The Pathology of Liberalism

Bottom line, the entire world is now witnessing a regime of fixated Liberal-Leftist-Progressive children trying to run the most powerful country on earth, when what they really need is psychotropic medication, behavioral therapy

By Joan Swirsky ——Bio and Archives--May 12, 2021 @ Canada Free Press

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From the inception of psychology about 140 years ago, medical conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, Tourette’s syndrome, even stuttering, were thought to be psychological in origin—and with enough therapy, enough blaming inadequate parenting, enough talk, enough delving into “feelings,” the sufferer could be treated successfully or even cured.

We now know—thanks to tools like PET scans and pharmaceutical advances—that these conditions are largely biological in nature, more receptive to medications, augmented with behavioral-therapy techniques, than to any of the other “therapies” that were utilized so ineffectually on multimillions of people over the past many decades.

These scans, in fact, have revealed the specific areas of the brain that show increased activity during anger,  revenge, anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, stuttering, pathological lying, cheating, manipulation, obsessive-compulsive behavior, depressive disorders, even cravings for chocolate!

NATURE OR NURTURE?

How do we know these conditions are for the most part biological? Because in addition to the fact that medications have treated them successfully—for example, Haldol for psychoses, Lithium for bipolar disorder, Lexapro for depression, Xanax for anxiety, et al—they have identical symptoms—albeit some more severe than others—in people raised in luxury high-rises in Buenos Aires, slums in Los Angeles, kibbutzim in Israel, huts in rain forests, and penthouses in Manhattan. And also in people raised in both harmonious and dysfunctional homes.

What we also understand is that most intractable mental conditions seem to be genetically driven, rooted in centers of the brain that are still not fully understood. Perhaps this is why political affiliation—with exceptions, of course—seems to run in families.

It is also true, as Linda Goudsmit—author of The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’—points out, that both biology (genetics) and the physical environment (epigenetics)—including foods, chemicals, air, water, and EMF pollution—have profound effects on human pathology. 

Whatever school—genes or environment or both—a person subscribes to, the symptoms displayed by liberals-leftists-progressives—whatever they’re calling themselves today—are obvious to even the casual observer. 

SYMPTOM #1—THE GLUM FACTOR

Liberals are uniformly glum, both in their grim demeanors and bleak outlooks.   This is because their worldview is invariably negative. When things are good, they see only the bad and reach back decades to invoke the Misery Index cited routinely by Democrat President Jimmy Carter and resurrected not only by the dour wannabe-president—and today an alleged traitor—John Kerry in 2004, but in one way or another by every Democrat presidential, congressional, and local candidate to this day. 

With liberals, the glass is always half empty, the sky is always falling. When things could be better, they see only that things could be worse. 

• In the stellar economy that President Trump created—with the GDP, employment, housing sales, and consumer confidence at peak levels: inflation, the trade deficit, and crude oil down; employment of blacks, Hispanics, women and youth sky high, and America achieving energy independence for the first time in history—the liberals among us were inconsolably miserable.
• In measurable and quite astounding educational successes of blacks through Eva Moskowitz’s 47 Charter schools in NY City, liberals see only “too much testing” and a threat to a huge source of their power and income—unions!
• In the face of 3,000 lives being exterminated by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, and escalating Islamic terrorist attacks around the world since then, leftists only see the miniscule if non-existent threat of white supremacists.
• Worse, they see that all of our country’s problems, according to Mary Eberstadt of The Wall St. Journal, are the fault of—ta da—America! 

SYMPTOM #2: THE DEPENDENCY FACTOR

• Liberals are emotional children—no matter their educational pedigrees, fancy credentials, lofty titles, prestigious positions, or economic well-being. That is why they believe in and defend and work for and donate money to and teach their children that there is nothing quite as benevolent and important as Big Government! 

Proof is Joe Biden’s “American Families Plan” to provide—Venezuela-style—federal entitlements including two years of free universal prekindergarten, free childcare for all, paid family and medical leave, two years of community college, on and on and on.

While liberals pretend to fight for the “little guy,” those poor, oppressed illegal aliens, and “people of color,” et al., it is they themselves who feel needy and scared and inadequate and so project their desires to be taken care of onto people they believe have the same infantile needs.  

Given their failure to grow up, it is almost predictable—as a Pew Research Center survey in March 2020 found—that white liberals were “significantly more likely than other racial and ideological groups to be diagnosed with a mental health condition.” 

