All America’s Problems are Leftist Problems

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The problem with solving problems is that once they are solved, no one needs the solver anymore. The better kinds of problems are recurring problems that ensure customer retention, employing plumbers, locksmiths and police officers, but the best kind are the completely unsolvable problems.

And those are the only kinds of problems that the Left wants to solve.

Given enough human ingenuity and technological development, most problems can concievably be addressed and that is why the Left has to contrive to make them unsolvable by either causing the problem (homelessness), defining it in such a way that it is inherently unsolvable (equity), defining the inappropriate problem while obscuring the actual problem (gun violence) or inventing fake problems (global warming) that can never be solved because they don’t exist in the first place.

Why create unsolvable problems? They’re a virtually infinite source of money and power.

The Left came into being by defining inequality as its signature problem. Since inequality is a factor of human nature and every attempt to solve it involves creating more inequality, it was the perfect unsolvable problem. But the primal leftist error was defining inequality in social and economic terms. Growing technology and social mobility made both social and economic inequality managable even as leftits were building up a full head of steam, toppling governments and setting off revolutions.

(Manageable is a long way from the equity ideal, but it’s all most people actually want from life.)

Eventually, by default, the only ‘unequal’ people left to advocate for were the dysfunctional whose lives could not be improved through their own efforts. Criminals, addicts, the lazy and those with poor impulse control became the last outpost of the working class proliteriat who would not work.

The working class who would not work became the new vanguard of the revolution. The wealthy student revolutionaries who also didn’t want to work went to war against society on its behalf. Along the way they lost the working class who did want to work and never looked back. The working class who would work became the new bourguese and the enemy of the non-working working class.

The social and economic theories of socialism depended on the idea that there were no individuals, only societies, and that individual dysfunction was really social dysfunction. The worse the individual, the worse the society. Solve the society and the criminals and junkies would become research chemists. And they would be if only society were not holding back their potential through systemic oppression.

Eventually the worst human beings on earth, serial killers, crackheads and terrorists, came to embody the leftist mission of expopsing their crimes as an expression of society’s seamy underbelly. The more evil the crime, the more it testified to the evils of the society that had brought it about. Those who were guiltiest were the most innocent among us because they had suffered the most at the hands of society. And those who were innocent were evil because their lack of crimes showed their complicity in an oppressive system. If they were truly innocent, they would also be criminals or terrorists.

In this way, good became evil, and evil became good. The problem of making good into evil had been solved long ago in the Garden of Eden, but the problem of turning evil into good was unsolvable on the leftist terms of blaming society while denying individual accountability.

Crime and terrorism became unsolvable problems because no matter how much leftists punished society by freeing criminals and turning countries over to terrorists, things never got any better.

The unsolvable problem that could never be solved went on being unsolved. Endless billions of dollars were thrown at the problem of giving evil everything it wanted so that it would turn into good.

It never worked and evil took over instead. Some leftists had desired this very outcome. Others were too foolish to understand the inevitable outcome of their adopted worldview. Most were happy to have an unsolvable problem whose solving could consume the resources of the entire planet for a billion years without doing anything except making the problem endlessly worse.

The Left’s problems are unsolvable because they are misstated to align with a simple ideological formula which always assumes that all problems are caused by those with power, that power is defined in economic terms and that the solution to those problems is the transfer of power away from those with money to leftists who will use the money to solve all the problems that they caused.

In short, industries are to be broken up and transformed into governmental organizations.

Whether it’s changes in the weather, school shootings or drug addicts lying in the street, the formula demands variations on the same solution. An industry, real estate, firearms manufacturers or oil companies, are scapegoated, followed by demands that the industry be regulated, banned and otherwise subsumed by the government. None of this has any hope of changing the amount of bums on the street, crazies in schools or the temperature outside, but it does transfer massive amounts of wealth and power from one group to another. And that is all that the Left ever really does.

The one thing that the Left will never do is solve a problem. It however excels at creating them. If there is a problem out there, it will do everything within its power to make it worse by rejecting the obvious root causes and insisting that all the efforts must be directed at its ideological formula which very often has the added side effect of juicing whatever the root cause is. Faced with crime, it insists on freeing criminals, with homelessness, it subsidizes it, with school shootings carried out by suicidal fame-hungry teens, it talks of them endlessly and makes them as famous as they could ever hope to be.

Are terrorists unleashing violence? The only thing to do is throw billions of dollars and enough territory at them so they can build a state. Is there economic inequality? Drive out businesses. Have people lost good work habits? Subsidize them so that they never learn those habits. Is there gun violence? Make sure that only the criminals have guns and have nothing to fear from the police.

And so the unsolvable problems thrive among feudal leftist outposts of urban human misery.

Eventually the problem ceases to be the problem and the Left becomes the problem. The Left claims that it knows the only way to solve all our problems, but it’s the Left that is creating our problems.

And there is no way to solve all of our problems except by defeating the Left. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

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