Thursday, March 27, 2008

Great post of the day

Via Sideshow, I found this great post by Lance Mannion on liberals and reality:
...one of Liberalism's virtues is that it is pragmatic, not ideological or even idealistic. Liberalism is and has been about recognizing and adapting to, and when called for making corrections to, reality, that is to the world as it actually is and to people as they actually are. Most of Liberalism's successes over time have required making people see what is really going on, as opposed to what they wish was going on or what they are being told by the ruling class is going on. Liberalism is first and foremost an insistence on freeing people from their own deluded and demented thinking. It is a demand that people give up their prejudices and their vain and self-centered illusions and deal with the facts of life.
One of the facts of life is that times change. Conservativism is based on the belief that this is always a bad thing and must be resisted when it can't be ignored. In other words, conservativism is a lot of wishful thinking.
But the American Right is not conservative. It is reactionary. It doesn't want to deny that times change. It wants to turn back time. Conservativism is a mild delusion. Reaction is an outright madness . . . I don't know exactly why the News Media Elites have decided to treat this madness as a legitimate point of view, but they have, and since they have they have put themselves in the bind of sounding "liberal" every time an actual fact escapes their lips.
Read it all.

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