Western liberalism is being replaced by pure power politics

Western liberalism is being replaced by pure power politics. By Jeff Goldstein.

These New York charges being levied at Trump, the latest of which he barely even defended himself against, as his main attorney is focused on the ludicrous and politically-motivated indictments brought by Alvin Bragg, are at once picayune and pitiful, while simultaneously far more important than we’ve allowed thus far.

That is, their relative pettiness, combined with the verve with which they are being criminally or civilly pursued, mark a frightening shift in the political space wherein unspoken rules of comity that long prevented a splintering of our two party system into diametric ideological opposition — as opposed to a system in which friendly adversaries situated within Enlightenment liberalism squabbled over policy differences, each side trying to persuade the other — have been disregarded, replaced by pure power politics.

The left party did a switcheroo:

It’s been clear for some time that the Democratic Party, having embraced the “progressivism” of Barack Obama and his acolytes, is not the Democratic Party that existed before his two terms in office. And that’s because Obama was and is a leftist first, and a Democrat only nominally — a Marxist through and through …

Gender studies; Queer theory; Critical Race Theory; Indigenous Studies; Whiteness Studies; Fat Studies; Disabled Studies; Latin Studies, and so on, have all become active in the political — not merely theoretical or academic — arena.

This takeover of the Democratic Party has been a carefully choreographed hijacking. Keeping the name of one of the two major political parties allowed the left to infiltrate and remake the Party from within, while maintaining the support of rank-and-file Democrats — most of whom were largely oblivious to the changes, and who voted for Democrats almost by rote. That is, until Trump, whose America First project won over a number of erstwhile Democratic voters who found the ideological transformation of their Party, which they could sense by the end of the Obama Administration, was both actual and troublesome.

The latest outrage illustrates the changes:

All of this finds its metaphorical manifestation, I’d argue, in the E Jean Carroll case: there is simply no way to defend yourself against a rape charge nearly 30-years after the alleged incident took place — particularly when, as in this case, the accuser admits in her deposition that she didn’t say no, that she didn’t scream, and that she didn’t report the incident to police. Hell, she doesn’t even know with any specificity when the alleged incident happened!

And yet a New York City jury, which was always going to be politically hostile to Trump, found the former President liable in the case.

This use of the legal system as punishment — lawfare — goes beyond mere political vindictiveness. This is, in fact, common practice post-Trump. It is the normalizing of political prosecution by partisan actors using the legal system as cover in a way that appeals to American sensibilities, especially the aesthetic, “rule of law,” which we’re conditioned to believe, in a neutral sense, we still live under. But we don’t.

These aren’t real trials. They’re simulacra. We’ve become a Potemkin democracy. Nothing is as it seems. All is power. And power is all. …

The new way is the opposite to the old way:

Leftism is a response, in fact, to what it sees as the inevitable failures of the western liberal project. It rejects universalism, individuality, rationalism, merit, objectivity, science, and the idea of neutrality itself — all of which it sees as mere idealized tropes created through discourse used to protect and maintain the white supremacist patriarchal hierarchy from which those ideas emerged.

The left believes knowledge is positional and experiential — subjective — and that those who’ve been marginalized have a claim to special knowledge that those who don’t recognize the overarching structures of power controlling them can’t similarly see. Leftism, by its own admission, then, is illiberal; it is totalizing; it is necessarily authoritarian …

In short, it has all the hallmarks of both a fundamentalist religion and a cult. …

This is not the country you were born into. In fact, it is rapidly becoming its direct inverse. …

We’ve seen this tactic repeat itself over and over again, rendering itself into a recognizable pattern: January 6 defendants are held without bail while BLM rioters are set free and never charged; Trump is the target of persistent lawfare, while our Intel Agencies and news media join forces to protect Hunter Biden from scrutiny before an election; certain mass shooters have biographical details revealed by law enforcement and media almost instantly while others receive the protection of those same institutions; “misinformation” and “disinformation” charges somehow always protect government narratives; and some whistleblowers are cheered on as heroes while others are characterized as seditious. The long march, it’s fair to say, has been wildly successful.

I preferred the old USA. Read it all.