Meaning “don’t try to create heaven on earth”, conservatives have used “don’t immanentize the eschaton” to fight liberal social engineering for decades. Coined in 1952, it has persisted through the completion of FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, Nixon’s environmental bureaucracy, the War on Poverty and the War on Terror. Per the conservative narrative, liberals (and sometimes conservatives!) have enacted many layers of new social engineering programs, restricting freedom, taxing success, and subsidizing social decay. Conservatives have lost on every single issue they fought for.
So one of two things has to be true: either all these people were lying and there was no risk of metaphorically immanetizing the eschaton, or liberals did in fact immanentize the eschaton and we’re all living with the consequences.
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