…and other obstructers of justice. Congress should impeach them. And remove them. They should have done it with Holder, too.

Yes. Impeachment is used far too seldom, largely, I think, because political partisanship has come to take precedence over Congressional prerogatives against the Executive. The Founders would be appalled at the degree to which partisans in Congress allow the Constitution and law to be spit on.

America the not-so beautiful:

Initially, the progressive assault made some sense. Traditional “civics” education often presented American history in an overly airbrushed manner. Many of the nation’s worst abuses – the near-genocide of American Indians, slavery, discrimination against women, depredations against the working class and the environment – were often whitewashed. These shortcomings now have been substantially corrected in recent decades, from what I can see in my children’s textbooks.

Of course, the old attitudes still remain embedded, particularly among those mostly older, white middle- and working-class Americans who are attracted to Donald Trump’s call for America “to be great again.” This kind of unfocused nostalgia does seem likely to be consigned to – as Trotsky dubbed it – “the dustbin of history.”

But as progressive ideology has grown in influence, it has become ever more radicalized, often to the extent of downplaying, or even denying, the remarkable accomplishments of our civilization. It is now considered a “microaggression” on college campuses, notably, those of the University of California, to call America “the land of opportunity,” or celebrate the notion of the “melting pot.” This attitude ignores that America has provided succor and hope to many millions of people who left desperate conditions in places like southern Italy, Ireland, the slums of Lancashire, the shtetls of Russia, rural Japan, China, Central America, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa…

And they continue to come, despite what an atrocious place it is.

Nick Cohen has given up on Labour:

The half-educated fanatics are in control now. I do not see how in conscience I can stay with their movement or vote for their party. I am not going to pretend the next time I meet Owen Jones or those Labour politicians who serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet that we are still members of the same happy family. There are differences that cannot and should not be smoothed over.

I realise now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.

Pro tip, Nick: They never were their causes. They’re not in the U.S., either. Leftists are not, and never have been, liberals.

[Update a while later]

Who really won the Cold War?

It’s all enough to make the few traditional leftists among us want to pull their hair out. The broad alliance of cultural Left and corporate Right, which questions none of our economics, has triumphed in our politics—or at least had until Donald Trump came along to question “settled” issues such as mass, often illegal, immigration. The cultural Left favors this because it gradually dissolves the traditional culture, which they despise, while the corporate Right favors it for the cheap labor. Postmodern capitalism is a least as revolutionary a force as anything cooked up by any Marxist, as well as something any Social Justice Warrior can live with.
Postmodern capitalism is a least as revolutionary a force as anything cooked up by any Marxist.

For more than a generation we have sorely lacked mainstream contributions from social democrats who seek to make our society better, not destroy it. There ought to be no illusions about what the cultural Left seeks: a full revolution of our society and its history, which they see as benighted by irredeemable racism, sexism, and Old Think. Their opponents are objectively evil and on the “wrong side of history,” as Obama himself has assured us, and they must disappear. “Error has no rights,” the mid-nineteenth-century Vatican formulation, has oddly been adapted by our postmodern Left.

As communists once predicted the state itself would wither away, resulting in complete human freedom and progress, the New Left expects that all traditional societal arrangements will wither away, thereby allowing full human freedom and progress. One offered discipline and order and sometimes gulags; the other offers sexual liberty, anti-racism, and iPhones.

But no purpose.