Hatefulness and progressivism

The golden age of progressivism was the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt (R) from 1901-1909 and Franklin Roosevelt (D) from 1932-1945.

But now that proper role of government in regulating the excess of the industrial revolution and the “Robber Baron” mentality of the times and then the 1929 depression has descended into the demagogic, narcissistic hatefulness driving progressivism today.

Our schools, universities and some businesses have embraced an ideology that divides people by identity and punishes anyone who doesn’t adhere to that orthodoxy. What has developed is an intolerance of people who have another point of view.

This dogma goes by many names, including wokeness, social justice and critical race theory. What is happening today in schools and campuses, where our future leaders are developed, where the young are naïve and easily manipulated, students are often pampered, insulated, and infantilized. The human brain does not mature until our mid-20s or even 30s in some.

We see the results in anti-white and anti-Semitic racism in news reports, street demonstrations and in some of our local letters from people who view themselves as enlightened. When such attitudes move from the shameful fringe into the public square it is of great concern — perhaps society and culture itself is breaking down.

Socialism/Marxism is proposed as a solution to societal issues but actual experience proves it does not work. A planned economy demands a planned social order and human individuality prevents that. Distribution of prosperity is useless if there is no prosperity to distribute.

A recent asinine and desperate local letter extolling socialism blithely ignores the armed guards of Eastern Europe, Stalin’s gulags in the USSR, famine in the Ukraine (1932-3), massacres in Hungary (1956) and Tiananmen Square (1989) and the exodus today in Venezuela and Cuba among many other tragedies of socialism/Marxism.

John Manning

Palmdale