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Friday, August 03, 2012

We've Been Aiming At The Wrong Adversary

We often think of Karl Marx or the progressive movement as the main source of our political troubles; but the more fundamental source of America's political conflicts goes back to a time before America's founding, finding its most powerful expression during the French Revolution, and seeing its most honest and enduring trademark in that revolution's Reign of Terror.

The source of the emotional power behind the left's influence in America is one sad, strange man from Geneva, whose inspiring emotional tone swept across France, and who, through expressing some compelling emotional sentiments mixed with bizarre anti-reason ideas, spread those ideas like a virus through the adolescent body of modern civilization.

Jean Jacques Rousseau had a romantic vision of his native early 18th century Geneva, with its relatively free peasants and its rural absence of snobby elite airs – even while he was one of only eight percent of the population who could call themselves legal citizens. He disliked the attitudes of the elite in Paris, even while he was sponging off and enjoying the intellectual company of those very people whom he so harshly would criticize. He lectured people on childrearing practices while he personally abandoned his five children to an orphanage.

So he was a hypocrite.

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