And it once was.

All this changed with the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s when objectivity went out of style.  The argument put forth by the Modern Liberals was that the individual is incapable of being objective.  They argue everything a person believes is so tainted by their personal bigotries – bigotries borne of the color of their skin, the color of their hair, the nation of their great-great-great grandfather’s birth, their height, their sex and their weight, etc. — that the only way to eliminate the evils of bigotry is to eliminate all attempts at rational thought.

Since the 1960s, the Modern Liberal has been preaching that rational thought is a hate crime.

Writing about this phenomenon as it relates to one of the communities most infected with the Modern Liberal dogma, the leftist news media, the great Thomas Sowell argued that the quest for objectivity has been replaced with the quest for  ”neutrality.”  What’s the difference between objective reporting and neutral reporting?

Consider a journalist covering a football game and the Jets have just defeated the hapless Patriots 57-3.  (Hey, this is MY post, I can make up the score.)  An objective journalist would write a report about how the Jets are a better team than are the Patriots.  The story would feature key plays and decisions that highlighted New York’s superiority to the New England franchise on that day.

Consider the coverage of Nidal Hasan’s massacre of 14 innocent people at Ft. Hood.   The objective reporter writes about the clear and obvious link between the murderer and his Muslim faith.  But the neutral reporter — the one who has been taught that he cannot imply in any way that one culture or one religion is better or worse than any other — will not only not write the objective truth, but he will seek to invent a narrative that proves the murderer has been victimized.

Just as the sports reporter could not write that the Jets are a better team and therefore had to turn the good into the bad (the cheater), the neutral news reporter had no choice (i.e. would not be a “good reporter”) unless he ignored the truth, which, in turn, left him no choice but invent a storyline where the mass murderer was the victim and his victims the bad guys.

“Neutrality” is just another form of the indiscriminateness that I write about and another example of how indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminatess of policy but rather invariably and inevitably sees the Modern Liberal side with evil over good, wrong over right, and failure over success.

When that money ran out, those of us who followed the mantra we were taught in the Leftist run public schools, “If it feels good, do it,” simply stole our children’s money, mortgaging their future for our personal comforts.  We’ve borrowed so much against their account that the numbers now are written in trillions – with each child born burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in debt – money we spent on ourselves — the moment they enter the world.

Now, with no more to steal from our parents or our children, many of us are demanding that we receive deeply discounted health-care services.  It’s something, we argue that we’re entitled to (for no other reason than that we’ve graced the world with our presence. )

The problem is that, forcing insurance companies to write bad policies – to take in in premiums far less than what they’ll have to dole out for the aging Boomers’ growing medical conditions – is untenable.  In fact, it is exactly the same formula these same Leftists used to force banks to make bad loans because they felt that everyone of their generation was “entitled” to own a house.

But the Boomers have a plan!

Their scheme is simple – if they can force their grandchildren to pay for premiums for services they don’t want, don’t need and won’t use for decades, that money can then be used by the insurance companies to subsidize the cost of insurance to the aging Boomers.  In effect, the grandchildren will be paying for their irresponsible grandparents’ while themselves being deprived of the money they would otherwise use to further their education, start a business or make a down payment on their first home (if they can get a loan from the banks their grandparents destroyed. )

Make no mistake about it, this generation is a generation of thieves and the people who stole their parents and their children’s money to make their own lives cushier are at it again.  This time the target is their grandchildren.

The kids from the Bronx with the accents became fireman.  The kid from Queens with the gaudy chains and the girlfriend with the big hair became cops.  People who worked with their hands, people who risked their lives, I am now terribly embarrassed and ashamed to say, were thought of as just of another kind, the kind that my Leftist friends continue to deride as being from “fly-over country,” or from Kansas where the people have something “the matter” with them.

9/11 made that narrative impossible for me to cling to any longer.  It may have taken days, weeks, months and years for all my ingrained bigotries to subside, but in those horrific moments when the Masters of the Universe were helpless, and those I had been culturally bigoted against ran up those stairs it became impossible for me to cling to them any longer.

The lies of the Left would never be so clearly exposed – except in their future defense of those lies – as they were that day when those heroes did not call in sick as they saw the morning news, but answered the call, and did not stand by as they would have had there been any truth to Leftist dogma, clapping and shouting about “The chickens coming home to roost.”  They risked it all – many gave all – because that’s what heroes do.

