Today’s liberals are jealous of liberal heroes past. They want to be heroes too.
They yearn for a cause as great as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights for oppressed minorities, equalizing employment and electoral opportunities for women, and achieving marriage equality for same-sex couples.
In today’s America, of course, there is no slavery. No one alive today has ever experienced slavery in America or knows anyone who has. Women have had the right to vote for nearly a century and are fully accepted as a regular part of our workforce and our politics. Racial, religious, and ethnic minorities are vigorously protected from discrimination in both the public and private sectors. More recently, gay Americans received those same long-overdue protections under the law, and our society across the political spectrum was quick to embrace this development.
Giving credit where it’s due, those battles were fought and won primarily by great American liberals from all of the great American political parties: Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyndon B. Johnson, and far too many more to list.
As a result of the hard and courageous work of these great men and women and the people who fought alongside them, all Americans now enjoy protections and guarantees of all of their civil rights.
Having achieved such commendable success, one would think liberals would declare victory. Unfortunately, most liberals don’t even recognize that they achieved any progress at all.
Classic liberalism was about freedom and equality. Modern liberalism is about ego and emotion.
Today’s liberals can’t acknowledge the tremendous accomplishments of their own movement because to do so would deny them the opportunity to be heroic too. For today’s liberals, it’s no longer about the cause. It’s about their egos.
So, today’s liberals pretend that women are still oppressed, and they hold a “Women’s March on Washington” and a “Day Without Women” without ever actually articulating any specific grievances or objectives.
Today’s liberals accuse the Republicans of trying to suppress civil rights without ever actually specifying which rights we supposedly want to suppress, why we want to suppress them, or any actual policies we have proposed to do so.
Today’s liberals compare the Republicans with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan without ever articulating a single fact that shows even the slightest commonality of interest between fascist and racist thugs and a party that is rooted in limited government and that since its foundation liberated the slaves, gave women the vote, voted in higher percentages than the Democrats in Congress for the seminal civil rights bills of the 1960s, created and passed into law a national holiday honoring Marting Luther King, Jr., appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act, and appointed the Supreme Court Justice who authored the opinion guaranteeing marriage equality for gay couples based on the convincing arguments presented by a former Republican solicitor general
Yet today’s liberals call themselves the “resistance” to the Republicans, as if the Republicans were operating a police state that required an underground resistance movement consisting of people courageously risking their lives to oppose us.
It never occurs to them that they voice and coordinate their “resistance” over a free and unregulated internet without any fear of arrest or reprisal. It never occurs to them that fancying themselves a “resistance” is a gross insult to those who actually did risk their lives to resist the Nazis in Europe or Castro in Cuba.
Are there still ways that we can improve ourselves as a nation and as a people? Of course. There always will be for a society consisting of imperfect beings such as ourselves.
But overall, we have done more than any other country in history to enlighten ourselves and to guarantee the fundamental human rights of all of our citizens. That happened largely because of the hard and courageous work of liberals at a time when those rights were being denied to entire segments of our population.
Those days are behind us. Today’s liberals are fighting battles that have already been won. But the cause no longer matters. They want to be heroes too.
Author: Ken Falkenstein
Ken Falkenstein is the Managing Editor of Committed Conservative and brings a wealth of experience and expertise in public affairs to the job. Ken served in the U.S. Army in the last years of the Cold War as a Russian linguist for military intelligence and the NSA. After leaving the Army, he earned his degree in Secondary Education from Old Dominion University, where he also wrote a popular column in the student newspaper.
Upon graduation, Ken worked as a Legislative Aide to two Republican members of the Virginia House of Delegates. Ken also served as Corresponding Secretary of the Young Republican Federation of Virginia, managed several successful political campaigns, and managed governmental affairs operations for a local Realtor association.
In 1995, Ken moved to Washington, DC to serve as a Legislative Assistant to Sen. John Warner (R-VA). While working for Sen. Warner, Ken attended law school at night, earning his J.D. with honors from the George Mason University School of Law (n/k/a The Antonin Scalia Law School). Since that time, Ken has practiced as a civil litigation attorney, including serving for three years as an Associate City Attorney for the City of Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Ken previously was a contributor to the highly-regarded political blog Bearing Drift and was a weekly co-host of The Steve Batton Radio Program. In 2016, Ken ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia Beach School Board. Ken is also a former President of the Down Syndrome Association of Hampton Roads.
Ken now lives outside of Denver, Colorado with his wife, Kim, and three sons, Adam, Dylan, and Joshua, who has Down syndrome. Ken’s writing is motivated and informed primarily by his concern for his kids’ future.
