The Left -- Celebrating One Hundred and Fifty Years of Adolescence

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  (1^st Corinthians, 13:11)

One has to envy the people of the left.  They have managed to cling tenaciously to adolescence for at least a century and a half.   To remain on the Left is to lock one’s self into a permanent state of arrested development.  The upset election of Donald Trump has brought leftist adolescence into the streets, demonstrating how an ideology turns adults, young and old into emotional children.

One of the most distinctive marks of adolescence is a relentless self-centered view of one’s place in the world.  Work, with its often tedious, routine and time-demanding nature, is not readily embraced by highly self-centered creatures like adolescents.  Full time work is something that Leftists devoutly believe other people should do since they have higher callings like dismantling the corrupt old order and installing a regime of virtue in its place – grandiosity being another stage of late childhood.  Karl Marx spent his adult life dodging gainful full time employment.  His wife, Jenny, and the Marx children languished in squalor while Karl scribbled away and sponged off his pal, Engels.  Stalin as a young, ambitious Bolshevik robbed banks.  Mao wrote poetry.  Sartre lounged about in Paris cafes affecting a distinctively French anti-bourgeois style while producing reams of unreadable bilge that that aspiring sophisticates in college dorms and faculty lounges could flaunt as deep Existentialist thought.  Bill Ayers tried to blow up the Pentagon before he settled into his sinecure as an “education” professor and aging celebrity-radical. 

The “Occupy Wall Street” youngsters  a few years back, with the encouragement of their Hope and Change President, squated in public places and railed and fumed at “rich, greedy bankers” ignoring a couple of seemingly obvious questions: why would anyone want to be a banker if he couldn’t be rich? Presumably, they don't object to poor bankers, but why would any sane person trust their savings to one?  “Greedy,” by the way, is “adolescent-speak” to describe “someone who makes more money or has more than you think he should.”  I believe that it is safe to conjecture that in the history of the world it would be exceedingly difficult to discover many examples of individuals confessing, themselves, to being greedy.  No one on the Left would ever make such a confession.  Greed is the cardinal sin for the Leftist, and its application is most flexible.  George Clooney,  Michael Moore and Hillary Clinton have more money than most of us could dream of. Yet, I have never heard of anyone calling them greedy.

As well, adolescents also tend to be know-it-alls.  They gaze around at the world observing and deeply resenting all of its injustices and pettiness.  They know exactly what is wrong and how to fix it -- If only they were allowed to.  Most pass through what their elders patronizingly and euphemistically call the “idealistic” stage, come to terms with the imperfections, live out their imperfect lives, in this most imperfect world.  
    
However, we have the amply sad history of permanent adolescent know-it-alls, professional Leftists, in charge of fixing things.   One word is sufficient to summarize the state of the paradise that two of the more ambitious adolescents promised would unfold if they were put in charge – “starvation.”  The world’s two most populous countries, Russia and China were run for decades by a couple of men widely proclaimed to be “geniuses” and paragons of virtue.  No field of study or body of wisdom was beyond their mastery.  No aspect of the character or personality of either leader was sullied by self-interest.  Both Stalin and Mao went on to engineer famines that killed tens of millions of their own countrymen. Mao, whose real forte was poetry, untrained and wholly ignorant of agronomy and basic science, nevertheless overturned traditional Chinese agricultural practice, and inserted his whims and fantasies as law.  The Great Leap Forward is the ultimate demographer’s challenge to this day as researchers try to determine how many millions of Chinese people perished as the result of Mao’s policies.    

In addition to starving a sizable portion of Ukrainian farmers in the 1930s Stalin put the ignorant know-it-all, Trofim Lysenko, in charge of Soviet agronomy who managed to damage it even more than Lenin and Stalin.  One single statistic that forcefully expresses the staggering ignorance and incompetence of the adolescent know-it-alls that governed the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991 is the following:  “In 1917 Russia had been the world’s largest exporter of grain; by 1989 it was the world’s largest importer.” [Quoted from John Mosier, Hitler vs. Stalin: the Eastern Front, 1941-1945, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010, 11.]     
    
