I recently passed my 26 hundredth post. Most of that writing has been about the failures of the modern leftist movement. I never thought I would need to write the following sentence. I am now in the minority as an American who is extremely proud of his Nation.
I attribute this devastating trend to the leftist use of identity politics. They tell every ethnic, racial and gender group of Americans why they should have a grievance against another group of Americans. It begs the question, if white America (still the majority demographic) is so hostile to (Hispanic, Muslim, women, etc.) groups, why are there caravans of tens of thousands of these individuals walking across Mexico to arrive here? (Venezuela would be a much shorter walk.)
Their reasons, at least as far as I have heard, are to “find a job.” So I ask, which political party has spawned the great job growth we are experiencing (there was a dearth of illegal immigration during the Great Recession)? The next most common reason is to “escape violence.” So I ask, which political party would you call “the law and order party?” Which political party denigrates our police officers? And which American cities have the greatest violence and which political party governs those cities?
[Sources; Charting the Danger of the Modern Left, by Stephen Moore (Mr. Moore quotes heavily from Know Thine Enemy: A History of the Left, by Mark Melcher and Steve Soukup]
The history of leftist movements began during the Enlightenment according to the studies of Melcher and Soukup. They write in the introduction:
“(The left) emerged in the eighteenth century during the so-called Enlightenment period, and was based on the belief that science and reason should replace religion as the foundation of a modern society. The purveyors of this new ideology had trouble agreeing on details of this new belief system, and this resulted in the wide proliferation of leftist prototypes, among the best-known of which are communism, socialism, Marxism, fascism, and, in the United States, progressivism and liberalism.”
Before my Democrat readers get all in a lather, I am not suggesting that these leftists philosophies are the same. There are, of course, many significant differences. However, they do have some commonalities and share several important philosophical ideas.
These commonalities and philosophical constants are (from the Melcher and Soukup book):
- an aversion to Christianity and religion generally
- an aversion to capitalism
- lack of a strong concept of (and, among some, a belief in) private property
- a belief in the perfectibility of mankind
- a belief in the superiority of reason over faith
- a claim to an affinity with the working classes
- a belief in the achievability of a world order where there is peace, equality, and prosperity, free from the evils that religion had foisted on mankind.
Some of these philosophical concepts appear quite admirable and in that I would concur. However, these two political historians are able to draw a straight line from Voltaire and Rousseau to the United States and its “progressives.” So what is it about this philosophy that I see as a consistent failure? Each leftist scheme is “dedicated to undermining the existing order and creating a ‘new’ man — whether he likes it or not.”
To me the whole of the problem lies in the notion of the “collective.” Their consistent failure is written in the DNA of 7 billion humans. There will never be a “collective.” I guess they could create this new world order by cloning Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton a few billion times over and then getting rid of the rest of us. But short of that, they have grossly misjudged the DNA of those they believe they can convince to “join the collective.”
The alternative to altering everyone’s DNA is to establish a forceful government. Some were extremely forceful (the German Reich, Communist Russia, Cambodia) or somewhat less “forceful” (Cuba) or American Progressivism (the government “knows best”). I read our Founders as believing the exact opposite.
[Directly from the Moore article] Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Mao, Pol Pot, Antifa, Castro, Che Guevara and the like use power to reduce the sanctity of the individual for the common good of the collective. It is a kind of enslavement that degrades the human spirit and makes us poorer over time. But the real villains here are not the leftists of yesteryear who set back the quest for human freedom and material progress, but the modern left — the academics, the politicians, the media mavens — who know, or should know, full well the destruction and retardation of statism, but still selfishly pursue it.
I consider the US Constitution as the most important political document ever conceived. And I believe it agrees with the founding principle of why I write The Rugged Individualist. “Big government is bad government; its axiomatic.”
Roy Filly
The Rugged Individualist 