On that day, eight years ago now – their children of ten now almost twenty – my heart goes out to their loved ones and I thank them.  And I ask them to know, how many others their loved ones may or may not have been able to save, on that day, eight years ago today, they saved me.

I asked him what the surgery entailed and he told me he didn’t know as he’d never read about it.  I sarcastically asked if he intended to read about it before he cut me open and performed this radical surgery on me and he told me he wouldn’t bother because it would be too complicated for him to understand, anyway.  I asked him what was wrong with me and he told me I had the sniffles and a slight temperature.   I asked him what massive radical surgery would do to help cure my cold and he said, “well, doing nothing isn’t going to cure it.”

I didn’t scream, I didn’t yell.  I’ll admit I did raise my voice a little, but I mean, who wouldn’t?   This guy took an oath – hey, this guy works for me!

Well, apparently my raising my voice was too much for him, he called out into the hall for some burly hospital workers – you know the ones, those big orderlies in purples shirts – to stand by and be ready to knock me out with a single punch and tie me to a gurney if I brought up any more objections.  With their arrival he declared that he didn’t want me to “do much talkin’” since I’m the one who “caused the problem in the first place” by catching cold.

With me quieted for the moment the doctor began to speak.  Not to me.  Apparently he’d gotten a phone call about something much, much more important than me.  I think it was the odds on “Rickety Split” in the seventh.

When what should have been a ten or fifteen minute examination turned to first a half-hour then an hour, my friend, who had driven me to the doctor in case I needed a prescription that would make operating heavy machinery unwise, politely knocked on the door and poked his head in to ask if the exam would be much longer as he had to get back to work.  The doctor shrieked, “A mob!!!”  and slammed the door on his foot breaking his toe.

My friend was rushed to the O.R. and is expected to make a complete recovery from the full appendectomy and quadruple bi-pass surgery my doctor performed to fix it.  The bad news?  I’m now on the AMA’s Enemies List for all my fishy questions.

For the next five decades (pseudo)-intellectuals, hiding behind tenure and “Academic Freedom,” have been spewing greater and greater nonsense designed for one purpose and one purpose only: sabotaging and eventually destroying all of Western Civilization.

 
Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

Don’t think so?  Simply consider the fact that one of the most oft-repeated chants of the Modern Liberal movement is “Hey, hey, ho, ho. Western Civilization has got to go.”

With control of the “education” system, the Leftists turned what had been a place of scholarship into a Leftism factory with a curriculum and modus operandi designed to facilitate their Utopian dreams which first required the demolition of the great (but imperfect) Western World.

With America’s children in their hands, from the moment they enter kindergarten barely able to read or write, until the moment they graduate from Ward Churchill’s “Ethnic Studies” class (still barely able to read or write), the Leftists were able to instill their agenda into the minds of those too young to be able to stand up to these moral and intellectual bullies and fight back with the facts.

Further, in the era of unprecedented prosperity (thanks to the efforts and the values of those who came before them), when suddenly virtually everyone went to college, the indoctrination process stretched on (and therefore, so too did childhood) often well into one’s mid-twenties and even into their thirties. Think about that!  If a person retires at the age of sixty, having first left the unreal and perverted world of post-coup schooling at thirty, that means they will have spent half their lives – their most formative years – in an indoctrination process of misinformation and lies.  Many Right-Thinkers are stunned at how immune Leftists are to facts and reason but, in reality, they are no more so than members of any other cult and, in fact, their response to factual and moral challenges are exactly those of the cultists, seeing the other as the enemy and attacking with vitriol and violence. 

Lefties love to tout their superior intellect, often pointing to the number of years they spent tramping the bucolic campuses of major universities.  But staying longer in the school system only makes one smarter if what they’re being taught is true.  If what they’re being taught are lies, then the longer they stay in the schools the stupider they become which is, in fact, exactly what we see.  This is why Dennis Prager will (paraphrasing George Orwell, I believe) end a conversation with a particularly stupid caller by saying, “Sir, that is so dumb you must have gone to graduate school.”  It is why those who have never known any life other than school – the professors – are stunningly stupid and so morally inverted that, in order to be made head of the “Ethnic Studies” department, one must believe that the Islamic fascists are the good guys (for killing Americans) and that the victims of 9/11 were nothing less than “Little Eichmanns” (for nothing more than being Americans.)

