Revolution on the Left

The American left has lost its mind. In some places— like New York City— the only acceptable discussion involves how badly you want to kill Donald Trump. Forget about reason. Forget about deliberation. Forget about facts. Forget about objective truth. It’s raw emotion, raw passion all the time. If you do not feel deeply that you must dedicate your life to the all consuming task of destroying Donald Trump, you are going to be voted off the island.

Among the obvious points, so obvious they need repeating, the new Democratic left is neither liberal nor progressive. It is radical and, in the terms the New York Times proposes this morning, revolutionary. Today’s Democratic Party wants to upend American institutions, open America’s borders to any who wants to come, repeal the Industrial Revolution in order to save the climate,  bury the last remnants of free enterprise and redistribute wealth to the people. Free stuff for everyone... except straight white males.

When blacks commit crimes, the fault invariably lies with white police officers. The reality of the crime statistics be damned.

As for national gas lighting, we must believe that gender is merely a social construction, a free choice that any child can make, chromosomes be damned. Emphasize the word "child" here. Because six and eight year olds are now allowed to select their gender. Where on earth is a child granted the right to make such a decision and to have to respected as holy writ.

As a nation we have decided that mutilating children with injections of puberty blocking hormones is copacetic. Anyone who dares object will be immediately expelled from polite society. Facts, especially biological facts are irrelevant. And then the new revolutionaries inveigh against anyone who would dare to refer to facts.

The transgender mania, which Camille Paglia correctly called a sign of cultural collapse, works to detach people from objective reality. It opens people up to indoctrination. It wants to make beliefs paramount over biological and other realities, and thus, it no longer allows opinions to be judged empirically. If you dare to notice that socialism has never worked, and has produced unspeakable calamities, you will be accused of being a bigot and of failing to have sufficient faith. Asking whether it works or not is now forbidden… in the new Worker’s Paradise.

One would like to say that it is color blind and gender neutral, but the new revolutionaries are trying to organize people of color and people of the distaff gender into a vanguard that will rise up and smote the enemy, privileged straight white males. You might think that the Democratic Party has taken leave of the placid semi-liberal Obama legacy, but, if you look more closely, the agenda of the radical and revolutionary left has a marked resemblance to Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation theology. The notion that blacks would lead a revolution against white oppressors is the order of the day in today’s radicalized Democratic Party. Wherever do you think that that came from?

The new radicals are protecting the Obama legacy. They are positively horrified to see Republicans, led by the Devil Incarnate, systematically undoing it. They do not defend their Messiah overtly, but rant and rave about everything that Trump has done. Even the Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua, railing about Trump’s willingness even to consider allowing the Russians to interrogate a former ambassador, neglects to mention that, on her watch, terrorists in Libya murdered ambassador Chris Stevens.

Is Hillary responsible? Of course she is. The job description of Secretary of State specifies that she is responsible for the security of ambassadors. It doesn’t matter what she did or did not do. What matters is that she was the responsible party and should have resigned in disgrace. For her to rant to a Senate that it makes no difference what happened is an appalling act of moral cowardice.

The rhetoric of revolution is not new. During the Vietnam War the counterculture marched in favor of revolution, especially, of Communist Revolution. They saw that America’s soldiers could not beat a bunch of pajama clad guerrillas in the jungles of Vietnam and concluded that fighting for a lofty ideal made you more powerful than a modern military organization.

They did not consider the chance that America’s war machine was being constrained by inept politicians and by the best and the brightest intellectuals… to the point where it could not really fight.

In the decades that have passed, the bloom came off the leftist revolutionary cause. The great Communist dictatorships in the Soviet Union and China collapsed. With them the hope for installing a Worker’s Paradise. But, then again, hope gleams eternal, especially to those who think that "the audacity of hope" is grammatically correct.

Anyone with any sense of reality, anyone who was willing to judge the effectiveness of policy in terms of the outcome produced, would have long since abandoned the radical leftist cause. Communism counts among the greatest policy failures in human history.

What human mind would think that we should resurrect it? The answer is clear: a mind that has been deformed by the American educational establishment. Having long since abandoned the goal of teaching anyone anything, American educators have turned their classrooms into indoctrination mills. They no longer teach anyone how to think. They tell students what they must and must not believe. As for judging policy in terms of past successes and failures, it is forbidden. Rational and empirical thought is banned. You are required to believe the right beliefs, adhere to the correct dogmas.

Being seriously undereducated they cannot grasp most of the material. Their professors cannot either, so they do not feel that badly. But, when something arises in class or in the culture at large that they do not understand, they stand forth, like buffoons, and declare that they have been triggered, that their feelings are hurt. Anyone with a minimal sense of shame would know better than to advertise such weakness, but in America's educational establishment, what with its transvaluation of values, it counts as strength.

This system has given us the mindless stupidity of the Democratic Party’s new poster child: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rarely have we seen such an ignorant politician, someone who functionally knows nothing. But, she is merely a symptom. Today’s young people, having had their minds deformed by radicalized pedagogues, do not know how to think, have never learned the habits necessary to hold down a job and seem increasingly incapable of competing in the world markets.

Surely, America still has a good share of capable and highly competent young workers. And yet, the number of people who are manifestly incompetent keeps growing, and with it, the appeal of socialism.

Socialism appeals to those who know that they will never be able to compete in world markets. Well-intended empaths, they recoil from the prospect of fighting for market share, of innovating the next technological breakthrough, of getting their hands dirty and working to win. The educational establishment has produced a generation of students who will never be able to compete. Thus, they are asserting what they consider the most basic of human rights… the right to spend what someone else has earned.

Keep in mind, the new socialists believe that capitalism is theft. It is theft from the underprivileged and the disadvantaged. It is theft from minorities. It is theft from Mexico and Central America. Because, America’s wealth and success was acquired criminally by oppressing the masses, both within our borders and south of our borders. Those who are defying our laws and sneaking into America deserve to be cared for, they deserve to receive welfare payments, they deserve to have a free education… because their impoverishment state was caused by patriarchal capitalism. It’s all about justice; it’s all about income redistribution; it’s all about rectifying the oppression visited by white males on the rest of the world.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s true of false. To the deformed minds of the young generation it seems like a better way to make a living. Better than work, that is.