When adolescents do not get their way those who disappoint them are made to feel the extreme effects of their resentment.  At the hard rock bottom of all Leftist ideology is the premise that social conflict and struggle both underlies and explains all human interaction.  Leftists are perennial grievance-mongers.  The social world is always and inevitably about one group exploiting and dominating another.   All that is wrong with the world becomes the doing of the unfairly advantaged Exploiter-Dominators (ED's) who pummel the lowly Exploited-Victims (EV's).   Being an EV means that there is always an ED to resent and to blame.  An EV in good standing must have a grievance to polish and villains to excoriate.   EV's are heroes (Marx, Che, Joe Hill). ED's are villains (Capitalists, Bankers -- the latest, Donald Trump).  EV's are virtuous – compassionate, selfless and wise.  ED's are greedy, selfish and mean-spirited.     
     
This stark, Manichean, hero-villain picture of the world is perfect for the adolescent theorist-moralist. With it he can feel down-trodden, virtuous and special, all at the same time.  The source of his discomfort always redounds to those self-centered adults (projection) who lack the insight and knowledge he does (more projection).  From this picture flows what Bertrand Russell called, “The Doctrine of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed,” which means that whatever the EV's do to the ED's is morally justified.   Lies, character assassination, bombing the Pentagon – all can be justified because the ED's are all the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, even though they pretend not to be. When everyone who opposes you is some variety of Nazi, Fascist or Klansman your toolbox of weapons is quite expansive.
In 2018 we will celebrate the 200^th Birthday of the original adolescent- philosopher. Happy Birthday in advance, Karl.   You would be pleased to see that so many of your “children” rule.

COMMUNISTS AND NAZIS – THEN AND NOW

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets….  At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated."          

                                Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father

In a recently published book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, (2010) Yale historian Timothy Snyder takes the reader back to central Europe during the years of World War II where the police and armies of Stalin and Hitler took turns killing millions of the people who lived there. While pretending, as always, to be peace-loving liberators of the oppressed and exploited, the Communists under Stalin’s leadership were indistinguishable from the Nazis in their brutality and criminality.  For the unfortunate peoples in the central Europe death came from the west in the color of Brown; from the east it was Red.

After Stalin’s brief courtship with Hitler went badly in 1941, his good fortune was to become regarded as the lesser of two evils by the leadership of the democracies Hitler’s armies were on the way to obliterating. Stalin thus was opportunistically embraced by Churchill and FDR in the vein of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and to him were given timely and useful gifts -- Lend Lease, Studebaker trucks and eventually a Western front that enabled him to participate in, and claim credit for the defeat of his ex-comrade who had double-crossed him but with whom only a few short years before he had shared the ravaging of Poland and the Baltic states.  Stalin’s Red Army and his NKVD, instruments of so much of the murder described by Snyder in his book, then were instrumental in imposing for much of the rest of the century a state of helotry on much of central Europe once Hitler had been dispatched. Hitler’s reign of terror was of relatively brief duration – twelve years -- in comparison with that of Stalin’s which endured long beyond his personal demise in 1953. While Hitler produced no replications, many “Stalins” came into power following the end of WWII – Mao, Castro, Kim Il-sung, not to mention the likes of Nicolae Ceaușescu,, Erich Honecker and the rest of the satraps who ruled over the Soviet vassal states of the eastern block.    

Unlike the Communists who adroitly concealed their vast iniquities under the rubric of “anti-Fascism” the Nazis had always been more open and forthcoming about what they were really about. With the military and political collapse of the Third Reich and the destruction of Germany the Nazi leaders were branded and tried as war criminals. Side by side with the Americans and the British, the Soviets sat in judgment over the Germans at Nuremburg. The man who organized and prepared the Soviet participation in the International Military Tribunal that prosecuted the defendants was none other than Andrey Vyshinsky, the same man who led the prosecution of Nickolai Bukharin and other high ranking Bolsheviks in the mid-1930s Moscow “show trials”, legal farces that Stalin engineered to eliminate rivals and critics in the party. Vyshinsky’s forte was vitriol, calumny and abuse always in service to his boss, Stalin who had him on a very short leash. Here is one of his more memorable productions at the conclusion of the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial in Moscow, 1936.

