As leftists threaten to burn down the republic forever, where are America’s voices of freedom?

Sep 30, 2020 by Andrew Symes

by Os Guinness, Washington Times:

[…] Rioters, looters and arsonists can be countered by law and order, but the ideas behind the radical left cannot be stopped by riot shields, tear gas and bullet proof vests. The defence America needs today is not a matter for the National Guard or the Seventh Fleet. America requires voices on behalf of foundational ideas of freedom.

Freedom, it is often said, requires trust, and as trust goes, freedom goes. Societies with high levels of trust have wide enjoyment of freedom, whereas societies with low trust have low freedom, and high levels of surveillance and control. But trust, along with notions such as reason, truth and objectivity, is at low ebb today. They are all dismissed as “aspects of Whiteness.”

The fact is that much of today’s philosophy leads to skepticism, today’s psychology to self-doubt, and today’s political theory to suspicion. Suspicion is the only antidote to power and the potentially bad motives of others. Plumb the depths of modern critical theory, and you come away with one tip for your own safety: “Suspect thy neighbour as thyself.” Little wonder 2020 has been a bonanza year for gun sales in America.

This deep-dyed suspicion, so corrosive of freedom, has been at the heart of the radical left ever since the convergence of the neo-Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School with the postmodernism of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in the 1980s. God is dead, truth is dead, “essences” are gone, “binaries” are blurred, and all that counts is power. Such power without principle is a zero-sum game, or a scorched-earth style of war.

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