By J. R. Dunn
The left’s slide into irrationality in recent years should come as no surprise. There is no way the ideology – in particular regarding its record – can be rationally defended any longer. Virtually every claim made by the left has been negated repeatedly, often in the most sanguinary terms imaginable. No reasonable defense remains; all that exists is irrationality.
Leftism began amid claims to being the ultimate in rationalism, an application of scientific method to politics by thinkers as varied as Saint-Simon, Hegel, and Marx. Throughout its development in the 19th through 20th centuries, through the Fabians, the British Labour Party, the New Deal, and the Great Society in the United States, leftism held fast to that claim above all others: that it embodied the sole rational method of dealing with political and social challenges.
With each step, certain predictions were made, and with each step, every last one was undermined and swallowed by history. In the USSR, occupied Eastern Europe, Maoist China, and Cambodia, failure was accompanied by bloodshed on a scale difficult for most millennial individuals to comprehend. In the West, the process was less bloody, but just as thorough. The UK, Sweden, France, and all other social democratic states have been forced to admit defeat. The same occurred in the U.S. with the Great Society and its underpinning programs – federal welfare, urban renewal, the War on Poverty. All were based on the most rigorous rationality, and all were abject failures....To Read More....
The left’s slide into irrationality in recent years should come as no surprise. There is no way the ideology – in particular regarding its record – can be rationally defended any longer. Virtually every claim made by the left has been negated repeatedly, often in the most sanguinary terms imaginable. No reasonable defense remains; all that exists is irrationality.
Leftism began amid claims to being the ultimate in rationalism, an application of scientific method to politics by thinkers as varied as Saint-Simon, Hegel, and Marx. Throughout its development in the 19th through 20th centuries, through the Fabians, the British Labour Party, the New Deal, and the Great Society in the United States, leftism held fast to that claim above all others: that it embodied the sole rational method of dealing with political and social challenges.
With each step, certain predictions were made, and with each step, every last one was undermined and swallowed by history. In the USSR, occupied Eastern Europe, Maoist China, and Cambodia, failure was accompanied by bloodshed on a scale difficult for most millennial individuals to comprehend. In the West, the process was less bloody, but just as thorough. The UK, Sweden, France, and all other social democratic states have been forced to admit defeat. The same occurred in the U.S. with the Great Society and its underpinning programs – federal welfare, urban renewal, the War on Poverty. All were based on the most rigorous rationality, and all were abject failures....To Read More....
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