The survey was inspired by an Evie Magazine article on the possible “scientific correlation” between progressive ideas and mental illness, and it noted that liberal ideology often “forces its followers to wallow in feelings of helplessness and victimhood,” as opposed to “building resiliency against hardship…”

SYMPTOM #3: THE INFANTILE FACTOR

Liberals, like the children they are, live in a world of utopian dreaminess, clinging to an imagined reality and believing that if everyone would just be nice to each other, all the noisy death threats and pesky suicide bombings would go away, and all those grumpy grownups in Republican and especially Conservative circles would see the light.

And so they do what children do when they’re angry at grownups. They call names and have temper tantrums.

• Who but an adult with a child’s mentality could participate in the Women’s March on Washington the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration and think that wearing tasteless, cringe-producing pussy hats and spewing vulgarities in front of the entire world—and their own daughters!—would inspire even one person on earth to admire them, emulate them, and want to join their ranks?
• Who but an adult with an angry child’s lack of self-control would rip up a historical document—President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union speech—as did Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the quintessentially inappropriate temper tantrum of our century? 
  

SYMPTOM #4—THE RAGE FACTOR

To understand the left’s treasonous rage, it is important to understand that the most cherished value in the life of children (read liberals) is to be “liked” by their peers, a theory that Judith Rich Harris has exhaustively documented in her best-selling and revolutionary book, The Nurture Assumption.

According to the evangelical religion of leftism, if America were not so strong, so powerful, so rich, so successful—so enviable to the rest of the world—things would be better. This is because liberals hate strength and power and wealth and success, except, that is, when they are the beneficiaries! It is significant to note that the richest politicians in Congress are Democrats!

This fantasy flourishes, says Evan Sayet, author of THE WOKE SUPREMACY: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto, because liberals are “wedded to the childish philosophy of—multiculturalism’ … the fantasy that all cultures are equally good. It is why they “believe we should—celebrate diversity,’ as if all differences—say freedom of religion and massacring all infidels—are equally worthy of celebration.”

“We laugh at the stupidity of the Democrats who go after cartoon skunks, plastic potatoes and pancake syrups,” Sayet continues, “wondering if anything is too small for them not to be outraged about. The answer is no. Totalitarian means total—right down to the tiniest things. It’s the way it was in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and every other Leftist regime. It’s the way it is with the Woke Supremacist movement of today.”

The entire world, in fact, had a close-up view of this ugly trait while witnessing the four years of uncontrolled rage, fury, acting-out, and widespread criminal acts after the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016. This was the behavior of poor losers. 

But even in the flush of electoral victories, liberals are unable to conceal their endemic rage and inevitably reveal themselves as sore winners! Even today, six months after the, ahem, election of Democrat Joe Biden, they’ve been unable to recover from President Donald J. Trump! No surprise….they still haven’t recovered from George W. Bush’s defeat of Al Gore in 2000!

 

Book Review: The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies, by Josef Joffe

Reviewed by Jay Lehr

I will cut to the chase and tell you that this book is the most brilliant discourse on world economics and its history I have ever read. If you have ever worried about China one day over taking the United States in your life time or that of your grandchildren’s, this book will eliminate those sleep depriving thoughts. A sub title for the book could have been The reality of China's declining path to progress. One must care about both history and the realities of economic outcomes to fully enjoy the abundant supporting information that Joffe presents to his readers. But even a speed reader will discover a bounce in their step when the journey through its pages is complete. And if education is your main concern, buy the book just to read the chapter Challengers and Champions to know how well we are doing as a nation in spite of the impediments placed in our way by our government and its teachers unions.

The myth of our decline is mainly homemade by our resident doomsayers, originating in the 1950s, when Sputnick’s launch made Russia look pre-eminent and then reenacted once every decade with the threat from another country. But if history has one certain message, it is the transience of spectacular growth, a fate that may have already overtaken China as it did earlier to Russia, Europe and Japan.

Joffe succinctly summarizes the historic ups and downs of the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and even Reagan years, where he shows the downs to be exacerbated by journalistic fictions when comparing us to what were, in all cases, inferior competitors. It has been the incessant drum beat of America’s shrinking global power and prestige that surfaced through the decades, that has made our populace constantly concerned that we are sinking slowly, while others were rising with our influence on the wane.

