You can move a lot faster when not burdened by Facts and Truth

BS for the Masses or the 'Big Lie,' "if you tell it often enough they will believe it!" m/r

The Dogma Business | National Review Online

By Jonah Goldberg  7-19-14

Progressives are quicker to seize on the political opportunities created by a changing culture. 

… If you’ve been reading my stuff over the years, you’ll find a number of common themes (“And recycled jokes. Let’s not forget those.” — The Couch). One such theme is that liberalism hides behind seemingly value-neutral or benign language in order to advance a value-laden and not necessarily benign agenda. That was the basic idea behind The Tyranny of Clichés.Conservatives argue as conservatives. Liberals tend to argue not so much as liberals, but in a variety of disguises, each of which tries to draw on authority unearned by liberalism itself. Indeed, the history of American liberalism can be understood as a series of costume changes. A new nominally non-ideological discipline emerges — political science, engineering, public health, psychology, environmentalism, neuroscience and, these days, various forms of data prestidigitation — and liberals flock to it. They don the latest fashionable version of the white smock and say — à la Bill Murray in Ghostbusters — “back off man, we’re scientists.” Or to be more fair, they claim to be speaking for the scientists, engineers, psychologists, and other experts. “We’re not ideologues, we go with the facts.” This game was old when Walter Lippmann came out with his Drift and Mastery. After all, Karl Marx, the Babe Ruth of this sport, had long before insisted that his shtick wasn’t opinion or even mere analysis, but a new science.

In 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address at Yale. He explained that “political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution” of today’s challenges. At a press conference the same year, he expanded on the idea. “Most of the problems . . . that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems.” These problems “deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men” and should therefore be left to the experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate.

Today, the political landscape is littered with earnest, well-intentioned, and often, incredibly sanctimonious liberals who insist that they are simply pursuing truth and fact regardless of ideology. This, of course, remains Obama’s favorite pose. It runs through the “scientific consensus” argle-bargle on global warming. …

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