some hesitant attempts at promoting integration, but it's a fitful self-doubting effort that consists of the authorities telling everyone who listens that integration is moving along smoothly, while the No-Go Zones grow, black ghosts haunt the alleyways of major cities and the mosques go on crying Jihad from minaret loudspeakers rising above European capitals. There is the occasional burqa ban, a nervous ban placed on the most extreme of the extreme clerics, an occasional investigation of a school that teaches that infidels are animals to be killed, and a cautious warning from some putatively conservative politician to the Muslim community that things have to change. But none of them adds up to anything. The left, which excels at attacking traditional values, has signed a pact with Islam. Not only does it refuse to undermine its religion and
traditional values, the way that it undermines those of everyone else, but it actively promotes Islamic values and traditions as morally superior to those of its own society. The reason for this is simple strategy. The progressives of the left in each society are at war with their own traditionalists. American liberals are at war with American conservatives. European liberals are at war with European conservatives. Liberal Christians are at war with Conservative Christians and Progressive Jews are at war with Traditional Jews. This war isn't always as overt as it was in the Soviet Union, or as it is in Cuba or Sweden. It's a quiet war marked by "artistic statements", by the school curriculum and the late-night newscast, by laws that transform public spaces into government spaces and private spaces into public spaces, and put the whole thing under government regulation whose overriding purpose is behavior modification. Despite their many victories,
the progressives have numerous disadvantages in this war. They are a minority dependent on front groups and divide-and-conquer politics. Rarely are they able to openly state their agendas and beliefs, because, if they did, they would be stoned on the spot. Instead, they have to worm their way in, presenting a false front of moderation, and slowly move their agenda through its outer stages to its inner core. The left is up against common sense, which is just shorthand for the traditional way of thinking. And traditions exist because they are natural; right or wrong, they are organic, embedded in human nature and the way that people live their lives and draw their conclusions. Its Utopian schemes put it up against the human animal, so that the left has to ride the body politic like a bronco buster fighting to stay on a mutinous steed. Much of its rank and file doesn't know this, but its leaders and planners are well aware of how precarious their position
is. But there is also a more practical angle. Demographics. The progressives tend to have a lower birth rate than traditionalists. If values were transmitted on a generational basis, by now they would be deader than Disco. To compensate for their demographic disadvantage, the left reproduces by insinuating itself into the educational system. The Cuckoo's reproductive strategy is to plant its eggs in the nests of other birds to be raised by those birds, but the reproductive strategy of progressives is to raise someone else's young as a member of their species, while getting paid for it by the taxpayers. This demographic disadvantage makes it vital for progressives to attack tradition, because it is also the only way that they can reproduce. Their reproductive strategy is entirely dependent on disrupting the ability of fertile groups to pass on their values to their offspring. There are parallels in biology to this behavior. A number of species compete
for territory by interfering with the reproduction of another species. The fertility limitations of liberals make it an ideological imperative to disrupt the reproduction of more traditional species. The progressive attack on a society's values, when successful, leads to a national disintegration and a splintering into an apathetic middle and a traditionalist right. Fertility rates fall across the board, but are still fairly high in traditionalist circles. The left, facing a demographic threat, redoubles its attack on the values of the traditionalists. They are invariably painted as savage, backward, violent and a threat to society. They are depicted as abusing their children, all the better for the progressives to take away their children or closely monitor their educational practices. Progressives may succeed in converting some traditionalist children into their own kind, but traditionalists are, especially after a generation or two of the left's
cultural imperialism, much more hardened to this sort of campaign than their ancestors were. They are purposefully intolerant, unwilling to listen and contemptuous of the greater culture around them. They have also learned that if they don't insulate their children, that they will almost certainly lose them. Human beings adapt. Sheep may always go on being eaten by wolves, but humans who are preyed upon learn defensive strategies. And offensive strategies too. As all good leftists know, revolutions produce their own reaction. A polarized society split between progressives and traditionalists is a conflict that the left cannot win without dealing with the demographic angle. And there is no way to deal with it, without either a One Child program or importing an even higher-reproducing population that is allied with the progressives.
