The Christian “elect” believed that those who did not adhere to their creed were going to hell. My grandmother is an example. In my opinion, the lefty attitude towards the “deplorables” is rather similar. The “deplorables” do not adhere to the social justice narrative de jour. For that the lefties consider them beyond the pale, just as the “elect” viewed those who did not adhere to the creed of their particular church.

In a sense the Christian “elect” could have been considered more forgiving, as it was often believed that those who did not agree with their particular church creed were more mistaken than they were evil. I get the impression that lefties consider the “deplorables” to be downright evil.

I have a cousin I’m fond of who has bought into Howard Zinn whole hog. Somehow, I don’t think he’s aping his Calvinist great-great-granddaddy. I don’t think his mother (a Bible study denizen who’s been on the evangelical-pentacostal spectrum) is an inveterate subscriber to dispensational pre-millennialism or predestinarian notions. His grandparents were ordinary broad-church Episcopalians. His great-grandparents had their issues with the Calvinism they were raised with as well, though his great-grandfather may have subscribed to it in a pro-forma way.

I highly recommend An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America. Amazon review:

We live in a profoundly spiritual age–but in a very strange way, different from every other moment of our history. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand on the side of morality–to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light.

Or so Joseph Bottum argues in An Anxious Age, an account of modern America as a morality tale, formed by its spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the Mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life.

Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber’s sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies in contemporary social class, adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave it meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls “The Poster Children,” Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old Mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors’ Christianity. Turning to “The Swallows of Capistrano,” the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories–and later defeats–of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying Mainline voice in public life.

Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.

For example, Protestants of an earlier era were very concerned with belonging to the “elect:” those who were going to heaven. The agnostic or atheist descendants of those Protestant churchgoers are also very concerned with belonging to the “elect.” Here belonging to the “elect” means adhering to the ever-changing “social justice” concern of the day. For ever changing, consider the left’s current opinions on gay marriage or immigration, which are rather different from what were considered approved lefty opinions on those topics several decades ago.

Leftism has replaced more religions than Christianity. For example, for a huge number of Jews it has replaced Judaism.

And no, leftism is not a religion. For its adherents it functions in many ways that resemble a religion and has many characteristics it shares with a religion. But it is not a religion. To call it one is a metaphor.

“Damore wrote a memo and circulated it on company time.”

Art Deco in reply:

Again, the management at Google had solicited input. When they got it from him, he was fired. They’re dishonorable scum, and should be treated badly by the larger society.

I am reminded of Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, where the regime solicited opinions from intellectuals. The name Hundred Flowers came from a poem.

The name of the movement originated in a poem: “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”

When the regime found out the opinions weren’t what the regime liked, those who had given their opinions were subjected to intense public criticism,and in some cases, sent to prison camps.

The first part of the phrase is often remembered as “let a hundred flowers bloom”. It is used to refer to an orchestrated campaign to flush out dissidents by encouraging them to show themselves as critical of the regime, and then subsequently imprison them. This view is supported by authors Clive James and Jung Chang, who posit that the campaign was, from the start, a ruse intended to expose rightists and counter-revolutionaries, and that Mao Zedong persecuted those whose views were different from the party’s. For instance, in Jun Chang and Jon Halliday’s text Mao: The Unknown Story, Chang asserts that “…Mao was setting a trap, and…was inviting people to speak out so that he could use what they said as an excuse to victimise them.”
Mao’s personal physician Li Zhisui, suggested that the campaign was “a gamble, based on a calculation that genuine counterrevolutionaries were few, that rebels like Hu Feng had been permanently intimidated into silence, and that other intellectuals would follow Mao’s lead, speaking out only against the people and practices Mao himself most wanted to subject to reform.”[10] Only when criticisms began shifting toward him personally did Mao move to suppress the Hundred Flowers movement and punish some of its participants.

(IOW, when the regime is run by one person, criticism of the acts of that regime is interpreted as criticism of the man on top.)
The lesson is that when your employer solicits your opinion, be very careful in expressing your opinion, just as you would have been careful in Mao’s China- of the China of today.

I doubt they’ve even thought about it; but if they did think about it, they would decide that any discomfort felt by a Republican, Googler or not, is all to the good.

Needless to say, I’ll also sue the bleeping bleep for every penny it possesses for the aforementioned felony fraud of having lied to gain employment in spite of extraordinarily disreputable behavior — to wit, being a leftist. The entire class of leftists puts ordinary rapists, robbers, murderers, and child molesters to shame for deeply anti-social characteristics. Leftists are evil and need to be savagely counter-persecuted in every conceivable way. Ideally, they’d all be rounded up and worked to death in gigantic labor camps with any excess proceeds over administrative costs directed to partially compensating the survivors of huge mass murders by communists and socialists.

Justice is justice.

Sears, Roebuck and Eastman Kodak were yuuuge in their field 35 years ago. Borders was impressive and up and coming 25 years ago. Newsweek and The Boston Globe were lucrative media properties as recently as 20 years ago. Things change. If fortune smiles on us, Google will be destroyed.

That doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a reasonable inference that their seminal institutional culture was disordered and they haven’t yet faced competition which has broken that culture.

Damore wrote a memo and circulated it on company time.

Again, the management at Google had solicited input. When they got it from him, he was fired. They’re dishonorable scum, and should be treated badly by the larger society.