Shoot these rabid dogs. Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism!... Down with these abject animals! Let's put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let's exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let's push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats!

This was how Stalin treated his distinguished colleagues who had helped Lenin seize power in 1917. None of these “rabid dogs” or “stinking corpses”, as Vyshinsky would have them, were guilty of any of the charges against them.  The crimes were fabricated, the defendants were tortured, and the entire proceedings were rigged. Zinoviev and Kamenev in exchange for confessions to things they had never done were promised that their lives and those of their families would be spared They were killed as were the families. Keeping promises was not in Stalin’s moral repertoire. The “vulture Trotsky” remained a dedicated Marxist until another Stalin-stooge Ramon Marcader took his life with a pick ax in Mexico City four years later.

In spite of all that the Communists have actually done – the lying, murder, and betrayal of purpose -- they have never over the years relinquished their pretense to moral rectitude and service to humanity.  In this they have had copious assistance from the legions of enablers (“fellow travelers”, as they used to called; “useful idiots” as Lenin saw them) from those bourgeois societies they loathed and had from the beginning planned to destroy.  These enablers still play the role even today.  They used to go to the Soviet Union and Mao’s China.  They now go to Venezuela and still to Cuba. 

Hitler and Stalin persist as poles of extreme ideological identification, as labels of execration, symbols and markers that are constantly used to focus unabated loathing and denunciation. “Far,” “extreme,” “rabid,” “fanatical” are the adjectives that often accompany the mention of “Left” and “Right” in current political commentary.   “Far Left” and “far Right” (remarkably similar in practice and appearance) are where we now locate the ultimate source of moral and political evil.  Communism in its Stalinist form has come to be viewed as the Left’s consummate stage of degeneracy. This has happened gradually, reluctantly and is incomplete.  Nazism, personalized by Hitler and the regime of the Third Reich, immediately upon conclusion of WWII became the symbol of Right-wing ideology at its worst, although National Socialism was in definition and practice an instantiation of socialism.

During his Presidency George W. Bush was frequently likened to Hitler by those on the Left, with comments like those of British playwright, Harold Pinter in the Guardian in 2003: “The U.S. is really beyond reason now. It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do. There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany.”   President Obama to his most antipathetic detractors is a Marxist-Communist.  His Republican opponent, Allan Keyes, in the 2004 U.S. Senate race referred to him as a “hard-core academic Marxist.”  The parallelism, however, is less than perfect since nowhere can we find documentation or evidence of Bush’s admiration for Hitler, an affinity for his ideas or an association with Fascist writers or organizations. Whereas in the first of President Obama’s two autobiographies, Dreams from my Father, there is explicitly expressed his youthful infatuation – never repudiated or seemingly regretted – with Marxists writers, particularly the violence-worshipping Franz Fanon, and his revulsion with the old order.  His mentor-pastor and spiritual advisor for two decades, an avowed Marxist, was the inspiration for his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, a title taken from one of Pastor Wright’s sermons.

“Nazi” is today not just a word reserved for historians and political philosophers to designate an extinct and odious political movement and party that flourished in one of the world’s most cultured and scientifically advanced countries in the middle decades of the last century.  Its denotation has been overwhelmed by its connotation.  “Nazi” is now a frequently resorted-to term of abuse, an entry in a specialized lexicon assembled from historically related terms like “Fascist,” “Brown Shirt,” “Gestapo” selected primarily for political vilification and nullification.  For the historically ignorant, “Nazi” comes into play as a vague image of murderous bigotry, a label of pure insult and abuse, devoid of historical or empirical content.  This lexicon is favored particularly by those on the Left to vent their frustrations and as a source from which to retrieve and frame their insults and make grotesque caricatures of their political opponents in the center and on the right. 

