This column is a good example of why I love Jonah Goldberg's writing -- he has a broad expanse of knowledge, AND he is able to apply it to the world at hand.
I won't do a bunch of quotes, just one, which is actually a quote from Jonah's book, "Liberal Fascism" about Herbert Croly, one of the demigods of early 20th century liberalism:
Croly was a quiet man who’d grown up with noisy parents. His mother was one of America’s first female syndicated columnists and a dedicated “feminist.” His father was a successful journalist and editor whose friends dubbed him “The Great Suggester.” Their home was something of a “European island in New York,” according to one historian. The most interesting thing about the senior Croly — if by “interesting” you mean really loopy — was his obsession with Auguste Comte, a semimystical French philosopher whose biggest claim to fame was his coinage of the word “sociology.” Comte argued that humanity progressed in three stages and that in the final stage mankind would throw off Christianity and replace it with a new “religion of humanity,” which married religious fervor to science and reason — even to the extent of making “saints” out of such figures as Shakespeare, Dante, and Frederick the Great. Comte believed that the age of mass industrialization and technocracy would pluck the human mind from the metaphysical realm for good, ushering in an age where pragmatic managers would improve the plight of all based upon man-made morality. He anointed himself the high priest of this atheistic, secular faith, which he called positivism. The elder Croly made his Greenwich Village home into a positivist temple where he held religious ceremonies for select guests, whom he would try to convert. In 1869 young Herbert became the first and probably last American to be christened in Comte’s religion.As I have mentioned ad nauseum, "liberalism" and "progressivism" are RELIGIONS and their faith is in experts, science and the perfectability of the human.
It's a worthy read!
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