In fact, let’s call these adult students the “long-schoolers,” and the long-schooler is doubly denied real education, first by the misinformation campaign that masquerades as intellectualism these days, and then by the years of real world experience lost in their cartoonish world of binge drinking, projectile vomiting, girls going “wild” for the cameras, with whatever attempts at scholarship being little more than regurgitating the anti-Americanism that pleases their teachers but bears no resemblance to the truth.

Ward Churchill

And it’s getting worse (this is why Americans believe we’re on the wrong track no matter which party is in power.)  This is because the first several generations to enter the schools after the coup at Columbia, had the opportunity for what I call “residual intelligence,” things learned from being in contact with members of The Greatest Generation and those who came before them.  As we moved into the late seventies and early eighties – as those who held true American values began to retire and therefore move out of positions of influence – moronity became both wider and deeper so that by 1987 Professor Allan Bloom could write The Closing of the American Mind - his masterpiece detailing the abject stupidity of the students then first entering the universities.

It is far from a coincidence that Bloom’s book was published in 1987 for that would be almost the very second when the first children of the children of the Sixties – the first generation wholly raised by people who came of age in the post-coup era – were beginning to matriculate.  

And since then, as the Greatest Generation began to die off, things have only gotten worse still.

Meanwhile, as those with real American values (and real accomplishments) began to leave the stage, their jobs were taken by those reared in the schools and universities of the post-coup 1960s.  Suddenly, those indoctrinated into a cult of mindless hatred for Western Civilization in general (a bunch of dead, white men all) and America in particular as the perfection of that civilization, began making movies and reporting the news and taking up other positions of cultural influence and power.

Here again, we see the destructive nature of post-coup education and the unprecedented long-schooling of Americans.  In days of old, journalists worked their way up the ladder by doing real work in the real world.  They likely started as a stringer, or a reporter covering the night courts in some small town.  With good work perhaps they got a promotion and after many decades of learning their craft and testing their childhood (and childish) theories against real world realities, they might, if they learned their lessons well, finally find themselves in positions of power and influence as an editor or a White House correspondent or an anchorman.

Sadly – and devastatingly –  this paradigm has been replaced in the Modern Liberal era by decades of schooling (indoctrination in an unreal setting where childish theories remain forever untested by the real world) followed by high profile positions at prestigious media outlets.  After all, with that much “education” and with that neat-looking diploma from the Columbia School of Journalism, you don’t think this thirty-year-old is going to accept an entry-level position, do you?  If you’ve ever wondered why it is that the Leftist news media cares so little about the truth, it’s because they have never spent even a second of their lives where the real world butted up against their infantile fantasies.

This same pattern is clear in the new and old Hollywood.  Prior to the Modern Liberal era those with power and influence in the entertainment world came to their positions with a lifetime of real world experiences.  Many were immigrants, all were risk-takers and pioneers and each and every one of them worked their way to the top.  Suddenly, in the early post-coup years – with the advent of “film schools” — “wunderkinds” like Steven Spielberg were handed the keys to the studio without having spent even a single second in the real world.  They went from mommy’s house, to the cloistered world of the university, to the gated communities of their Hollywood mansions without having ever experienced the real world for themselves.

Steven Spielberg

So, then, by what measure does a Spielberg pick the material he seeks to turn into a movie?  It can be on no other basis than the lies he’s been taught by radical Leftists in the world of academia – and remember, the word “academic” is a well-known synonym for the word meaningless as in “It’s all academic, anyway, let’s go do something important” — who, themselves, have never lived in the real world. 

The result is Spielberg’s Munich a morally and factually retarded effort (retarded at the level of the five-year-old, the time in their lives when they first entered the indoctrination process on a full-time basis in kindergarten).  Since truth is of no import, then, Spielberg is comfortable making a movie that upholds the orthodoxies of the cult despite having to employ one half-truth or outright lie after another.  Making clear Spielberg’s agenda is that each of these half-truths and lies served the agenda of the cult by either denigrating the more Western culture, the Jews of Israel or acting as an apologist for the non-Western culture of the Arab/Muslim terrorists.

If you doubt that this is the mentality that permeates all of Leftist Hollywood, simply consider that, despite being at times laughable in its depictions, Munich received an Academy Award nomination for “best picture,” along with four other movies that had but two things in common, they were all box offices bombs and they all promoted anti-Americanism and anti-Western values.

