The Pagan Roots of Liberalism

Here's an excerpt from a fascinating piece by Michael Knox Beran. Using Barack Obama as a paragon of the modern liberal man, Beran limns the essentially pagan origins of modern-day liberalism. His observations on liberal culture and celebrity are particularly noteworthy.

Four: Liberalism’s celebrity elites have spawned an artistic culture that makes a fetish of what is hellish in human nature: in contrast to the art of Dante and Baudelaire and Dostoevsky, the new poetic culture of Warhol, Madonna, and their imitators offers its devotees no insight into the possibility of transcending, through divine grace, what is hellish in us. Obama worked to “block a bill that was designed solely to protect the life of infants already born, and outside the womb, who had miraculously survived the attempt to kill them during an abortion.”

Five: The poetry of liberal celebritydom is characterized by a rhythmic primitiveness evident in the monotonous backbeat of the bass drum (that primal, Jupiter Tonans thumping that often emanates from passing cars). Pope Benedict calls this music “Dionysian” both because of its “cultic character” and its power to enslave the soul to the “elemental passions.” Yet in spite of its brutish qualities, the new music has to a great extent replaced, as an educative force, the West’s older poetic culture which, before it was scrapped as a teaching tool by liberal educators in the last century, provided for the intergenerational transmission of artistic and spiritual culture.

Obama’s strategy is based on exciting, in the electorate, the same hysterical and cultic enthusiasm that the Pope has rightly diagnosed as a sickness of modern secular culture.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmZhOGRlZTcwOTVlNmVmOWJhYmIzMmNhNGE5MjVmYzc=