Indeed there have been ample catastrophes on the world’s stage to feed the journalists and doomsayers with smoke where fire did not exist. None offered greater fodder than Jimmy Carter with his famous Malaise speech of 1979 which led Newsweek to print a cover story “Has the U.S. Lost its Clout”.  On the opposite side of the coin, Reagan used these misguided feelings to propel himself into office with his famous campaign speech “It is Morning Again in America”.

When Japan was predicted to overtake us in 1985 their economy was one third of ours, and five years later it was half of ours. Shift to the present and it is again one third of ours; so much for linear projections, “tomorrow will be like yesterday.” Joffe explains to us.

 “Japan’s bureaucratically guided capitalism..demonstrated an increasing propensity to corruption. The banking system that once gushed forth limitless capital was mired in bad debt and cover-up. The school system? An inhuman pressure cooker that was good for rote learning, but flunks on fresh thinking.” Now he tells us that China is following that same scenario.

We were told that America was evolving into a nation of hamburger flippers, pizza makers and big box store clerks, but in fact the opposite was true. The primary indicator of national success is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per worker, and we have always outranked our nearest competitor by a wide margin over the the past 50 years.

At the turn of this century globalization became the rage and here we were destined to lose our edge. It did not happen.  “The nice thing about prophecy” Joffe tells us is that doom never comes with a date.”

The crash of 2008 gave the doomsayers new hope of our decline, but who among the world’s nations is roaring back? Only the U.S. of A.. Usually “Declinists” just come back, they never repent but Roger Altman the former Deputy Treasury Secretary has done just that with this quote, “the US banking system has recovered faster than anyone could have imagined. Capital and liquidity has been rebuilt to levels unseen in decades.”  Joffe tells us that the United States has made a huge leap in industrial competitiveness and can look forward to bringing back jobs from the rest of the world. Our breath taking increase in energy development from horizontal drilling in shale will increase our GDP a full percentage point within five years, he says.

Joffe traces declinism throughout history beginning with the bible itself. It has always been a mechanism to first scare people and then offer to lead them out of despair. He quotes Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist “Arch-pessimists are feted, showered with honors and rarely challenged let alone confronted with their past mistakes.”

For some the book offers more history and statistics than one may desire but these parts can be sped through.

Most readers will recall the recent focus on the BRICs, Brazil, Russia, India and China, said to inherit the earth. Today they all find themselves mired in economic turmoil, and of course the European Unions financial crisis is everyday news. It is not clear how China could soon best a nation like the United States that weighs in with a per person income ten times larger. “A nation becomes neither rich nor powerful by adding 1.3 billion very poor people”, Joffe says.

The authors analysis of our superior military power versus all other nations is inspiring both in terms of hardware, planes, ships, tankers and military bases, all of which dwarf the rest of the world. He surprises us with figures that show that this is actually all very economical.

Joffe traces the economic miracles of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and China, explaining that none can ever last, as he says “whether it is balloons, airplanes or economies, what goes up must come down. His basic knowledge of economics explains the formula that cannot last” low beginnings, spectacular growth, rising prosperity, authoritarian rule, forced capital accumulation, infant industry protection, a high saving rate and an under valued currency”. His detailed analysis of all the problems China has created including corruption and the wealth accrued by its leaders is a fascinating read. He leaves no question unanswered about their present and future. They are in a double bind that will stifle future economic growth regardless of the political direction they go.

Joffe summarizes a presentation by a Chinese scholar in 2011 presented at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center assessing America’s advantages in the global contest.

They include: population, geographic position, natural resources, military muscle, high level technology and education, cultural soft power, cyber power, allies, geopolitical strength, intelligence capabilities, intellectual power and global strategic power.

In the final chapter, America, the West, and the Rest, Joffe explains all elements of world order no longer ruled by one, two or five nations, or even the U.S. Battles win tactical gains, no longer strategic gains, while explaining clearly how world power created their earlier empires over the past 500 years.

This book is difficult to put down both for the strength of its argument and the joy it brings to the formerly pessimistic reader. In the end you will not buy into to the doomsayer’s message again, and the state of our current federal administration will bother you less. I am well aware that my reviews have the feel of high school Cliff Notes, short circuiting the need to buy the book. Trust me here that I can never come close to creating a pale shadow of this great book. Read my review and you will smile for a day, read the book and smile for a decade.