More recently, the Hollywood Leftists showed their allegiance to the cult by making close to a dozen anti-American movies about the Iraq war all either in utter contradiction to the facts or, like the story about Haditha, before the facts were even known.  On the Left there is no reason to know the facts because their agenda isn’t truth, it is the undermining of Western Civilization.

Tellingly, within the groups that we most associate with Modern Liberalism – celebrity and academia – there are subgroups to whom facts are cherished and essential and, by no coincidence, they are the ones who reject the brain-dead ideology of Modern Liberalism and tend to support the mature and thoughtful (if not always right) policies of the Republican Party.

In the world of celebrity there is one group, then – just as beautiful as Hollywood stars, just as rich as Hollywood directors, just as adored as Hollywood rock stars, their posters up on the walls of youngsters just as often as any Hollywood starlet in a bikini – who tend to reject the morally and intellectually retarded world-view of the Democrats and that group is comprised of professional athletes. 

Similarly, in the world of academia there is one group that does not follow the lemmings in the world of education and therefore rejects the stupidity of Modern Liberalism and these are the professors who teach about the hard sciences like chemistry and physics.

What do athletes and professors of physics and chemistry have in common – and what is it about them that makes them different than the others in the world of celebrity and academia?  Unlike their professional colleagues, the athlete and the chemist live in a world where truth both matters and cannot be fudged by rhetoric.  In sports, the player either catches the ball or drops the ball and no amount of pseudo-intellectual prattle changes the facts or makes a bad athlete good.  So, too, with chemistry where either the titanium and the einsteinium react to each other or they don’t.  There, too, no amount of fevered rhetoric about how the Einsteinium is part of a neo-conservative conspiracy to control the world, sees the failed chemist elevated to the level of chairman of the department.

America is on the wrong track because, over the past fifty years, no matter who was in the White House, the Leftists have held the reigns in the culture-creating industries of education, news and entertainment and they have used their powers not to advance truth, beauty, justice, morality, decency or anything else that is good.  In fact, good is the enemy of the Left because Western Civilization is not only good, it is the last best hope for man on earth.

For decades, these people have been using our children to wage war against America and the majority has remained mostly silent.  I suspect this is out of both a certain sense of complacency that comes with unprecedented comforts and also, ironically, a deep and abiding tradition of true liberalism (lower case “l”) that makes good Americans extremely tolerant even of their enemies. But we have reached a tipping point, a time where either we will enter the battle and fight for America against our internal enemies (both witting and unwitting) or we will end up in the dustbin of history with a return to the dark ages that Western Civilization pushed into only the darkest corners of the world.

The bad news is that the hate-America-always crowd is deeply entrenched and have decades of battle-hardened soldiers who feel no allegiance to truth, justice, beauty or anything other than the orthodoxies of the cult.  The good news is that we have the majority and, most importantly, we have the truth.  If we enter the battle and fight back we will win.

I do believe I am witnessing that rousing of the sleeping giant.  I think, in some ways, the disaster of having an enemy-of-the-state as President of the United States has gone a long way in making clear to the good guys that Modern Liberalism isn’t just a fringe cult located on college campuses and at Hollywood pot orgies, and that enough is enough.  To them I say “Welcome to the fight.”

When we hear about “the culture war” this is the war that we’re in at home, it’s between those who believe in things bigger than themselves and those who fear things bigger than themselves.  Why do they fear patriotic children?  Because patriotism is, to the Modern Liberal, an act of bigotry.  As you watch America’s new Commander-in-Chief running around the world belittle America, apologizing for “wrongs” that weren’t even committed by us (such as “colonialism” which was the Europeans) and literally bowing down before the “Keeper of the Holy places,” the Saudi King, you must recognize that he does so because he believes that love for America is bigotry and if there’s one thing a Leftist is not (in his own mind) it’s a bigot. 

The Modern Liberal believes – as he does with guns being the cause of crime – that soldiers are the cause of war and that his Utopia would exist if it wasn’t for the patriot. This is exactly as John Lennon chronicled it in the Modern Liberal anthem “Imagine.”  They imagine “no countries” and that starts first and foremost with the destruction of the greatest country in the history of the world.  Add in the Leftist’s dream of a world where no God exists to compete with their own self-importance (think Barack Obama yet again) and the most telling line is for everyone to imagine a time where anything and everything is devalued to the point where “There’s nothing (left) to kill or die for.”  