From the real, live, flesh-and-blood Nazis that were completely vanquished in the smoldering ruins of Berlin in1945 an ever present specter of Fascism has been conjured out of the ashes by the Left that seems to need a threatening Nazi lurking forever in the shadows as a malevolent, atavistic counterpoise to its own romantic mythology of humanism, progressivism and heroic resistance to evil.  Today’s world lacks real Nazis; yet they remain for the Left as necessary, menacing abstractions of pure evil, their permanence assured.    

The Reign of Resentment: Barack the Solipsist

 “We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

                                                            Barack Obama

Solipsism:  a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.

 

Some of President Obama’s detractors think that he is a Socialist.  His supporters scorn the notion. It is difficult after reviewing much of what he has done, said and written to believe that he is not.  His autobiography and the account of the authors he read and admired, his mentors, his actions as a politician, suggest that he is. The Europeans still love him, and why not?  He is one of their own, a dogmatic, secularist statist, contemptuous of men and women who make their own way in the world, even more disdainful of  the red state un-sophisticates who as he put it, “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them.” This is a man whose world view expressed in his own words in Dreams from my Father is fundamentally shaped by alienation, resentment and grievances.  He came to see himself as a man with an historic mission – to fix the grievances – the classic Marxist.

Like all the great Marxist ideologues who find themselves historically appointed to order other people’s lives, Obama apparently fancies himself to be a genius, a man far above all others. Stalin was the “Great Teacher,” Mao, the “Great Helmsman,”….  Obama in 2008 became … “The One”, “the Change we seek.”  He would in his own words, “heal the planet” and “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” This is not the rhetoric of regular campaign politics, not the typical blustering of an aspirant to high office. It unabashedly expresses the fantasy of an egomaniac. The monumental energy and enthusiasm of his campaign came not from his ideas or vision or achievements.  There was no content beyond the candidate, personally – his eloquence, intelligence and personality.

The 2008 campaign of Barack Obama was thus a huge paradox – on the one hand it was all about HIM, his brilliance, his charisma, his style, but at the same time he was nothing (NO THING) that could be defined or described in a substantive, empirical way. His complete lack of executive experience, scholarly, intellectual depth and legislative accomplishment turned out to be an advantage, a useful nothingness that let him be an alluring mirage, completely protean, a wholesome, earnest, moderate, “pragmatist” who could charm the independent voters disillusioned by George W. Bush, but at the same time  let him play the role of a cerebral “activist,” radical enough to enthrall the elite Leftwing stalwarts and the Hollywood limo-set of his party who loath those Neanderthals who drive pickup trucks, go to church and live in awful places like Texas, North Dakota and rural Indiana.    

The Obama campaign was all about The Obama who managed to be everything to everybody.  Once elected, however, he could not avoid revealing that his enthralling message of Hope and Change was smoke and mirrors.  Hope and Change could be nothing other than nothing because nothing, after the fumes of his soaring oratory dissipated, was what Obama was offering in the way of a better America.

Obama has always been exclusively about Obama.  Every political office he has held was merely a prelude to the next step up; his career a non-stop exercise of self-adulation and self-promotion.  Obama, one must conclude, governs as he has lived, that is as a solipsist. The solipsist believes that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.  Obama as our leader has turned out to be that complete "Self" undergoing the only modifications that matter, his own. He contemplates nothing but his own self’s facets of perfection, preternaturally blind to certain intractable features of a world outside of that Self that he will not and cannot comprehend.

