Posted by
SteveJ on Thursday, February 07, 2008 12:00:00 AM
What makes the leftist a leftist? On the most basic level, it's the way they appear to interpret reality.
I have my opinions, but that's all. There's no empirical proof for anything I'm stating here. I've formed my views via my interaction with the left, so my observations are purely anecdotal. But here they are.
1. For the left, the greatest of virtues are equality and fairness. Nothing trumps this. Leftists can't tolerate a society in which some people have great wealth and others have considerably less. Never mind that our capitalist system has bequeathed us the highest standard of living in human history. Never mind that our poor are rich by the world's standards. As long as the pie isn't divvied up evenly, we can expect leftists to rail against our society and bemoan the existence of the "haves and have-nots."
That means that the primary role of government, to the leftist, is the enforcement of equal outcomes ... not the protection of individual liberties.
2. Leftists never hold people responsible for their low standard of living. They will castigate anyone who does and charge them with cruelly "blaming the victim." And this is a salient point. They habitually view people as victims, victims of our unjust society.
Of course, many poor really are victims and bear little or no responsibility for their lot. But leftists tend to see all the poor in this light. Conservatives will look at a person who dropped out of high school, got into drugs and had out-of-wedlock children, and say, "It's no wonder they're struggling ... their life choices made poverty inevitable." But the left gnashes its teeth at such reasoning. It's always society's fault. It's racial discrimination or cuts in government programs. Never the individual himself. No, the individual has simply been carried along inexorably by currents stronger than he.
3. Leftists tend to disdain time-honored institutions associated with the majority. The family, religion, free markets, industry. Being essentially elitist, the left wishes to distance itself from typical, middle America ideals. So the libs, ever the reactionaries, swing the pendulum to the other side.
Do "regular people" think the traditional family is a good thing? Then the contrarian left sees "alternative" families as the ideal: gay partners, single mothers, cohabiting couples, etc. Does the majority see America as a force for good in the world? Then libs see it as a force for evil. Does the majority appreciate Western culture? The left routines trashes it and extols the virtues of primitive cultures, Eastern cultures and even totalitarian Marxist cultures.
4. Leftists form their conviction based on the way they feel about something, not on evidence or logic. In a debate, they tend to be unfazed by the evidence arrayed against them because they just "feel" they're right. It just feels like blacks are in their current economic and societal plight because of white discrimination. It just feels like people are poor because of big business greed. It just feels like the United States is the world's greatest polluter. Emotion is the engine of conviction and there's no switching engines.
For that reason, they often forgo the use of facts and statistics -- even common sense -- in their debates. They resort to every fallacious trick in the book: straw man, ad hominem, name-calling (especially "Nazi," "fascist" and "Hitler"). Their emotions seldom accommodate the principles of rational debate.
5. Rather than simply disagreeing with their conservative counterparts, leftists are offended by them. They esteem conservatives downright evil, not just in error. Accordingly, libs sometimes try to censor their detractors. They write radio stations to have right-wing talk shows pulled. On college campuses, they protest visits by conservative speakers and labor to have them cancelled. And if their efforts fail on campus, they heckle and shout down the speaker to prevent him or her from being heard. Despite their ardent talk about free speech, they view the right as so dangerous that its views should be excised from public discourse and heard by no one.
6. Leftists have a high regard for token efforts. They love the mere appearance of compassion, even if their compassion-driven programs don't actually produce net results for good. What really matters is that people see that they care. Many leftists are little more than compassion exhibitionists, whose main mission is looking tenderer than thou ... even if little gets accomplished in the process. And their generosity toward the downtrodden is less than impressive. That's because their efforts to help so often involve other people's money, taken forcibly by the government and redistributed.
7. The left is made up of staunch collectivists. They identify people not as individuals, but as members of groups. Consequently, they want government to treat people this way. Instead of championing individual liberties, they push for laws that benefit one group over another: for example, affirmative action and hate crime laws.
8. Leftists insulate minority groups and grant them special political protection. Accordingly, the groups are held to lower standards of civility and responsible discourse. (On the other hand, anyone who does hold such groups to the same standards as everybody else is, to the leftist, a bigot.) And so Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton can make the wildest, most outrageously irresponsible comments and be immune to criticism because of their special status. But to criticize them or to scrutinize their message makes someone, at best, insensitive and, at worst, a cross-burning, racist crazy.
9. The left is so weighed down with the imperative of "multiculturalism" and "diversity" that it can't critique any non-Western culture ... even when that culture is at grossly odds with the leftist agenda itself. An example: radical Islam. Nothing could be further removed from the leftist feminist ideal than a culture that beats women and drapes their bodies in burkas. But the left is stuck here; to cry out against this horrid culture would violate the sacred doctrine of multiculturalism. So libs say idiotic things like, "Christian extremists are just as frightening, if not more." Newspapers routinely hold back the religious identities of Islamic murderers. And the Palestinians are always the good guys in any and every conflict (no matter how ghastly their action) because they're less Western than the Israelis.