Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk tries to break "The Silence of the Left":

Cathy Seipp - who also runs the excellent Cathy’s World blog - had an interesting column up in the LA Times yesterday built around the notion that:

“ … one of the great paradoxes of our time is that two groups most endangered by political Islam, gays and women, somehow still find ways to defend it”

While a somewhat sweeping generalization, it goes to the heart of the Fortuynist argument that the groups that benefited most from the liberalization of our society in the 1960s and 70s, probably are least aware of what they stand to lose if radical Muslims and their western appeasers are allowed to embrace and implement a new social agenda.

Seipp’s claims sparked a sharp rebuff from Gabriel Rotello on the Huffington Post where he countered by compiling a list of notable gays and women who have taken on the excesses of radicalism in our midst. That of course is a fairly superficial way of addressing the issue as anyone can come up with a list that contains Sullivan, Bawer, Manji, Hirsi Ali and the late Fortuyn. But it doesn’t address the core of the issue and therefore Rotello largely misses the point.

The fact that the focus is on these few brave individuals that speak up and who now in some cases have to live under police protection proves Seipp’s point: it is the left at large that has been silent. Where is that mass movement, where are the rallies, those concerted efforts that characterized women’s and gay movements from the 1960s onwards? And it is not just gays or women: there is a string of left-wing causes which always managed to find a joint umbrella under which it protested the free west’s accomplishments, think of the “women against nukes” or the various “animal rights” groups. I grew up in a country that was in the vanguard of this leftist revolution and which as a result spawned a political and media establishment that was firmly rooted in the values of this post-war social and cultural revolution.

This is certainly far from a new phenomenon: in his recent essay on H.L. Mencken, Fred Siegel dubbed Menck an "Anarcho-Authoritarian" for his pro-German attitudes World War I:

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

More recently, the issues that Dorsman focuses on in his post, the "women’s and gay movements from the 1960s onwards", as he puts it, are, at least in the US, far more trends of the 1970s than they were of the sixties, which was dominated, at least until 1968, by a relatively benign FDR/Great Society liberalism, until it morphed into something far more punitive.

As a result, the anarcho-authoritarianism that Siegel described, while it may be a mouthful of an expression, was definitely at work in the 1970s, particularly in Hollywood. Tinseltown simultaneously celebrated liberal sexual mores in its 1970s movies, while simultaneously championing societies would happily through anyone caught committing such actions into the gulag. One of the peaks of this mental schism was the 1975 Oscars, as James Webb noted in 1997:

There is perhaps no greater testimony to the celebratory atmosphere that surrounded the Communist victory in Vietnam than the 1975 Academy Awards, which took place on April 8, just three weeks before the South’s final surrender. The award for Best Feature Documentary went to the film Hearts and Minds, a vicious piece of propaganda that assailed American cultural values as well as our effort to assist South Vietnam’s struggle for democracy. The producers, Peter Davis and Bert Schneider [who plays a role in David Horowitz’s story—see page 31], jointly accepted the Oscar. Schneider was frank in his support of the Communists. As he stepped to the mike he commented that "It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated." Then came one of the most stunning—if intentionally forgotten—moments in Hollywood history. As a struggling country many Americans had paid blood and tears to try to preserve was disappearing beneath a tank onslaught, Schneider pulled out a telegram from our enemy, the Vietnamese Communist delegation in Paris, and read aloud its congratulations to his film. Without hesitating, Hollywood’s most powerful people rewarded Schneider’s reading of the telegram with a standing ovation.

Scott Fitzgerald once said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function". Not entirely paradoxically, he expressed that thought in "The Crack-Up".