Useful?: On one side a generally more religious, more traditional, more patriotic cultural majority and on the other a less religious, less traditional, less patriotic cultural minority. Gradually, then suddenly, the iceberg flips.

‘Home, hearth, town, state and nation,’ becomes more like ‘home, foyer, community, democracy units and global human village’ a good deal more than before.

Ilya Shapiro (CATO) and Eric Kaufmann have a back and forth at The National Review:

The data that Eric Kaufmann presents and explains about ideological prejudice, social intolerance, and “affective polarization” (“Political Discrimination as Civil-Rights Struggle,” July 12) are as disturbing as they are depressing. Progressive authoritarianism is a growing problem, particularly among young elites and thus at the commanding heights of business, culture, and education. ‘

This blog’s take: What do you think of the analogy? Useful?

What you most focus on as a threat, often reveals what you most value.

Freedom doesn’t equal liberation. Many people causing the iceberg to flip have done so by promoting illiberal thought and action, violence, ideological utopianism, and of course, through the further control of language (words=violence).

Liberalism proper hasn’t provided a sufficient-enough moral framework to prevent this state of affairs, and the force of the iceberg’s flip has scattered apart the old Liberal Guard, the ‘classicals’, the Old Left (Marxists and free-speech, pro-science Left).

There are deeper currents affecting all of us.

Meanwhile, much of the cultural production (music, T.V., acceptable discourse) continues to drift along where it does…

I know, I know. Smith and Hayek may not be enough, but they offer quite a bit:

‘Smith offers us nothing less than a critique of ‘scientific socialism’, a doctrine that was to emerge almost two centuries later. This theory asserts that a benevolent government may achieve the social good, or, at any rate, socially desirable ends, through planning and directing a society and its citizens by means of legislation, rules, regulations and administrative fiat. ‘