So, you men and women in the U.S. Military, are not only good, decent, smart and patriotic Americans, you are the heirs to the real and great America of The Greatest Generation and those who came before them. Somehow, against the onslaught of our enemies at home – the leftist news media that constantly slants its stories against America, the leftist entertainment industry which doesn’t even have to wait to find out the truth before making movies about the evil America solider in Iraq, and the leftist education system that literally slams the doors in young patriots’ faces — you have found and held, and most importantly protect, the real and great America – the one that no president (save leftist Jimmy Carter and now his heir, Barack Obama) has ever felt the need to apologize for.

So, first, I say with all my heart, thank you and God bless you and then I vow that while you fight and win our wars abroad, I will fight for the real and good America in our culture war at home.  Again, God bless you and thank you and may God continue to bless America!

Having had very little experience with the Internet, I had no idea that the talk would go much further than that half-empty room of eggheads.  Instead, it soon went viral and became the talk of the conservative community.  To date, the speech, which I called, “Regurgitating the Apple: How The Modern Liberal ‘Thinks’” has been viewed by almost a half-million people on YouTube alone.  As far as YouTube hits go, that’s perhaps not the biggest number, but remember, I wasn’t wearing a bikini and singing about my love for Obama. This was a forty-seven minute, rather wonkish talk, by a previously unknown (at least in Washington and political circles) television writer with a bad haircut.

Striking to me was not just the number of people who watched the talk, but the calibre of thinkers who were sending it to each other, discussing it amongst themselves and going out of their way to contact me just to say “hi” and “thanks.”  These were people who thought, wrote and read about this stuff every day and surely didn’t need to take an hour out of their busy schedules to listen to just another talk.  This speech resonated with what I consider the best minds and most important thinkers and activists in the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Since then, I have had a great deal of time to devote to the thesis of “Regurgitating the Apple,” as the success of the original talk saw me become an even more in-demand speaker, appear on radio and television programs and do the research for my someday to be finished (I promise) book now called, “Hating What’s Right: How The Modern Liberal Winds Up On The Wrong Side of EVERY Issue.”  As I have devoted more and more time to what has been called the “unified field theory of Liberalism,” my conviction that it is a cult of indiscriminateness, intentionally promoted by those who see a utopia to be found in the elimination of all efforts to be right, has only deepened.

Also striking was the utter failure of those who took exception to my thesis and made arguments that didn’t actually work and only further proved my points.  Name calling, ad hominen attacks, strawman arguments, vulgarity and anger were the vehicles of “debate” from the left.

As the number of viewers of my talk began to approach the half-million mark, I decided it was time to return to the Heritage Foundation for a “follow-up” lecture on the “thinking” of the Modern Liberal in order to revisit and expound upon some of the most important points from the first talk and to introduce some further consequences of the mindset I call “Modern Liberalism” and the rejection of rational and moral thought that now dominates the Democrat party in America.

Please enjoy the talk and, if you think it worthy, pass it on to others and link it to your sites.  I can be reached for questions and comments at www.evansayet.com.

Sowell recognizes that, at its most basic level, this conflict of visions revolves around what one believes to be man’s innate nature.  Is it, as the Neo-Liberal believes, that man is born good and then corrupted by the institutions of society or, do the Conservatives have it right and man is born with a dual and conflicting nature — capable of good and evil and everything in between — requiring cultural forces to help him tamp down the darker side and cultivate the good within?

Lennon’s iconic anthem “Imagine” could not be a better representation of the Neo-Liberal vision.  Since the Neo-Liberal believe that man is born good, the way to create a good society – in fact, a utopia – is to remove all forces that hinder him from doing what he wants to do, when he wants to do it.  A heaven on earth is to be found merely by following the early Neo-Liberal mantra, “If it feels good, do it,” for, being innately good, ones feelings – and not moral codes or civic responsibilities, loyalties to others or such pedestrian concerns as the need to make a living – will see the Neo-Liberal do what is good.

Springsteen, on the other hand, holds the diametrically opposed – Conservative – vision of man’s nature:

“Two faces have I.  One that laughs, one that cries.  One says ‘hello,’ one says ‘goodbye.’  One says things I don’t understand.  Makes me feel like half a man.”

