“Do not mistake Progressivism
for progress.
The former only pretends to the latter
in order to access the keys
to your nation’s treasury.”
~Ange
Ange will never forget the scars he feels Progressivism left in his heart.
He was born just before WWII, during the presidency of liberal icon FDR. Ange grew up sheltered from, but shocked by, the daily news of death and destruction wrought by FDR’s war in Europe and the Pacific. Before tv, people saw short weekly newsreels before feature films at local movie theaters, showing the “progress” of the war. London’s devastated buildings still burning. Bombs exploding, machine guns blasting away, P-51’s strafing and dive-bombing Nazi trains. To a little boy like Ange, war seemed even cooler than Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy and Lash Larue.
Then, Democrat President Truman lit up a couple of Big Ones over Japan. Nuclear bomb progress ended the war but ushered in the age of paranoia after a couple of American “progressives” stole the nuclear secrets and smuggled them into the USSR. Young Ange had no idea what kind of crazy world he’d been born into; all he knew was he and his little school mates suddenly had to duck-and-cover every time air raid sirens blasted in cities across America. Ange didn’t mind ducking under the desk with Pattie and Sheila, and covering themselves with a piece of canvas. No one told them it wouldn’t protect them from a bomb or its deadly radiation. But it was a diversion from boring math; and in the dark, girls got scared and hugged. Progressivism could be fun. Except for the nightmares. The threat of another holocaust, this time close to home, were etched into Ange and Pattie and Sheila’s tender minds. After that, nothing was ever the same.
Ange grew up in Newark, NJ, where neighborhoods were populated by the children and grandchildren of immigrants from virtually every European nation. They mixed pretty well probably because they were all white and shared certain values. It was nice, if you want to believe Ange. Until Progressive Democrats descended upon the city.
In the span of that one decade after WWII, the city declined. Ange didn’t understand why, because at that age he had no understanding of the nature of Progressivism. Like so many, he thought it meant progress. But he well understood that his city had turned somehow nastier than it had been before. Now children were warned not to go into certain areas of the city. Ange heard his grandparents talking about how “progressive” Democrats were elected to govern the city. And how the spigots of the city’s treasury began flowing to those who came to trade their votes for free benefits. But being a child, Ange didn’t think free stuff was so bad. Wasn’t that progress?
And so it went. Newark and many other big cities’ liberal Democratic era brought with it racial tension, racially based riots, the loss of industry, deteriorating infrastructure, the misery of slums, ghettos and growing unemployment. And the inevitable white flight.
Ange’s family home value dropped precipitously. Whites didn’t want to live there anymore. They finally sold the house to a tri-racial family. Ange lived with them for months, absorbing the dark, bleak side of Progressivism before the house his family was to move to became available. Before Ange’s family left, the entire tri-racial family was arrested in a daytime raid by the Newark Police Department. The charge: racketeering and certain other unspecified crimes. The episode was an eye-opening experience – and Ange’s first lesson in true Progressivism – taught to him not by the Sisters of Charity, but by progressive Democrats.
Ange’s good grades and attitude won him a scholarship to a fine Catholic boys prep school. At the time, there were no girls nor African-Americans in the student body. The former by design, the latter simply by circumstance. In fact, until Ange began working, he never had even the most casual acquaintance with an African-American of his own age. Not because he didn’t want to. He was as curious about other races as any other kid. He just never had personal contact with them, which, in a city like Newark was a remarkable thing.
Ange’s family moved to a neighboring town whose population at that time was virtually all white. Ange transferred to the local secular high school whose student body at that time was a mix of Christians and Jews. Soon enough, the same “progressives” who ran Newark were welcomed into this town’s governing body. Today that town is majority African-American and terribly run down. It is also terribly crime-ridden. Ange knows this because to this day one of his best boyhood friends lives there behind heavily padlocked doors. Perhaps, like Ange, you begin to see a pattern here.
Not long after, between Democratic Presidents JFK and Lyndon Johnson, America was ass-deep in out-and-out racial conflicts... and the Viet Nam “action.” It was a numbnuts proxy war. At the same time, Ange couldn’t help but notice that progressive presidents JFK and LBJ provided little in the way of progress for MLK and his non-violent fight for racial equality. Once again, spurred on by outside progressivist influence, cities across America erupted in racial violence.
It was the ‘60s and the cultural revolution. Endless Viet Nam war protests and marches, Woodstock, Dylan, John and Yoko, exotic drugs and “free sex” exploding into the culture. Ange’s America was turning away from the kind of progressivism which resulted in actual progress, and embracing a kind of progressivism which resulted in the embracing of an American flavor of Marxism which deliberately pitted one group against another.
Ange and his friends were drafted into the Army to serve in the Viet Nam “action.” The constant, protracted threat of being sucked into a pointless war drained the spirit of Ange and most other young men; and all these decades later many if not most still feel its after-effects. Some tried to escape with student deferments, some ran to Canada. Some claimed to be gay or crazy or handicapped or whatever they thought would earn them deferment. Others fought the authorities tooth and nail on campuses all across America. It took a conservative President Nixon to end this bad “police action.”
