Progressive Persuasion: Prove you love me you bigot!

Vincent J. Curtis

30 June 2016

This morning, the publisher of the Hamilton Spectator, Paul Berton, published an editorial which expressed opposition to the holding of a referendum on the LRT project in Hamilton.  His reason was that the mood of the unwashed and uneducated in Hamilton was such as to oppose an LRT.  A recent example of such a mood was the decision in the Brexit referendum.

Since the construction of the LRT is on the progressivist agenda, holding a referendum on it would be bad he holds, because referenda tend to result in progressivism's defeat.

Owing to the anti-intellectual attitude and bigotedness of the majority of the population, progressivism loses referenda.   Therefore referenda as such are bad. Consequently, a referendum on the LRT is bad.

The progressives would likely lose, and losing would expose the lack of hold (I mean trust) that progressivists have over the electorate on top of the defeat of the progressive idea that was the particular subject of the referendum.

He then concludes with, can't we all just be friends?  And you can prove your friendship to me by allowing this particular item on the progressivist agenda!  ("It is up to all of us - urban, suburban, rural - to look for ways to understand each other, and move forward, not backward, as comfortably as we can."  is how he expressed it)

 

You have to admire progressives.  It is not just that they think they are right – most people do – but the smugness of their conviction is outstanding.

Today, we are treated to the advice that referenda are probably bad things at the moment because the mood of the non-university educated is anti-progressive.  The great unwashed are anti-intellectual and bigoted, and can’t be reached.  And there is nothing more intellectual than a progressive.

If a referenda on a progressivist project were held, the bigoted and uneducated anti-intellectuals would get to vote too, and since there are so many of them, the progressive project would likely be defeated at the polls.   Like Brexit.  And hard to explain anti-democratic measures would have to be employed to put things right again. 

That was today.  Yesterday, we were treated to the smug condemnation of residential schools by a proud Hamilton progressive, the president of McMaster University.  It never occurred to him that the residential school movement, in which the aim was to raise the aboriginal to the cultural and educative standards of the European, was a progressivist project of those days and was conceived and perpetrated by the good president’s intellectual forebears.  Then he announced proudly that his University squatted on the traditional territory of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee “nations”, never thinking that perhaps he might be asked to return the goods.

I can understand why good progressives are so smug in the conviction that they are right.  They never have to answer their critics because their critics are hideous, immoral, and their feelings don’t count.

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