A Field Guide to the American Left Dangerous policies, incoherent ideas, and amoral politics. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-field-guide-to-the-american-left/
The Democrats have responded to their repudiation by the voters by tripling down on the toxic ideas and preposterous policies that make sense only when one remembers that, as DOGE has exposed, in the end, they are patent grifts, opportunities for enriching themselves and their plutocratic, corporate globalist co-grifters.
On one hand, this state of affairs makes for great comedy enlivened by 100-proof schadenfreude. But we should remember that as British PM Harold MacMillan famously said, “events” are the most frightening thing in politics. The unforeseen, the unpredictable, the astonishing anomaly, all are most powerful in representative governments with regularly scheduled elections that invite the voters to ask, whether fairly or not, those in power, “What have you done for us lately?”
Despite having twice been victims of that biennial habit of our democratic republic, the Dems seem to keep deepening the hole they’ve been digging for decades, mostly by endorsing various iterations of Marxism, and abandoning the Constitution––but also by willful blindness to the voters’ anger over their policies that defy not just the Constitution, but also morality, virtue, common sense, and the science they arrogantly claim as their guide.
Typical of the Dems’ willful blindness is their attacks on the Republicans’ attempts to stop the blatant corruption of our elections by passing the proposed Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility Act.
As Joe Concha recently pointed out, on this issue the contrast between the majority of voters, who are concerned about electoral integrity, and the Dems’ left-wing caucus, was one of the issues that cost them the election last November. Yet “208 Democrat Congressmen,” Concha reports, voted against “a bill aimed at preventing those who entered the country illegally from voting,” and 47 Senators for now are also lined up to vote against it. “And since 60 votes are needed for cloture,” Concha reminds us, “that means this is dead on arrival.”
But according to Gallup, Concha continues, 84% of people “support requiring a photo ID to vote, . . . with 83% supporting showing proof of citizenship when registering to vote.” Yet the buffoonish Dem political flavor of the month, Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, still is claiming of that the bill is “a straight-up voter suppression bill.”
But this is just one of many Dem policy proposals that large majorities of voters in numerous polls have indicated angers them: once-prestigious universities allowing terrorists and anti-Semites to pollute their campuses with violence and genocidal slogans; energy policies that defy the laws of physics and common sense alike while endangering our economy; “transgender” nonsense that violates the laws of biology and the whole purpose of Title 9 of the Civil Rights Act by allowing real males to compete against real women, and invade their privacy in locker rooms and showers.
All these lunatic policies and programs, despite obviously helping the Republicans to a decisive victory last year, are still part of the Democrats’ political program, and are touted by the Dems and shilled by their media fellow-travelers.
But sheer stupidity, third-rate educations, venal opportunism, and tyrannical ambitions do not alone account for these dangerous policies and amoral politics. Such behavior is the consequence of the incoherent ideas that for over a century have assaulted our Constitution and corrupted our culture.
Secularism, the banishment of God and religion from our national town square, has left morality, ethics, and virtue marooned in the merely material realm. As a consequence, political religions, what French philosopher Chantal del Sol calls “black market religions,” have filled the void and provided narratives of salvation, redemption, and heaven on earth, with all the unquestioned authority and uncritical obedience once commanded by faith. Marxism and its various iterations like progressivism have been the most successful and murderous of these cults.
What follows are the juvenile, incoherent, intolerant behaviors we’ve witnessed from the Dems. The emotional vehemence of the “woke” left––the word itself is redolent of Christianity’s imagery of salvation––is predicated on a passionate certainty that needs no logic, empirical evidence, or coherent arguments. The political heretics must be “cancelled” and silenced, their Constitutional unalienable rights attacked and discarded, and frequently subjected to lethal force. Like the young Nazi with whom Karl Popper tried to reason, today’s “woke” — who murder a CEO for his profession, or throw Molotov cocktails at Tesla vehicles and dealerships, or violently assault Jewish students––“don’t want to argue, they want to shoot.”
Another dimension of this ideology is its status value, its power to convey superiority to hoi polloi, those normal people who lack the credentials of the “brights,” the self-appointed cognitive elites. These chosen ones “follow the science” and preen about their superior virtues that are lacking in the unsophisticated MAGA rubes who rely on tradition, faith, practical wisdom, and common sense. These “deplorables” scorn the scientism of technocratic “experts,” the poseurs of postmodern “higher nonsense,” and the spurious authority of an intelligentsia that, as British PM Stanley Baldwin once quipped, “is to intelligence what a ‘gent’ is to a gentleman.”
This status-mongering explains why the self-styled “resistance,” daring “speakers of truth to power,” and moral preeners are in fact slaves to intellectual received wisdom, stale clichés, and fashions like collectivist economic systems that have for over a century serially failed, as we witnessed during the Biden administration’s carnival of blunders at home and abroad. Yet no amount of failure or repudiation by history can shame the left into acknowledging reality and the truth. Their amour propre is too deep, their disdain of the philistine middle class too important for their inflated self-regard.
Another dysfunction of the left is the adoption of the therapeutic sensibility––the cult of feeling, and conspicuous compassion as a political weapon to wield against their enemies, who are caricatured as heartless, selfish, and evil. But of course, the bleeding-hearts’ solution for the dysfunctions and conditions that create this emotional trauma is to spend more and more taxpayer money. The result is the hypertrophied regulatory regime that empowers unaccountable government clerks to interfere in our lives and the economy by redistributing taxpayer money to their political clients and favored factions.
This therapeutic bent for the ad misericordiam fallacy and melodramatic pathos, were on display recently when Democrat Sen. Chris Van Hollen visited El Salvador and lobbied its president to send Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien and member of the brutal MS-13 gang, back to the U.S. When Van Hollen returned to the U.S., he reported how much Garcia missed his wife and children with a “tear in his eye.” I’m reminded of the quip attributed to Oscar Wilde about Dickens’ lachrymose description of Little Nell’s death: “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears … of laughter.”
Next, identity politics –– founded on the political selection of some citizens to be anointed as victims of heartless conservative policies and bigotry––has been a particularly potent enabler of this malign sentimentalism, and a convenient way to practice what Dickens called “telescopic philanthropy” –– conspicuous displays of “empathy” and “sensitivity” on other citizens’ tax dime. And it also buttresses with the exorbitant sentimentalism of the Marxist narrative that rich, free-market capitalists, who oppress the “poor” and refuse to “pay their fair share,” are keeping humanity from reaching the Marxist paradise of perpetual happiness and equality.
Endorsing romantic illusions about the innate goodness and perfectibility of human life, then, the leftwing sentimentalist chafes at the wisdom of tragic realists like the Founders, who believe in the indelible limits on human nature, and its passions, interests, and corruptibly. The sentimentalists regard the social and political distortions of a fundamentally sweet and cooperative human nature as a problem that only socialism can restore––once capitalism and private property are destroyed.
All these traits of today’s “woke” leftist Democrats are anathema to 75 million voters who still believe in the same principles that created the Constitution and the freest and richest country in history. And the Trump administration is working tirelessly to repair the damage that the enemies of freedom have inflicted. But the fearsome “events” yet to be seen require that we keep our powder dry––and never give in.
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