We followed them into the intellectual bogs of Freudianism and Marxism and all the philosophical baggage that went along with that crap.

Now we are following them into mid-century totalitarianism.

(Apparently Roosvelt couldn’t pull it off to progressive’s complete satisfaction).

It seems that they have stumbled on the idea that we may have had it right. That there’s something to all that strange American freedom business.

So maybe in 50 years we’ll follow them into a weak watery version of the original American freedoms.

It’s all so bone-headed and pathetic.

Intellectual weakness is perfectly tolerable and innocent in people with no pretensions of intellectual mastery.

It’s disgusting in our pompous cultural elites.

Hooray! With just one sweet –– blissfully sweet –– sentence Angela Merkel does away with volumes of muddy Liberal philosophy and years of socialist cant. No more soupy collectivist abstractions for those Germans, no more razzle-dazzle Keynesian economics, no more useless Marxist experiments.

Dangerous stuff. Who knows where it will all lead?!

By God, before long they’ll even have the trains running on schedule, those German running-dog capitalist swine! What then? Promises kept? Contracts observed? Property rights? Profits? Economic growth? Prosperity? Fiscal responsibility? The end of serfdom?

Thank God for the token! one lip is still free,
One spirit untrammeled, unbending one knee!
Like the oak of the mountain, deep-rooted and firm,
Erect, when the multitude bends to the storm.

— John Greenleaf Whittier, “Ritner”