As a good academic, I first define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so
dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use
force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not. Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into
existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that
"noble" goal
Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian.
Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can
and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally
transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or
topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing
things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to
do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?
And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make
it. That seems to have escaped Mr. Obama That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian
is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich
Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His excellent short essay On authority
was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes:
"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is
the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part
by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"
Evan Sayet:
The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and
the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success."
(t=5:35+ on video)
Some useful definitions:
- If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
- If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.
- If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
- If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down.
- If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!)
- If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.
Leftists are classic weak characters. They dish out
abuse by the bucketload but cannot take it when they get it back.
Witness the Loughner hysteria.
Death taxes:
You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to
reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to
unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth. America is no longer the land of the free. It
is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course
The Leftist motto: "I love humanity. It's just people I can't stand" Why are Leftists always talking about hate?
Because it fills their own
hearts. Envy is a strong and
widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for
policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day
State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies
that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas.
Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so
strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The
destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names
in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left
The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary.
They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that
they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in
envy. But the haters come together as the Left.
Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in
it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their
own decisions and follow their own values.
The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more
vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for
ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them. Ronald Reagan famously observed that the
status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist
claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think
that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.
The shallow thinkers of the
Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others
in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion
with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to
abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political.
And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman
Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause.
Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here
Some Leftist hatred arises from the fact that they blame
"society" for their own personal problems and inadequacies, The Leftist hunger for change to the society
that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will
do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price".
Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by
deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably
use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what
haters do.
Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can
they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have
is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes
one's shirt A Leftist assumption:
Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does. "Politicians never accuse you of 'greed'
for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own
money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)
I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A
wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used.
Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their
opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists
seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet
Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation
is truly pitiful
The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a
distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is
truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is
undoubtedly the Devil's gospel. "If
one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness,
one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action."
- Ludwig von Mises
The naive
scholar who searches for a consistent Leftist program will not find it. What
there is consists only in the negation of the present. Because of their need to be different from the
mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk
purses. Among people who should know
better, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which
is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and
failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.
A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an
argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are
threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to
challenge is mere abuse. Because of the
fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and
provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence:
"How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse
substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.
Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights
from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid
state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid --
witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such
restrictions in Israel. Because their
beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good
for us. Conservatives need evidence.
- “Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics.” -- C.J. Keyser
- "Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus
- "The falsification of History has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind." Rousseau
- "Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.
- Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics,
history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance. Socialism makes the individual the slave of
the state – capitalism frees them.
MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would
just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between
you and that dismal fate.
Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes
sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an
excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people
who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what
is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even
accuse conservatives of projection (of course).
The research
shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited
but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that
makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that
personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that
hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred
and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves
as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one
another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive
past.
Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be
right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that
the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet
Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives
of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual
"projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of
themselves.
"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if
the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in
Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the
final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind
from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism
over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression
that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become
articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no
other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See
also here
and here
and here. For roughly two
centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally
associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this
day. See here.
Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are
only a small minority in Israel
Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism
(beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular
Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do
not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos
need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those
countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.
"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming,
liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of
race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are
the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives
champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter
Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right.
My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was
Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists
The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of
abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very
complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is
simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to
avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.
Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the
idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is
laughable
A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931–2005: "You cannot
legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What
one person receives without working for, another person must work for without
receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government
does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea
that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of
them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work
because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is
about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a
"big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather
pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big
notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create
the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than
the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they
purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost
themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help
"the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is
"big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here.
The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally
here
Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable
Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists
today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to
agree with them is the only freedom they believe in) First to fight for right and freedom, And to keep our honor clean, It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors
that they always were.
If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they
do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in a MONOGRAPH
on Leftism.
You can email me (John Ray) here
(Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John",
"Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine --
but my preference is for "JR"
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