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Thursday, October 10, 2019

Liberals and Leftists (Pt. I)

In a column at PJ Media Dennis Prager makes the following claim:
A rule of life is that everything the left touches it ruins: art, music, Christianity, Judaism, race relations, male-female relations, universities, high schools, elementary schools, late-night comedy, sports, liberty, journalism, the Boy Scouts, national economies, language and everything else it influences.

The left, not liberalism. (I have written a column and done a PragerU video on the differences between liberalism and leftism.)

To this list, we can now add childhood and children.
To see why Prager claims that the left is ruining childhood and children read his column at the link. To see how he differentiates between liberalism and the modern left (or progressivism) watch the following video:
One reason that people (sometimes including myself) conflate liberalism and leftism is that they both favor greater government control over the economy and individual lives, they both favor a welfare state, and they generally agree on most social issues.

Nevertheless, Prager's six differences are helpful. Unfortunately, there seem to be far fewer liberals today than there were a generation ago and a lot more leftists. The Democratic party was once the political home of liberalism in America, but today it has been largely taken over by leftists.

Almost all of the Democratic candidates running for their party's nomination for the presidential campaign of 2020 are leftists, and so are many of the party's leaders in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The same is true of much of the media, especially CNN and MSNBC.

Whether the progressives will be successful in pulling enough voters to the left thirteen months from now is uncertain, but if you agree with Prager's first paragraph above, it certainly matters.