Ange married his teenage sweetheart. By the time their first son was born, they they were able to buy a very nice house in his wife’s home town. A decent job, a child or two, a new car, a neighborhood populated by young newly-weds like Ange and his wife... the quintessential American Dream. But over the years, Progressivism resulted in the town morphing into a “Little India,” where the growing immigrant population began demanding its own set of special laws, and brought strange customs which made the original townsfolk shake their heads in frustration. Like too many modern-era immigrants, Ange saw how they were welcomed to America, but in shocking displays of ingratitude showed America their middle fingers. Ange wondered what in hell was happening to the America he grew up in and loved.
He worked in New York City, in Manhattan’s midtown, for a couple of decades in a field closely related to show business. And like show biz, it was dominated by “progressive” thinking. Liberalism had already turned the Big Apple into a rotten apple dominated by tall buildings, bizarre cultures (as comedian Robert Klein used to say) “from other lands,” and deteriorating services and infrastructure. Over the years, the city itself and the growing progressive influence in Ange’s chosen field worsened to the point he claims he couldn’t stand it. That kind of progress, he said, was making him sick.
When he got a great job offer from the west coast, he decided the time had come. The firm he decided to join had been one of the supporters of California Governor Ronald Reagan. A sign that perhaps in this firm there might be less of the PC culture which was destroying any attempt at balance which was affecting corporate America.
So Ange went off to Los Angeles. What can you say? LA changed before his eyes. Progressivism became so dominant there that many people Ange knows have been leaving because they hate what Progressivism has wrought in LaLa Land.
As a traditional conservative American, he was way outnumbered in this environment. Eventually he lost his job because of it. He didn’t mind that so much, he says; he’s got New Jersey attitude. What really bothered him was that not a single one of his colleagues nor the hundreds of suppliers he gave work to did a thing to help him find another job. If anything, he claims he sensed the snub. They did not like East Coasters. They wanted somebody young. They didn’t care about experience. They didn’t want to pay much. One fellow actually told him he was leery of Ange’s strong sense of morality! Preference was given to minority folks with no regard to experience.
Ange was forced to sell his house in the coastal LA town he’d come to love. Progressive culture was so eager to help those it felt needed a lift that it forgot people like Ange who carried the water for so many decades. Despite all the rejection, Ange started his own business, nothing fantastic, but they’re getting by and he says he’s “Happy to not face that PC crap every day.” But you can tell he’s still hurting from the scar Progressivism left in his heart.
Today’s California is so dominated by intransigent Democratic leadership that current political theory revolves about secession or bisection. This is progressive thinking. This is Silicon Valley thinking. Hollywood thinking. The thinking of those Democrats who despite the overwhelming rejection of their progressive agenda by Middle America, will not moderate their ideas nor relinquish an ounce of power to common sense despite the blatant corruption Ange sees in State politics.
While Ange doesn’t think secession will happen in the near future, it could happen, someday. It will undoubtedly be a version of Mexifornia or Calico. Ange wonders if his family will no longer be American! Will they feel psychologically impelled to leave the Golden State in frustration because they are being led by ideologues who can barely tolerate conservatives much less consider or even listen to their point of view?
Anyone who knows Ange, his wife, their sons and their children, know none of them take unreasonable stands on social issues. They feel great sympathy for those who’ve been dealt worse hands than they have (and you can believe Ange when he says they have been dealt some damned bad hands over the years). Despite all this, Ange tries his best to treat all others with respect because, as he says, ‘It’s only right.”
When Ange sees how liberal Democrats are behaving like spoiled children these days because they hate Donald Trump, you can tell he finds it thoroughly embarrassing. Comparing President Trump and his new administration to Hitler and the Third Reich would be hilarious if it were not so mental. Ange wonders if today’s liberal “elite” actually knows anything about our history. He thinks if they spent the same amount of time learning about the history of just WWII as they spend crying about losing the election... then... well let’s face it... Ange knows what they really hate is having lost the election. The elections! Shocked that their eight-year-long progressifest, chiseling away at America’s Constitution, has come, Ange hopes not too briefly, to a halt.
But Ange also knows they will not stop. Nope. Not as long as dirty money from shady sponsors like George Soros keeps pouring in to fund their causes. Imagine that, Ange shakes his head, the holier-than-thou progressive Hollywood/media/Democrat Party cabal crying because we elected a billionaire businessman while they are being funded by a billionaire outlaw who, in his own youth, sold his soul to the Nazis.
What do these progressive hypocrites have in common? They hate the America Ange and the rest of us love. They seem to despise our Constitution while using it to change Ange’s America into some hybrid Marxist Frankenstein. Conservatives like Ange simply want to keep the values and guarantees of The Constitution, and try to slowly evolve them through trial and error, with the States being laboratories of progress. That apparently is not “progressive” enough for the other side, which becomes deranged about any interruption in its headlong rush to Amerikenstein.
Ange and millions like him, have personally experienced what Progressivism brings: decade after decade of cultural decline, middle-class decline, lowering of the standards of education... in fact whatever Progressivism pushes... it goes downhill.
