America’s ever-increasing red shift

Howard Sutherland writes:

You are probably familiar with the astrophysical term “red shift,” a shift toward the red part of the spectrum given off by an object in space, used as a yardstick to measure the velocity at which stars and galaxies are moving away from the observer, and thus to measure their distance from the observer, since, according to the current understanding of the expansion of the universe, the farther an object is from us, the faster away from us it is moving. In this connection, thanks to your post about Arlen Specter’s Big Lie about why he left the GOP (namely that the GOP has moved away from Specter and off to the right, while Specter has stayed in the same place, whereas in truth the GOP has been shifting left, while Specter has been shifting left even faster), it occurs to me that red shift could also be a shorthand for the vector of politics and social life throughout the West at least since the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution. Well, really since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution or even, for us traditional Catholics, since the Renaissance and Reformation. My favorite century is the twelfth (although I like knowing about things like red shifts, fighter jets, space flight and Moon landings, so the twentieth century has its merits).

We live in a time when the social and political spectrum is being shifted continually and relentlessly to the red, on a leftward vector away from tradition, faith and reason. I thought about calling it a “left shift,” but I like using the red shift as a double-entendre better. Someone has probably thought of it already.

What got me thinking about this was Tim W’s very acute observation in your Arlen Specter post:

Meanwhile, as the press is ranting about how far to the right the leftward-drifting GOP has allegedly become, the Democrats have indeed moved far to the left, though no one says so.

That is completely true, but I still don’t think it fully describes the vectors of the two big American political parties since the cultural revolution of 1964-1973, to keep things a little closer to us in time. Let’s posit a political spectrum graduated from zero (the left end) to ten (the right end), where the left end is well and truly leftist, and the right end is thoroughly traditionalist. I would say that when Richard Nixon was inaugurated for the second time and the Vietnam cease-fire took effect, the Democrats were at about 4 and the Republicans were at about 5. What has happened since then?

The Democrats have been redshifting relentlessly, to the point where by the inauguration of our new Alien-in-Chief (thanks, Larry, for that moniker), I would say they are now somewhere between 2 and 1.5, so I agree completely with Tim W. that the Democrats have been racing leftward, and that to portray the GOP as becoming “more right-wing” is farcical.

So what about the GOP? At 5, they were a long way away from the right end to begin with, and I would say that they too have been redshifting, more fitfully—Reagan wasn’t a thoroughgoing conservative, but the velocity of the GOP red shift slowed temporarily, though it did not stop, in his day—and somewhat slower than the Democrats. Not merely drifting leftward, I’m afraid. I think by the time the Republicans nominated McCain and declined to fight B. Hussein for the presidency, they had reached a point somewhere between 3 and 2.5. It is only their (increasingly fainthearted) opposition to things like abortion and the “marriage” of homosexuals that has kept them from redshifting to the vicinity of 2 on my spectrum by now.

There are many things accelerating the red shift, but the most important one is the demographic transformation of America’s population through immigration. I can’t think of any immigrant group that arrives more right-wing than American natives, and once here the immigrants’ birth rates rise as ours falls. Of course, our willingness to contracept and abort our posterity only exacerbates the problem.

The open question is whether there is some point on my spectrum (somewhere between 1.5 and 0?) where a regime becomes so leftist, so redshifted, that Americans won’t tolerate it. I would guess that if we still had the American population of 1950 or even 1970, we would be past that point already. I don’t think the red shift can be stopped by changing the vector of either big party—we need to leave them behind. We need a blue shift! HRS

LA replies:

Since the red shift indicates both the speed with which an object is receding from us and its distance from us, and since you are using red shift in the political and moral sense of a shift away from God and traditional civilization, the famous passage from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Sect. 125, would be appropriate.

A madman comes the town square and announces he is looking for God.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?”

But the people stare at him in astonishment and say nothing.

“I have come too early,” he said then. “My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering, it has not yet reached the ears of men…. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”

Thus, several decades before the discovery of the expansion of the universe via the discovery of the red shift, Nietzsche visualized a universe in which everything is moving chaotically away from everything else, a universe in which all coherence is lost, because the center, which is God, and, along with God, truth and reason, has been killed, and he has been killed by man, in man’s own thought.

And speaking of America moving to the left and to nihilism and nothingness, I quoted the same passage in an entry in July 2003 in the aftermath of the catastrophic Grutter v. Bollinger and Lawrence v. Texas decisions, and Mr. Sutherland had a comment in reply, which would be interesting to read in light of his present comment.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 05, 2009 01:46 PM | Send