Since Springsteen recognizes that his feelings are conflicted, far from seeking the destruction of the civilizing forces, these are the things he specifically turns to for guidance:

“At night I get down on my knees and pray, I want to make that other man go away…”

For this reason, where the Neo-Liberal Lennon espouses the end of all religions, few contemporary artists so fully infuse their work with faith and works.  Fairly early in Springsteen’s career, in the song “Badlands,” the Conservative poet takes a moment to contemplate what will bring him happiness in life.  He then runs through the usual possibilities, from losing oneself in his work to the accruing of fabulous riches, only to decide in the end that is “Faith that can save me.”   Unlike the Neo-Liberal Lennon who indiscriminately rejects all religions without regard to what they practice or preach, then, Springsteen is undeniably a Catholic – his characters never happier and more fulfilled than when they are practicing the Judeo-Christian heritage and their Christian faith and never more pathetic than when they are without it.  In fact, Springsteen has often been compared to a preacher and called a “liturgist,” the release of his album, Tunnel of Love described by Father Andrew Greeley, writing in America – The National Catholic Weekly, as “Perhaps a more important Catholic event in America than the visit of Pope John Paul II!”

Neither does Springsteen share with the Neo-Liberal the belief that national identity is a force for evil.  Springsteen sees the constraints of the Constitution as good, right and essential:

“See that flag flying over the courthouse?  It says certain things are set in stone.  Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

The combination of Catholic imagery and American iconography stand in stark contrast to the Neo-Liberal Lennon whose Utopian dreams require the dismantling of these things – of all codes and creeds beyond doing what feels good at any moment – the things Sowell calls “constraints.”

Since the Neo-Liberal believes that man is born perfect, the notion of self-improvement is seen by him as an oxymoron.  After all, what can improve upon perfection?  In the Neo-Liberal world, then, the individual is never wrong and society is to blame for all outcomes short of utopia.  For this reason, Lennon’s song – like the policies of the Neo-Liberals in government — offers no suggestions as to how the individual might better himself and, in turn, better the outcome for himself and the world around him.  Imagine offers no criticism of the individual, taking only society – from top to bottom – to task.  If only the whole world would change, then, utopia will be achieved both in song and in the world.

Springsteen shares both the Conservatives recognition that we are living in the real world, and the belief that bettering ourselves is the very purpose of life.  Neither Springsteen nor others who share the Conservative point-of-view, denies the vicissitudes of real life nor pretend that they are always fair and just, just that they are and, more importantly, that individual choices can make all the difference.  For this reason, while Lennon’s opus requires nothing of the individual (except a flight of fancy in the “imagination”), Springsteen’s body-of-work reads like a “How to” on personal behavior.  In fact, Springsteen repeatedly rails against believing in the fantastic for the lethargy and wasted time such flights of the imagination ensure.   It’s not that Springsteen – and all other Conservatives — don’t have dreams.  It’s that they are dreams to be acted upon in the real world:

“I was living in the world of childish dreams.  Someday those childish dreams must end.  To become a man and learn to dream again…”

For this reason, Springsteen implores “Mary” to “Trade in these wings on some wheels.”   After all, wings may fly you quickly and safely over all of the bumps and potholes on the road…but they don’t exist!   Wheels – cars – on the other hand, do exist and are the only way to achieve the dream of finding something of value somewhere further down the road.

Time and again Springsteen makes clear to his love that he’s no “Hero,” does not possess the God-like ability to bestow “redemption”  and that he’s not “Prince Charming” whose single kiss will bring about a Utopian existence.  It is the individual who must take action and, in doing so, better himself, his lot in life and society as a whole.  In “If I Should Fall Behind,” Springsteen addresses the vicissitudes of life…

“Everyone dreams of, a love lasting and true.  But you and I both know what this world can do…”

…and then offers concrete actions to be taken to overcome the obstacles of the real world and to make that dream come true:

“…So let’s make our steps clear, so the other may see.  And I’ll wait for you, and if I should fall behind, wait for me.”

This concrete step is impossible to the Neo-Liberal for, as Sowell recognizes, loyalty –and all other bonds that are “intertemporal” such as patriotism, marital fidelity, constitutions, etc. – are “constraints” upon doing what one feels at any given moment.  Neo-Liberalism is, to use Lee Harris’ phrase, a “Carpe diem” philosophy, the hallmark of which, Harris rightly recognizes, is “A complete lack of interest in (one’s) own historical and cultural foundation, and…relative indifference to the future.”  Loyalty requires one to make a choice today based on something done in the past.  Patriotism requires one to do what doesn’t feel good for the benefit of something bigger and more important.  To those who share Lennon’s belief that utopia is a place where “All the people are living for today,” waiting for someone who has fallen behind is a intolerable and dying for something bigger than themselves an unfathomable choice.

