Observation: an example of Progressive repudiation of an American virtue: self-responsibility - Granite Grok

Observation: an example of Progressive repudiation of an American virtue: self-responsibility

And the continued push for acceptance and assimilation of the Progressive value that is a 180: eternal victimhood.  From George Will comes the example (in talking about Detroit, emphasis mine):

Steven Rattner, who administered the bailout of part of the Detroit-based portion of America’s automobile industry, says, “Apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs.” Congress, he says, should bail out Detroit because “America is just as much about aiding those less fortunate as it is about personal responsibility.”

There you have today’s liberalism: Human agency, hence responsibility, is denied. Apart from the pesky matter of “voting in elections” — apart from decades of voting to empower incompetents, scoundrels and criminals, and to mandate unionized rapacity — no one is responsible for anything. Popular sovereignty is a chimera because impersonal forces akin to hurricanes are sovereign.

And let’s add these bon mots from the President in saying that his poor relatives keep his kids “grounded”:

“Malia and Sasha have cousins who know what it’s like to struggle and know what it’s like to have to scrape by. They know that those kids are just as worthy as they are, they just haven’t had as much luck.”

Right – Obama’s family’s lofty position is simply due to dumb freaking luck.

It has nothing to do with hard work, being ready for opportunity, known how to create one’s own advantages, and having grown the skills needed (both educationally and inner motivation) at the right time. Hmm, maybe in his situation, he’s right!  For the rest of us, however, sitting on one’s duff and doing nothing of import is likely to keep one poor.  Yes, doing everything I enumerated does not guarantee success, but it generally means not staying in poverty.

Summary: these two big time Progressives holding that success has nothing to do with you being responsibility, exercising hard work, being persistence, or anything else.  In fact:

  • You aren’t Responsible (for you or anyone else)
  • Life is nothing more than “luck” and fortune.

Here we see the pincers of Progressivism – you have no responsibility or hand in your success individually.  And collectively, you aren’t responsibility for failure, either.   We see that the Warrenism / Obabamism of “You didn’t build that” is now joined with the new Ratternism of “You didn’t kill that”.

To use a word from Will, “restoration” for our society will come when one of the foundational attributes and values of traditional America, self-responsibility, is rightly returned.  We all have seen situations where people individually disavow responsibility for ANYTHING at anytime – our response is to get away from them quickly as they are serial disasters waiting to happen and innocent people become the guilty (even as the really guilty get off scott free just as Rattner is trying to do here).

And with Obama, if only “luck” and collective work (again, where no one is really, really responsible) matter, the signal is “why bother with traditional values”?  We all know the Big Lie Theorem – and Progressives have been saying the opposite what history actually shows for decades.

Oh, and this: has ANYONE seen Obama “spreading his good luck around” to those poor relatives?  His half brother in Kenya living in a tattered shack, his Aunt Zeituni in Boston living off the taxpayers, and his Uncle Onyango in (Framingham) MA as well?  No, that would mean “personal responsibility” would be in play.  Thus, in Obama’s mind, the fact that all taxpayers have to support his relatives “down on their luck” (with no mention of their decisions leading up to their present conditions) is simply a collective responsibility.  Or  as Rattner puts it: “America is just as much about aiding those less fortunate” – he is all about the collective instead of the individual act of voluntary charity.

And if this is how they govern – things are NOT going to get any better.

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