High-reproducing groups tend to be traditional, so that the only way for the left to outmaneuver the traditionalist reaction it helped create, is by importing other traditionalists. Islam isn't the only group on this list, but it is the leading group, especially in Europe. Its asset is that it has a high birth rate and it votes left-of-center. It may be innately traditionalist, but that doesn't matter to the Eurocrats because they don't care what Muslims do in their own communities and they don't think that it will apply to them. The United States armed the Mujahadeen against the Soviet Union. European progressives use Muslim demographics against European traditionalists. And their American counterparts, who are less dependent on Pakistanis and Algerians to pad out their voting rolls, are beginning to get with the program. What would be the quickest way to get a border fence between the United States and Mexico? If in the next election, 70 percent of
Mexicans in America voted for the Republican Party, there would be a 100-foot-high concrete fence across the border, topped with poison-spiked barbed wire and at the foot of it, rabid dobermans prowling around. And it would be up, with the acclaim of the media, no matter who was in the White House. Want to end Muslim immigration to the UK? Just get a stunning majority to cast their ballot for the Tories, while chanting that they support the monarchy, want lower taxes, drastic cuts to everything and an end to all global warming regs. And in a day The Guardian would be running columns denouncing Islam. And the same is true across Europe and around the world. Including Israel, where the left-wing parties are hopelessly dependent on Arab votes-- often on a pay-per-vote basis. Progressive parties depend on Muslim votes. Their immigration policies selectively import groups that they have a high confidence rate of voting for them. Higher-reproducing alien
traditionalist populations can demographically compete with or even out-reproduce native traditionalists, which helps keep the progressives in power and even seduces them with a vision of a country where they will always be in power for all time. Slave owners in the Caribbean would release snakes to kill escaping slaves. But snakes have a mind of their own, and they don't just bite the people they are expected to bite. Soon they had taken over the island, and the plantation owners were dying of snake-bites. So they imported mongooses to kill the snakes. Then, when the mongooses proliferated and became a pest, they had to import more snakes to kill them. The Red-Green alliance is a pact between low-fertility leftist reds and high-fertility Muslim greens. But what happens when there are so many greens that they don't need the reds anymore? What happens when they actively begin to prey on the reds, instead of only casually, as they do now? The
progressives tried to solve their demographic problem by making a pact with traditionalists from outside their culture, region and religion. They didn't mind that they were filling their cities with a feral population because their own reproduction strategy didn't depend on numerical survival, but on ideological control over the surviving population. Losing a few hundred or thousand of the natives a year to snakebites would make the rest more compliant. Chaos would strengthen the authorities and make their divide-and-conquer politics easier to implement. A feral population requires a police state and stirs up constant conflict that can be manipulated and exploited in a hundred different ways. But what happens when the snakes take over the island? To stave off domestic traditionalists, the left relied on an alliance with traditionalists with higher birth rates and beliefs that were much less compatible with the progressive way of life. The imported
population was much less susceptible to conversion, much more violent and bound to eventually take over. And they were doing it all with the tireless aid and patronage of the progressives who had dealt with their escaped slave problem by filling Europe and America with snakes. What kind of people, you might ask, do things like this? The kind who run up trillions in debt and insist that they are spending their way out of a recession. The kind who starve the peasantry and then force the survivors into collective farms, where they barely have enough food to get by... and expect a bountiful harvest. The kind who use unions to show off their own power, stage strikes for political influence, drive the companies overseas, then unionize government workers, demand unsustainable benefits, and watch the economy implode.
The kind who shoot or imprison every independent thinker and then wonder why their society is stagnant and entirely dependent on technological and cultural leftovers from free societies. The kind who outlaw firearms and self-defense, dismantle law enforcement, celebrate riots and then spend millions analyzing why the cities are decaying. The kind who build windmills where there is no wind, who destroy rights to protect rights, who fight wars in the name of peace, who build international communities that are somehow supposed to possess more decency and law than its individual constituent members, and who drill holes in boats because they are more environmentally sound that way. Evil destroys itself because it carries the seeds of its own destruction. It is not just destructive, it is also self-destructive. Evil is cunning, but it is also stupid. It is ruthless, but it is also cowardly. It loves plans, but it cannot distinguish its own fantasies from
actual events. Like an unstable element, it is forever at war with the forces threatening to tear it apart, until they eventually do, but not until the damage has spread. Evil cannot survive naturally, only unnaturally. It destroys itself, so that it cannot naturally reproduce, but instead it has to infect others. It can only survive by spreading the disease of its own instability. And it will do anything to survive, even as its attempts at survival not only doom it, but everyone around it as well. Progressives tried to balance out the instability they created by importing alien traditionalists to battle their traditionalists. But the demographic growth of traditionalists, alien and native, leads us to two kinds of societies. The kind run by native traditionalists and the kind run by alien traditionalists. And which one it will be almost entirely depends on how much power the progressives have had and for how long. The longer the progressives have
been in power, the likelier the country is to fall to alien traditionalists, who will have no mercy on them.
