Guest Post by The Zman
An argument I have been making for a long time is that the reason the Left has gone from triumph to triumph is that they are not motivated by reason. Instead, they are powered by a quest for salvation. The social issues that they champion, regardless of any practical considerations, are always cast in moral terms. The issue itself is immaterial. It is being on the right side of the issue that matters. Politics is an endless series of tests they must pass in order to remain on the path of the righteous, leading to the promised land.
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This story about Obama’s reaction to the election is a good example.
Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.
“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.
He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.
This is a recurring theme with the American Left. It is the reason they embraced the term “Progressive” as their preferred label. They start with the unspoken belief that the story of man is written. It is the duty of the righteous to live it out in order to reach salvation. It’s why “being on the right side of history” comes up so often. They think of the struggle as between those on the side of the great historical force and those who are standing in the way of it. The righteous are always looking forward and moving forward.
It is also why they think of the past as a dark age dominated by the sinners. There is no romanticism on the American Left, because the past is by definition further away from the glorious future. Instead, the past is filled with monsters that were either slain by the righteous, or locked away, but ready to return at any moment. For example, they remain forever vigilant about the return of Nazis, as if they are a real thing that still exist. In the mind of the American progressive “Nazi” is just another name for Old Scratch.
Notice in that Times piece that the Trump voters are described as “left behind” rather than unhappy or in disagreement. In other words, the people voting for Trump did so because they were sad for having been left behind by the righteous. Voting for Trump was a cry for help. It’s tempting to see this as part of Obama’s narcissism, but in reality his narcissism is also the result of this deep belief in the flow of history. He was chosen to lead the faithful, so of course he is a narcissist. What savior would not be a bit full of himself?
You’ll notice that Progressives are forever warning about some attempt to “turn back the clock” and return us to a former state of sin. It resonates with Progressives, because for them, the eternal quest for salvation means going forward, breaking away from the degraded past. Trump’s “turning the clock back” is viewed as the wages of sin. Obama thinks he tried too hard to deliver his people to the promised land. The result was the great leap backward into Trumpism. It is a lament and call to redouble the efforts of the faithful.
American Progressives are the purest form of true believers, because they have disconnected their beliefs from practical considerations. Therefore, they are immune to facts and reason. When you examine the language they use to describe politics and the culture, you see the extreme mysticism. Obama does not even really know what “left behind” means, but he is sure it is a bad thing. For him, it is a purely a spiritual issue to be thought of in those terms. Practical considerations simply have no salience for him.
The error the Right has made for generations is to think it is possible to prove the Left wrong, and therefore force them to abandon their agenda. That’s like thinking you can disprove sections of the Koran and cause the Muslims to abandon their faith. In fact, efforts to do so will always be met with a fierce defense of the faith. Practical arguments always embolden the righteous, as it confirms their belief in themselves as moral agents in a holy cause. Your irrational resistance is proof they are on the righteous path.
It’s why the Left have been so effective since the end of the Cold War, but also why it has become so extreme and bizarre. Defending socialism meant ceding authority to objective data like the unemployment rate or GDP growth. That served as a check on the more unhinged elements. Once free of these objective measures, it became a race to come up with the most extreme and bizarre identity group to champion. Lacking a limiting principle, and untethered from practical reality, the Left got increasingly extreme.
While it looks like the left is headed for some sort of crack up or possibly a dormant phase, it is important to remember that people have to believe in something. The reason conservatism was such a flop is it never tried to appeal to this aspect of man’s nature. It was the ideology of the bookkeeper. No matter how fat, dumb and happy, people will always yearn for the eternal. If there is to be an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, it is going to have to offer an alternative to those who desire to be on the side of angels.
It’s been called a “secular religion” for quite a while.
Nicely put together but I suspect that you are fundamentally wrong. They appear to me to be inspired by an ideal…a utopian ideal at that. It started two centuries ago and worked it’s way through communist Russia and China and in all of it’s forms it has failed miserably. I think that this is because it’s underlying premise, from each according to his capability, to each according to his need, can never be adequately defined. There is no way to know either the condition of need nor the condition of capabilities. And yet, it is a comforting thought that your needs will be met, regardless of you capabilities.
A few days ago I attached a video showing how the communists have always thought of this as a long term war that will be won, not on the battlefield, but in the hearts and minds of the stupid. For almost 100 years they have slowly picked away at the edges of the non-communist societies wearing down the stupid and leading them to that utopia that they long for. Now they have infested the halls of education just as the jews have infested the halls of power and money. Many throughout the world have learned from the early mistakes of the Marxists and now even the muslims are buying what they could not invade 1000 years ago. The jews bought israel. The muslims bought england. The communists bought the education system in most of the world.
How is that not capitalism at it’s finest. They bought out their competition.