Obama’s solipsism should have been recognized during his campaign, not so much a political campaign but rather the successful creation of a cult of personality.  The personality cult is the culminating phase of solipsistic rule where the number of courtiers who eagerly chime in a unison voice to affirm the ruler’s wisdom and infallibility, reaches a critical mass. And so it was. As Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek, Evan Thomas announced on television to fellow Obama-worshiper, Chris Matthews, Obama was “a sort of god.” (“In a way, Obama's standing above the country, above -- above the world, a sort of god.") Mr. Thomas never elaborated on just what “sort of god” we all might expect Obama to be, but suffice it to say that he and his colleagues who formed the bulwark of the Fourth Estate had conceived a mighty strong “crush” on this U.S. Senator of two years tenure, most of it spent campaigning for President. The crush demolished whatever critical capacities they might have exercised. The Gods exist to be admired and worshiped, not criticized. With their fawning adulation and uncritical devotion, by the time of his inauguration Obama became the genius who was the resurrection and amalgamation of Abraham Lincoln, FDR and JFK.

Obama was the refreshing, stunning contrast first to the harridan, been-there-done-that Hillary Clinton then to George W. Bush, by the end of his Presidency deemed to be intellectually, morally flawed and deeply so. Bush now was a palooka, a political Piñada whom everyone took turns whacking. McCain, helpless and old was no match. Obama in stark contrast was a star – cool, contemporary, photogenic, an Olympian standing high above the fray, descending only to bestow calm, impart his wisdom and receive thanks.

Bush was served up as the benighted antipode to an unblemished Obama, a uniquely singular individual (The One), morally and cognitively complete, a phantasm proclaiming that “We are the Change we Seek.” Obama thus became a totality, both the question and the answer, that Self, outside of which nothing else is important or relevant. There was, however, no “We”. There was only Obama himself mirroring the “Genius of Obama” to be held in contemplation, admiration and … anticipation.

The anticipation is long over and so is much of the admiration. With his re-election campaign of character assassination and four-plus years of solipsistic rule we possess a real, empirical grasp of the “Change we seek.” Our Chief is that Change, a change that has not turned out not to be what many people who voted for him had in mind. Something very essential was lost in the translation from rhetoric to reality.  Like all of the other solipsistic princes, his modifications of Self have produced nothing that seems to have made his subjects, other than his friends and political supporters, any better off. 

The disappointment that inevitably follows in the wake of the prince’s shortcomings of Self turns the solipsism into a rather ugly spectacle of blame and resentment.  Since the Self is perfect, the appearance of the gross disparity between perfection and reality which inevitably happens cannot be the doing or fault of the prince. With the arrival of the dashed high expectations and the unfulfilled promises someone or something must be blamed. The great solipsists have always been prodigious blamers. There is nothing else, practically, for them to do, and when the time for it comes … be careful.  For the misery of his realm, Stalin blamed the “wreckers” and “Trotsky,” Mao, the “capitalist roaders” and “running dog imperialists,” and for Castro, it was “Uncle Sam.”  Obama blames George Bush, the Republicans, and the European financial crisis. There is always a scapegoat du jour. The blame brings into clear focus the objects of the solipsist-prince’s acid resentment, namely those who have failed to recognize his genius and conform to his perfect understanding. The blame enables the prince to preserve for himself his image of his unsullied Self. 

The fate of the solipsist-Self is an immersion in resentment.  It seems reasonable to predict that over the next several months one will see in President Obama a man full of blame, increasingly resentful. When he finally departs, resentment will be all that remains.

The Left: “Yes, I’m the Great Pretender”

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
                                                                                George Santayana

Gazing across the political spectrum one might search for a single word or phrase that captures the essence of any one of the ideological occupiers.  The Left has long settled on “stupid” as the most fitting for conservatives.  “Conservatives as stupid” reaches a long way back with England’s great utilitarian philosopher and reformer, John Stuart Mill, calling the Tories the “stupid party.”

So it was then and so it is today.  The pundits have recently savaged the current crop of Republican Presidential aspirants mostly with aspersions on the paucity of their intellects. Whatever other many unseemly qualities they may evince – meanness, ignorant religiosity, greed, and hypocrisy – all are overshadowed with the low levels of intelligence by which they operate.   Rick Perry was stupid. Michelle Bachmann was ignorant and dumb.  Newt Gingrich may appear to be smart, but it is merely superficial camouflage. He is not really bright at all.  All of these troglodytes by comparison now, so we hear from columnist Clarence Page, make Ronald Reagan look wise.   Of course when Reagan was a candidate for President he too was simple-minded, senile, “an amiable dunce,” per Clark Clifford, vapid and intellectually inferior. 

