UNDERSTANDING AMERICA'S COLD WAR # 1 OF 2

UNDERSTANDING AMERICA'S COLD CIVIL WAR # 1 OF 2 

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - BLOGGER. CINOPS BE GONE - MON. FEB. 3, 2020

A PUBLICATION OF HILLSDALE COLLEGE, OCT. 2018, V. 47, NO. 10 - America's Cold Civil War, by Charles R. Kesler, Editor, Claremont Review of Books - Selected Excerpts.

    " As we saw in Bernie Sanders' campaign, the youngest generation of liberals is embracing socialism openly - something that would have been unheard of during the Cold War. At the same time, identity politics is on the ascendant, with its quasi-Nietzschean faith in race, sex, and power as the keys to being and meaning. In the # MeToo movement, for example - as we saw recently in Justice Kavanaugh's confirmation battle the battle - the credo is, "Believe the woman."

    In other words, truth will emerge not from an adversarial process weighing the evidence and testimony before the bar of reason, but by yielding to the will of the more politically correct. "Her truth" is stronger than any objective or disinterested truth...

    Underlying  our cold civil war is the fact that America is torn increasingly between two rival constitutions, two cultures, two ways of life... Normal politics place within a political and constitutional order and concerns means, not ends.... By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for what ends or principles ... I fear America may be leaving the world of normal politics and entering the dangerous world of regime politics - a politics in which our political loyalties diverge more and more, as they did in the 1850's, between two contrary visions of the country.

    One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788.... The other vision is based on what Progressives and liberals, for 100 years now, have called "the living Constitution." This implies that the original Constitution is dead - or at least on life support  - ... in order to remain relevant...the Original Constitution must be infused with new meaning and new ends ....

    As a doctrine the living Constitution originated in America's new departments of political and social science in the late nineteenth century - but it was soon at the very forefront of Progressive politics....

The resulting Constitution - let us call it "the liberal Constitution" - is not a constitution of natural rights or individual rights, but of historical or evolutionary right. Wilson called the spirit of the old Constitution Newtonian, after Isaac Newton, and that of the new Constitution Darwinian, after Charles Darwin. By Darwinian, Wilson meant that instead of being different to amend, the liberal Constitution would be easily amenable to experimentation and adjustment. ...

    But during the sixties, the so-called New Left abandoned evolution for revolution, and partly in reaction to that, the defenders of the old Constitution began not merely to fight back, but to call for a return to America's first principles. ...

    

    The conservative campaign against the inevitable victory of the living Constitution gained steam as a campaign against the gradual sudden disappearance of limited government and of republican virtue in our political life.  And when it became clear, by the late 1970s and 1980s, that the conservatives weren't going away, the cold civil war was on....

George H. Kubeck. 

P.S. What comes to your mind when you think of Biden,[ Pelosi], Kerry, Cumuo, Newsom and many other nominal  Catholics within the Democratic Party? From Dave Carlin's Facebook, "I read about great divisions inside the Democratic Party. Yet they are all united on the anti-Christian basics: abortion, homosexuality, transgender-ism, and teaching filth to little kids in public schools."