From another thread:
The Left
It’s not exactly news the political divide in our country is… pretty deep. And pretty acrimonious and growing more extreme. If you doubt that, try and imagine yourself only five years ago and ask yourself what you’d have thought if someone had told you one side would be fighting passionately for the right of parents to surgically mutilate their children – or worse, the power to take children away from one parent and give them to the other who wanted to mutilate them.
To some it seems like a dispute between two models of governance, and that’s at least partly correct. But though the left model is pretty well articulated: soul engineering, central control, top-down my-way-or-the-highway, the opposition on the right is not nearly as well defined.
Purely in terms of the oppositional dynamics what we have is a situation where the federal government has become so powerful to the point it has occurred to some that they must never let power change hands again, the danger the Founders feared.
And given no one is immune to the corrupting effects of power the question of which side is most dangerous. The answer is, the side which has been ascendant the longest of course. And today, that’s the Left. So…
What is the left?
- That part of the political spectrum historically concerned with obtaining the support of the bottom half of society, ranging from the moderate left to full-on communism. (Note I said, “the side concerned with obtaining the support of” not “benefitting.”)
- But like all social movements, the leadership is at the top end of society the aristocracy, either by birth or adoption. During revolutionary times it is comprised of ambitious middle classes, the so-called noveau riche and disaffected members of the upper class. (Stick a pin in that.)
- The very bottom of society comprises: low-wage earners and the disabled, but also the unemployable, the insane, and low-end criminals. Both victims of misfortune and those who’ve fallen to the bottom due to poor life choices. Leftists at the top of society cannot or will not recognize the difference.
- The line that defines “bottom half” also runs through the middle class and high-wage working class. Whether the middle identify as left or right may be determined by whether they see government as either, 1) the guarantor they do not fall downwards, or 2) as an obstacle to working their way further upwards.
- Today the left has lost the working class and now base themselves in a coalition of minorities – which they automatically characterize as part of the bottom half and lacking in “privilege” no matter how wealthy and influential they may be. Thus billionaires like Oprah can count themselves as unprivileged minorities with a straight face.
- While rightists can generally describe the left accurately, leftists cannot describe the right and when attempting to describe right-wing views create a grotesque caricature at best. This has been confirmed by research, most notably in Moral Foundations theory.
- While there is both a moderate left and a hard left as in every movement, the hard left is at present in control of the movement.
- Note that EVERY movement has a tendency to become controlled by its most extreme elements. Because they are the ones ready to devote themselves heart and soul to the movement. The rest of us have lives. Passion is power.
- Despite their professed concern for the poor and powerless they are elitist to the core and believe in rule by an enlightened ruling class rather than the rule of impartial laws.
- They implicitly believe in the inferiority of minorities and the poor, believing them incapable of rising by their own efforts no matter what opportunities they are given.
- The moderate left may be just as horrified by the crimes of communism as the right, but the difference is of degree, not basic principle. They are totalitarian by nature, by the very definition of the man who invented the term. “Tutto all'interno dello stato. Niente fuori dallo stato. Niente contro lo Stato” “Everything within the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state.” – Benito Mussolini.
- Though the Hard Left calls themselves “Progressives” they are anything but progressive, they revert to the oldest model of politics in history, the rule of the strong and (allegedly) wise.
- They despise liberty, but feel compelled to pay lip service to it – for now.
The Leftist approach to what they call “social justice” is: hierarchical, top-down, one-size-fits-all, my-way-or-the-highway. When they see a problem their first instinct is not to approach it with private, voluntary means, but to pass laws and create new government offices.
- Any suggestion that resources available to address social problems are finite and must be allocated intelligently is met with moral outrage.
- Their default assumption is that ordinary people are helpless to support and take care of themselves without preferential legislation and massive subsidies. In time this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Leftist model of governance is failing catastrophically, due among other things to:
- The increased complexity of government resulting from regulatory burdens that hamper production and growth.
- The enlargement of government resulting in the withdrawal of more and more educated people from productive work in the private sector.
- The diversion of wealth into patronage for supporters.
- The chaos and waste of resources caused by attempts to “soul engineer” i.e. make people good according to their vision of the good via manipulation of language and censorship.
- Attempts to increase upward social-economic mobility for some, which result in destroying the already established institutions that historically provided the means for the poor to rise. (See the history of City College of New York, “The Harvard of the Proletariat.”)
- Ignoring human nature. Note defunding the police and the subsequent rise of crime in poorer neighborhoods.
They react to the failure of their model by doubling down on everything that causes it to fail and finding scapegoats to blame for the failure.
The left is utopian rather than pragmatic.
- A lot of the injustice they see is just life.
- The idea that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and the corollary rule-of-thumb “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” are anathema to them. They favor change for the sake of change, confident it will always tend towards perfection - as long as they direct it.
- They are impatient with established rules and procedures and see them as institutionalized barriers to achieving The Good.
- For them the end justifies the means. If the end is perfection, what wouldn’t be justified to achieve it?
- For many years in many countries leftists have seen criminals as "primitive rebels" (as in the title of the book by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum) engaged in "social banditry."
- Part of the utopian view is to see planning and purpose everywhere. So failure to achieve it is never due to bad decisions or even just bad luck, but of active villainy on someone’s part.
- They are ferociously hostile towards religion. They seek to establish heaven on earth right now rather than in an afterlife or in the indefinite future.
- Their ethics are strictly situational. They reject the notion of an action that is bad in and of itself rather than whether it serves their cause or not.
- They maintain double standards for themselves and their opponents. Another word for which is “privilege,” the right to do that which is forbidden to others. And this is not hypocrisy! They see themselves as a separate and superior caste who must be judged by different standards than us peasants.