Springsteen does not “live for today,” but rather shares the Conservatives’ belief  that our lives have greater meaning and that goodness and happiness is to be found in the transcendent.  Unlike the Neo-Liberal, he does not see himself as the be-all and the end-all of everything, his every emotion, de facto, good.  Instead Springsteen recognizes himself to be part of the on-going pageant of humanity, with debts owed to and lessons to be learned from those who came before us, and promises – and the joy to be found in the keeping of those promises –made to those who come next.  Again, the transcendent is a concept that is wholly unknown to the Neo-Liberal who, living for today, can value nothing more other than self and moment.

Thus, in “Walk Like A Man,” a song about the death of his father, Springsteen does what he can on behalf of his father – he takes up the mantle of the adult and takes his place as an adult.  In “Living Proof,” a song about the birth of his own son, Springsteen had previously seen the world – as so many Neo-Liberals do – as a place that’s “So dark and dirty, so fouled and confused” and finds proof of God’s mercy in the gift that Barack Obama had only recently called a “punishment” – the birth of a baby.

One last constraint the Neo-Liberal finds intolerable must not go unmentioned and that is the concept of merit.  In the Neo-Liberal world, merit must be fully divorced from reward as becoming expert – or merely proficient – requires hours, days, months or even years of practicing for a pay-off that cannot possibly come soon enough for those who are “Living for today.”  As Sowell recognizes, costs – including effort – are constraints upon the ability to act as one feels.  The purpose of Neo-Liberal policy, then, isn’t to encourage as many people as possible to become expert, but to deny the expert addition rewards for their efforts. In the world of politics this is known as the “Nanny State,” while in Lennon’s utopia the hardworking and the slothful, the expert and the incompetent, the chaste and the promiscuous simple “share all the world” equally.

Springsteen whole-heartedly believes in the concept of merit — and is more than willing to “pay the price” for the things he wants.  In “Thunder Road” he makes clear that he not only “Got this guitar,” but that he put in the years needed to nothing less than “Learn how to make it talk.”   In “Local Hero,” Springsteen may acknowledge the luck involved in attaining success:

“…And if you turn the right cards up, they’ll make you ‘Boss,’ the devil pays off…”

But also makes clear that his luck is the residue not only of design but of effort:

“I learned my job, I learned it well.  Fit myself with religion and a story to tell.”

It is hard to believe that Springsteen believes that Bill Horton, who worked so hard to make himself a better man, and who built his wife a home with his own hands, should be forced to share that home with vagrants and bums and the hippy-dippy weatherman.  Springsteen is – like most Conservatives (and unlike most Liberals) extremely charitable. He wishes to take others with him on his road to success, but, as he says to Mary in “Thunder Road,” “the door’s open but the ride it ain’t free.”

In the end, Neo-Liberalism is about permanently infantilizing the populace.  The “thinking” is that, since children are born good, then the way to have a society of good adults is to keep the population eternally infantile.

Springsteen, however, does not dream of – to borrow a phrase from another iconic musical group of the Neo-Liberal Era, The Beach Boys –  Endless Summer of non-stop play.  Nor does he seek, in John Cougar Mellencamp’s words, to “Hold on to sixteen as long as you can.”   Instead Springsteen relishes the life of the adult with all its rules and constraints, duties and obligations – for they are both the challenges and the significance of life.  In fact, Springsteen repeatedly rails against those who seek “The carnival life forever.”  In “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” Springsteen enumerates the instant pleasures that are so appealing to the permanent children of the boardwalk from pinball machines to a parade of casual sex partners and declares:

“And me?  Well I just got tired of hanging in them dusty arcades, banging them pleasure machines.”

Soon Springsteen takes off down the “Thunder Road,” of life not with the child’s wings, but with the man’s wheels, not seeking the instant pleasure of sex, but looking for love – a love that comes with the condition that he merit it – his dreams to be worked for and ultimately realized, not merely imagined. Yes, Bruce Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star, ensconced in his palatial mansion high in the hills of Beverly may now consider himself a Neo-Liberal (“A life of leisure and a pirates treasure” can do that to a man) but Bruce Springsteen the poet — the philosopher – is the epitome of the Conservative vision.