Liberate. To free one’s self from an existing order. To loosen a binding of persons, places, ideas and institutions. To bring down an order of things.
Conserve. To keep what one has and minimize loss. To maintain. To preserve the order of things. Keeping and extending the existing structure of what’s been built. Keeping the order of things.
We have our political language wrong - or it has just worn out. To be a Conservative in America today is now the inverse of what it used to be. Conservatives no longer have an order to conserve but instead only a remnant of memories of what they thought still existed.
Liberals - or Progressives if you prefer - are no longer liberating or trying to change the the existing order. They are the order.
This is a great inversion. The labels just haven’t caught up yet. The Left is the new Right, and the Right is the new Left. What’s been to date known as Conservative is now radical. It is not the Establishment. It is in fact on the outside looking in, still trying to figure out what happened.
The New Right - that is the Established now Old Left, the Liberals, the Progressives as they are still being called - are recently getting relabeled as the illiberals, which seems appropriate. The New Left - those trying to change the existing order of things - are being called by the New Right the Deplorables, Radical Far Right, Conspiracy Theorists, Nationalists, Trump-lovers, etc. etc. The Old Right, that doesn’t know they’ve been usurped, are still trying to figure out who they are.
Let’s define the New Right. What are they far? Actually they are not for anything as so much as they are against the former things. That would be Individual Liberty, Gun ownership, Family, Our previously defined American history, America itself, God, Christianity, Whites, Women, Men, (possibly children, or at least the required responsibility to care for or even birth children -that abortion is an assumed right), and most of all Male Whites, and any formerly established assumed values of Good.
I think things may have peaked with the declarations of victory of the Civil Rights Act. Which was actually a progression of the old value of the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness or that “All men are created equal”. Another peaking may have been when Obama was elected. The first Black President. What a victory! Pretty much everybody was happy to see that. Whew! We can put this whole ugly past of prejudices behind us. We all now finally can feel racism is dead.
Wrong!
Martin Luther King Jr. stated something like we should all be judged by the weight of our character instead of the color of our skin. So this is when the Left went to far. They changed that into an inversion. Luther was wrong. Now we must do the opposite and judge by the color of the skin. We need to segregate skin colors and instead of giving equal liberty and justice for all we have to now give preferential treatment. And we can do that by convincing all White People how they’ve had preferential treatment all this time and now it’s time for all the others to be treated preferentially. We’ll shame whites with “White Privilege”. We can do the same for men in general too. Let’s give preferential treatment in all ways to women in general. They deserve it after millenniums of oppression by the the Male Hierarchy.
You know the story.
A good litmus test is the former “Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America”. Remember? One nation under God with Liberty and Justice for all?
Blasphemy to the new Order of Things. That once sacred vow is declared anathema today.
In Jungian terms ala Jordan Peterson, the New Establishment has now become the Devouring Mother and the Tyrannical Father. They are the Order that has gotten old and must now face new chaos from the outside - which happens to be the remnants of the former order raising up from the dead.
The Left is now the Order destined to be replaced. It cannot last. It is the Tyrannical King at the end of its reign. So be it. Death to the king that health may be returned to this now dying kingdom .