- There is no end-point to their demands. They have no appreciation of diminishing marginal utility.
They do not argue for their position and against yours – they write the script for both sides of the argument, i.e. not against your position but what they say your position is. (Strawman.)
- They do not appear to know what an argument is. (A set of propositions, one of which, the conclusion, is claimed to necessarily follow from the others.)
- They rely on fallacies “the counterfeit of argument” to support their proposals, most often: Appeal to Pity and Ad Hominem.
- They do not value free speech and the free play of ideas. Their reaction to any coherent contrary argument is to silence the arguer.
While claiming to be the “party of science” and to represent “the knowledge class” they believe and profess things directly contrary to what we know to be immutable scientific fact, such as their claim men can become women, get pregnant, etc.
They have to have enemies to excuse the failure of their model and rally their supporters with the strong social glue of grievance. Grievance which is fed by envy, “The only one of the seven deadly sins which brings the sinner no pleasure at all.”
- The target of that grievance, the Enemy – is you. Anyone who doesn’t think like them. And we have arrived at a point at which why they think of you as the enemy is of no importance compared with the fact that they do.
- They are not producing enough children to stay viable over generations, so they need yours to replenish their numbers via indoctrination. They have no respect for parental rights at all.
- Moderate Democrats are in what amounts to an abusive relationship with the hard left. They will not let themselves see that the things that pass for normal on the hard left are nothing like normal, and are in fact quite insane.
The dilemma of the right, or the "non-left" in general.
- They hate you, make no mistake about that. The level and kind of insult should make that plain to you. When they call you “Nazis” they are expressing a willingness to see you killed.
- There is nothing you can say or do that will make them stop hating you. They need an enemy to hate to preserve the cohesion of their movement.
- They say libertarian conservatives are racists, fascists, and Nazis. We know we are not.
- They say conservatives are homophobes and this is more nuanced. There are those who don’t have anything against gays per se, but just don’t like them setting the agenda in education and entertainment. It feels too much like grooming.
- They say conservatives want to return Black people to their status under (historically Democrat) Jim Crow. We know we want no such thing.
- They say conservatives are transphobes. They’re more solid ground here, anyone who’ll volunteer to be castrated and surgically mutilated is pretty scary. And anyone who can talk kids into it is REALLY scary.
What all of this amounts to is othering conservatives, classical liberals, and moderate Democrats to the point they feel justified in assault, vandalism, and repression by means of organized rioting and politicized government agencies such as the DOJ and IRS.
It’s not going to get better in the foreseeable future.
Bottom line. To recapitulate they hate you. They can’t be persuaded not to hate you because they need someone to hate to give their movement cohesion.
If you belong to any of the groups they see as their client minorities, in essence their property, they hate you most of all and you are in the most danger from them.
You say, “Well I’ve got lots of friends who are leftists and I don’t feel they are dangerous to me.”
So do I, and I feel that way too about them. But – to quote Heinlein from his novel Methuselah’s Children. “I am not in danger from my neighbors and you are not in danger from yours, but I am in danger from your neighbors and you are in danger from mine.”
You need to make your plans and preparations accordingly.
Questions:
Q: What percentage of the Left is really Hard Left?
A: Don’t know for sure but some estimates have it that “Progressives” are around 14-16% of the voting age population.
Q: How dangerous are they really?
A: Every totalitarian movement coming to power needs a thug corps. We saw the summer of riots a few years ago which produced relatively few casualties but billions of dollars of property damage. We also saw their tactics evolving. We saw training maneuvers designed among other things to sort out the “tooth to tail ratio.” To find out who among their ranks can be street fighters, who can stand incarceration, etc.
Q: But aren’t they a decentralized movement with no central command structure?
A: In a word, bullshit. We saw a sophisticated logistical support and supply system involving busing rioters from outside. The fact we cannot identify their command hierarchy with certainty should worry you.
Q: How bad is it going to get?
A: No clue. The left power base is confined to major cities with dense populations. It might stay there and make the cities progressively more unlivable. It might become something like the Troubles in Ireland, or worse La Violencia in Columbia. (Look it up.) Or it could burn itself out in a hurry and leave a minor footnote in history. (Well it might!) It’s a big country and the bulk of it will possibly not even notice much. I’ve heard that from expats living in rural Chile during the late troubles.
Q: You talk about plans and preparations, what kind of plans and preparations do you mean?
A: Up to you and your own individual threat assessment. I myself plan to live out in the sticks where violence is unlikely to penetrate with adequate preparation for supply train interruptions while I watch the world burn – or smoke and fizzle as the case may be.
Q: Do you think it could become a civil war?
A: We’re already in what amounts to a cold civil war. Will it become hot and if so how hot? Dunno, and where would it be fought? It’s not like everybody is going to dress up in their cammies and tacticool gear and head out to the national parks to duke it out. (Although the idea of holmgang has some merit to it..) Although as unlikely as that sounds to anyone living amid the broad treeless fields of the Midwest farm belt, one might remember General Grivas and the Cypriot insurgency.
Q: Aren’t you just being alarmist? We’ve been through bad stuff before as a country and always got through it.
A: Yes we have, but I urge you to remember this irrefutable historical truth. All predictions of social collapse come true – eventually.
I will leave you with Steve's Four Rules of Power, distilled from observations of totalitarian movements contemporary and historical. Listen, remember, and see if this doesn’t explain a lot of otherwise crazy stuff.
Demonstrate your power over others by:
1) Making them constantly afraid of giving offense unintentionally.
2) Making them give up cherished customs, symbols, pastimes, relationships.
3) Making them pay lip service to ideas of breathtaking absurdity.
4) Making them do things that disgust and repel them.
