Liberal Forum

Our age of bizarre ideological conceits—climate-change alarmism, transgender ideology, immigration extremism—is reminiscent of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’
 
It’s an “Emperor’s New Clothes” event for America and perhaps for the rest of the West too, an overdue recognition and repudiation of the regime of oppressive insanities we have been subjected to for a decade or more.

We’re all familiar with the details of Hans Christian Andersen’s moral parable: the unscrupulous tailors who trick a vain monarch into believing their empty work is a fashion innovation, the ambitious courtiers who go along with the fiction and vie with each other for the king’s favor, the crowds who silence their shock at the emperor’s nudity for fear of standing out from the rest, and the small boy who alone calls out the truth in the charade.

For a decade or more—yes, even when Republicans have been nominally in control—we have been led by peddlers of a set of ideas that have clothed our institutions and the country in social and political doctrines, fake claims and strictures that have inflicted untold harms. The fancy new items of invisible attire that our nation’s rulers have made us wear for too long include these:

The idea that people who have stolen into this country illegally should be showered with all the rights and benefits of citizens, that it is immoral to deny them those rights, and that they should instead be treated as victims of persecution and given “sanctuary” in our crowded and fiscally strained cities.

The idea that a nation that sits atop one of the greatest reservoirs of natural energy resources on Earth should forcibly restrain itself from exploiting them to “save the planet” on the basis of politicized science, while other countries are free to do much more damage to the global environment.

The idea that after a century and a half of progress in expiating America’s original sin of racism and making the country more equal, we are suddenly obliged to believe that America is as oppressive as it was in 1619, and that the best way to right the past wrong of treating people based on the color of their skin is to treat people based on the color of their skin.

The idea that children should, without parental consultation or consent, be free to choose their “gender,” be assisted by the state in committing acts of self-mutilation to do so, and all on the understanding that we have repealed millennia of science and just discovered that there is no such thing as biological sex.

The idea that democracy and freedom are best protected by denying people the right to express certain views that the authorities deem “misinformation” and by weaponizing the law against political opponents lest they weaponize the law for political purposes.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/four-more-y ... ?st=TeNatS