Marc J. Dunkelman: How Progressives Broke the Governement

Seems like thinly-veiled excuse-making to me...

   I mean, I agree that progressivism seems to advance incompatible positions: big gubmint, anti-freedom with respect to some issues, nearly anarchic with respect to others. E.g.: freedom to own guns: bad; freedom to have abortions: unlimited! Government must regulate everything Americans do--but mustn't do anything to stop non-Americans from pouring over the border...

   But, then, conservatives embrace nearly equal and opposite inconsistencies.

   But there is no way I'm buying the claim that the main failure of progressivism is being too Jeffersonian.

   Is anybody really going to buy that?

   Basically, progressives have decided that anything having to do with sex--especially nonstandard sex--must be free, free, free! Even to such a point that not-quite-born-yet babies have no moral standing. Even to such a point that they incoherently decided that people get to--magically, counterfactually--choose their own sex! Just declare it! Saying so makes it so!

  As for any other freedoms: fuck you. Do as you're told, comrade...

  I'm ok with civil libertarianism--that is, a libertarianism that excludes nonsense like open borders. I'd rather err on the side of protecting individual choice about how to live our lives--including weird sex and most abortions...with some constraints on the latter. But I'm not buying the bizarre mixture of totalitarianism and freedom from facts that is the contemporary American left.