By contrast the Left is the Mensa segment of the political spectrum, a brainy, high IQ society of college professors, trial lawyers and Hollywood actors, actresses and directors.  Whatever their shortcomings, they are smart. No one impugns their intellects.  George W. Bush, the only President to earn an M.B.A (from Harvard) was widely disparaged as much dumber than divinity school drop-out Al Gore.  President Obama, qualified “to heal the planet”, as he promised in his campaign, is said to be a brilliant constitutional lawyer and scholar, although he has never published a single article on the subject, even as editor of the Harvard Law Review, much less a book.  His only publications to date are two books are about his favorite subject, himself. 

So, what single word might we essay to capture the essence of the Left?  “Pretenders” – the politicos of compassion are the Great Pretenders.  What then do they pretend to?

First, they pretend to know.  Karl Marx, the Great Pretender of the 19^th century claimed to have discovered the “laws of history” from which he deduced and then predicted how the history of the modern world would unfold and what the end result would be.  The “good guys”, the oppressed workers of the world, would rise up take power from the capitalist exploiters and build a society free of domination, poverty, war and unhappiness.  Of course, none of this worked out.  Marx as a knower, a theorist was an abject failure.  But Marx’s disciples continued to pretend in the theory.  Not only would the “socialist workers paradise” predicted by Marx come to pass, but they pretended to be the chosen ones who would make it happen. 

The pretend-knower persists to this day.  The academy abounds with Leftists who invent “theories” which, they proudly assert, “unmask” the culprits in social world who dominate and exploit an assortment of unfortunates.  The University of California at Berkeley’s Judith Butler’s is one of the acclaimed knowers.  This theoretical bombshell appeared in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the “scholarly” journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

No one outside of a university philosophy and English department would bother to decipher this mental ordure.  Other than her graduate assistants and an assortment of her queer theory, post-modernist, post-structuralist camp followers, no one else would pretend that this says anything important, insightful or even interesting.  Good theories lead to inventions, innovations, deeper understanding.  Theories of this sort lead only to tenure, promotion and academic conference junkets – to read them makes for a headache.

Second, the Leftists pretend to be virtuous.   Their intellectual and theoretical superiority is complemented by their moral superiority.  They represent and speak for the oppressed, exploited and marginalized, and unlike conservatives who are motivated solely by greed and narrow self-interest, the luminaries of the Left are genuinely altruistic and benevolent.  They put people over profit, light candles and protest at the execution of murders, and congratulate themselves for their boundless compassion and devotion to the environment.  

Of course, these moralists are no more upright and decent generally speaking than the stupid conservatives and the masses they look down upon, including the rubes in the flyover states who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them.”  The Left too is full of antipathy – particularly for cigarette smokers, traditional Christians and owners of gas guzzlers – but they pretend to be open-minded and tolerant.  The many heroes of the Left – Lenin, Mao, Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh – while they were building the gulags, murdering their opposition and impoverishing their own people, were lionized and lauded by Leftist in the West as Robin Hoods, benefactors of humanity, tireless and selfless devotees of the poor and oppressed. 

      

Third, the Leftists pretend that their failures are successes.  For decades Leftists in the West pretended that the Soviets, then the Chinese Communists, then Fidel Castro had built societies far superior to the capitalist ones they comfortably lived in and disparaged.  The pretending persisted across the years in spite of the accumulating evidence of misery, penury and servitude in these paradises.  No one in Miami was building rafts and braving the open ocean waters and sharks to arrive in Havana. Yet, Fidel remains a hero who gave the Cubans who couldn’t escape his paradise free health care. His eventual New York Times obituary will pretend he was a humanitarian.  In the U.S. the Left has presided over the apotheosis of FDR pretending he was the greatest of American Presidents in spite of ample evidence that his policies greatly prolonged the Great Depression and that he seriously misjudged Stalin and was manipulated by him.  The peoples of eastern and central Europe paid dearly for FDR's avuncular view of Joseph Stalin.