WHY do people need to believe in something? I’d say they are totally into self interest. Over and well above any political involvement. They WANT what they want. It doesn’t need to make sense. This is the existential problem of modernism. Too much self interest at the expense of tribalism or whatever. The average person in Amerika is only self interested and not really interested in alternative or traditional viewpoints. How did they get here? They have been brainwashed by the media which are , of course ,controlled by — someone from maybe southern Russia somewhere. It remains all about who you listen to and your intelligence.
This might be Z’s best column. The progs aren’t trying to progress to some goal. The goal is progress itself. Forever. That’s why once they’ve seemingly won every successive battle in the culture wars – first outlawing employment & housing discrimination against gays and eventually winning even gay marriage – they move on to bathrooms for trannies and, most despicably, pushing for minors to be hormonally maimed prior to puberty so that their subsequent “transitioning” will have more esthetically pleasing results. Progress isn’t the means to an end. It’s the end itself. Horrifying, really.
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Iska, the thing on the right…is that the international wordless ID for a dress-wearing “gal” who has a stiffie?
Yeah, I wouldn’t send a young kid alone into a shithouse where we could find a faux tranny with its center pole raising the tent.
There is a black hole deep in the heart of any good progressive that seeks to be filled with good intentions and dreams of utopia. Because of an overwhelming sense of self-loathing, however, utopia to them is suicide.
Entertainment, music, news reporting, politics, football, and coffee shops. Show me one thing liberals have ever touched that didn’t turn to complete shit.
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There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.
– Proverbs 14:12
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Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes; ours has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of own intellectual elite. It has carefully nurtured its own barbarians—all reared on the best Dr. Spock lines, sent to progressive schools and colleges, fitted with contraceptives or fed birth pills at puberty; mixing D.H. Lawrence with their Coca-Cola, and imbibing the headier stuff (Marcuse, Chairman Mao, Malcolm X) in evening libations of hot chocolate. Not Bolshevism, which Stalin liquidated along with all the old Bolsheviks; not Nazism, which perished along with Hitler in his Berlin bunker; not Fascism, which was left hanging upside down, along with Mussolini and his mistress, from a lamp-post—none of these, history will record, was responsible for bringing down the darkness on our civilization, but liberalism. A solvent rather than a precipitate, a sedative rather than a stimulant, a slough rather than a precipice; blurring the edges of truth, the definition of virtue, the shape of beauty; a cracked bell, a mist, a death wish.
– Malcolm Muggeridge
Wow, great article and some even better comments. This is some really good shit we have going on here.
EXCELLENT work sir!
The Koran arguing is a bit I have used as trying to have a rational discussion with any cult believer. Say discussing Scientology converting to perhaps Mormon? Similar to the hundreds of poor fools going to Guyana to drink poison to get enlightenment.
The favorite of tax the rich to help the poor, ignoring any possible transmission mechanism from rich to poor washed through government. Ignoring the best possible get out of poverty of education and hard work, like Ben Carson, Connie Rice, Colon Powell, et al.
They may in fact be done for already, as the folks are perhaps beginning to realize that diversity, gender bathrooms and other nonsense, is not going to put money in any ones account. “It is the economy stupid” is the real issue. Maybe Sanders guaranteed minimum wage will sell next time?
Further to our progression down the rabbit hole, this just came up.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-03/modern-civil-war-being-fought-without-guns-so-far
This article boils it down quite nicely, a manifesto clearly defining the civil war that has already begun. An uncompromising light shining on the malfeasance from the beginning of this century to present and what to expect in the very near future. The system can no longer fix itself, it’s now just a question of who will fire the first shot that gets the ball rolling; I’m thinking Fort Sumter.
Leftism is an ersatz religion because it has no spiritual center. Leftie do-gooding is an imitation of Christian actions so they can believe that they are as good as Christians and so prove to themselves, and other fools, that belief in God is unnecessary. More fool they.
Man requires religion because he seeks answers to his questions. Of all the questions he has ever asked, none is so innately tied to his own existence as “why am I here?”
Our mind can think, our body move, but what is this thing that we call our conscience? It knows when we are doing right or wrong before our mind can process it and our body can act- as the kids in the hood would say- how do it know?
It is the voice of the Eternal speaking directly to us, without filter, scribbled on the walls of our innermost self and it cannot be denied. You cannot leave God behind because he is always within us, whispering the answers though we do not always wish to hear them.
And this is where we find ourselves today, having crouched like a child in a closet, playing the game of Hide and Seek, only to find that we are not, and have never been alone in that dark, cramped space.
Theirs is a faith without succor, a belief without a foundation and dogma of penance without redemption.
Brilliant column. Past is bad, future is good. Faith is destiny.
I get it now. The years of futile engagements bearing facts, logic and reason now make sense.
My challenge to Z is to now muse on answering is own open question, “If there is to be an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, it is going to have to offer an alternative to those who desire to be on the side of angels.”