First Rule of Defeating Leftists: Don't Call Them 'Liberals'

I'm 41 posted an excellent entry the other day, "The Blogger’s Rules For Defeating Liberals."

However, I cringed with all the references to "liberals." These goons are not "liberal." They're progressive collectivists (as the most hardened of them self-identify) or, frankly, simply radical leftists.

Zilla has more:

I can’t stand to see them called “liberals” because there is nothing “liberal” about them. Words matter, as they say. Call ‘em what they really are: LEFTISTS. The edit to the [blog] title is from me, because I don’t want to see the freaks called by their preferred misnomer at any place that I have editorial control over.

When referring to "liberals," the proper meaning makes reference to those early thinkers evoking the ideology of individual liberty and limited government, most importantly John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Adam Smith. The Democrat Party until roughly John F. Kennedy espoused a form of "modern liberalism" that by default drew on America's constitutional foundations in liberty but increasingly sought an expanded role for the state in promoting economic equality and social welfare. Yet, the left today is almost completely unrecognizable from the Cold War liberalism of Kennedy and Harry Truman. Today's left is a quasi-Marxist, state-collectivist ideological apparatus, intent to delegitimize private property and wealth accumulation and to elevate extreme ethnic tribalism as the blunt cudgel of radical redistributionist class warfare. President Obama is the chief class warrior and national divider in this mode, the perfect vessel of the vengeful fever swamp ghouls of the Democrat Party.

Zilla might not even be this charitable, although that's the pretty well-understood ideological bastardization of "liberalism" over the last couple of generations. Today's leftists are the Orwellian zombies who spout tolerance but practice extreme racism, anti-Semitism and viewpoint intolerance. These ghouls preach "peace" and "respect" as the highest principles but instead practice union thuggery and anti-speech bullying and lawfare as standard operating procedures. And more than ever, the left phantasmagorically operates under a false consciousness of objective lies as progressive truth. The "tent trutherism" coming out of Lansing is just the latest manifestation, but President Obama's 2012 campaign will perhaps be remembered by traditional historians as the most dishonest (and morally reprobate) in post-modern history, marked especially by a media empire in service to state power, with journalists effectively functioning as party apparatchiks for the endlessly voracious tax-and-spend regime of the soul-crushing collectivist machine.

That's why people should simply refuse to call these people "liberals." They are precisely the opposite of the great classical liberals, and are indeed the very kinds of tyrants for which the latter developed theories to frustrate, prevent, and destroy.