While conservatives may remain the stupid party, the Left has been and continues to be the party of pretenders, to paraphrase Santayana above, it persists as “a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.”      

Toleration, Attitude or Latitude?

That the corruption of the best things produces the worst….

                                                                                     David Hume

Banish the word “Intolerance.”   It is crudely and stupidly used. Those so fond of throwing it around are the worst offenders. What exactly is it that makes a person intolerant and, whatever it is, should we tolerate it or him?

Everyone is intolerant.   No one tolerates everyone or everything, nor should they.  Even Unitarians who pride themselves on their tolerant, open mindedness would not likely tolerate wife beaters, Hummer owners or members of the Mara Salvatrucha in their midst.   Consider, as suggested above, the paradox arising from:  “I will not tolerate intolerance.”   Tolerance by itself doesn’t go far.  Tolerance is less about attitude than latitude, that is, giving space to someone who advocates something you do not like or has beliefs that you disapprove of.  Being tolerant doesn’t mean that you cannot strongly disapprove of someone else’s politics, religion or moral views or that you cannot say that you disapprove.  It means that you must observe certain limits when you engage someone with opposing views or perspectives.   You attempt to separate your opponent as a person from his views.  You doubt his ideas, not his character.  You question his logic, not his reputation.   Ad hominem attacks and character assassination attempt to cut that “space” of toleration away.  They disqualify the critic as a person so that he or she cannot be taken seriously.   

The practice of toleration arose in the West as a way for individuals in competing and antithetical religious sects and denominations to live in proximity without violent conflict or attempts at subjugation.  It was understood that the competing sectarians disapproved of the religious ideas of each other but agreed not to attempt to infer with their mutual practice.   This initial sectarian “cease fire” over time evolved into an elaborate set of norms gathered under the umbrella of a “practice of toleration” that provided social space and compatibility for individuals with irreconcilable religious and philosophical views of reality. So, while rival sectarians might disapprove, strongly even, of each others ideas and views, they could still do business with each other and agree to rules of governance and order, including rules that governed dispute.

Over time two things emerged that shaped this practice of toleration.  First was a sense of intellectual fallibility – a realization that one’s ideas and interpretations might be flawed.  Second was the necessity to accord an appropriate level of respect to those with whom one disagreed.  Intellectual humility and a willingness to accord respect are closely linked.

Unfortunately, “being intolerant” is now widely confused with “disapproving” of someone, which is perverse.  You only tolerate what you disapprove of.   If you approve, toleration does not even come into play.   One of the greatest achievements of American political culture is that is that has made room for individuals from enormously diverse religious, ideological, political and social worlds to operate and compete in relative peace. Competing for influence and a voice are fundamentalist Christians, secular, humanistic atheists, Communists, free-market libertarians, survivalists, and so on across the entire social-political spectrum.  No one should be naive enough to think that individuals from such diverse and sometimes antithetical perspectives will be rhetorically gentle with each other.  

The Left, however, has come to embrace the equation of “disapproval equals intolerance” which they apply selectively, that is, to their critics, not to themselves.  For themselves they require admiration; for their opposition, contempt.  A few short years ago when they routinely called George W. Bush “stupid,” “a war criminal,” and a “Fascist,” they were simply stating facts and exercising their right to dissent.  After they won, the bar was suddenly lifted very high for the opposition: respect, civility, loyal opposition.  

How did this happen?  Long ago the Left lost any sense of fallibility and with it any tolerance for criticism.  For them, criticism equals intolerance and bigotry. Because they are infallible, their ideas cannot possibly be wrong or flawed. Anyone who disagrees must be defective, either intellectually or morally.