Understanding The Left
Posted: 01-13-2020 01:57 AM
Edited/Excerpted from Dennis Prager's article :
It Is not easy to understand the left. Asked for a treatise or two to read, every leftist will give a different answer or need some time to think it over. Few, if any, will suggest Marx's "Das Kapital" because almost no leftists have read it and because you will either not finish the book or reject it as incoherent.
So then, how is one to understand leftism? The fact is, it is nigh incomprehensible. What leftist in history would have ever imagined to be a leftist, one needs believe men give birth and have periods or it is fair that women have to compete in sports with biological males who identify as females?
There are two main reasons why what the left stands for is nearly impossible to describe. One is, ultimately, leftism represents chaos: -- Open borders -- "Nonbinary" genders -- Nonsensical & scatological "art" -- "Music" sans tonality, melody or harmony -- Drag Queen Story Hour for 5-year-olds...
-- Rejection of the concept of better or worse civilizations -- Removal of Shakespeare's picture from a university English department because he was a white male -- Ending all fossil fuel use even in transportation (as per the recent recommendation by the head of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization)...
-- Wholesale dismemberment of capitalist-free market based economic policies that have lifted billions of people out of abject poverty. And much more.
The other major reason leftism defies definition: it is key to the core emotion-driven. Leftism consists of causes offering those who otherwise lack meaning a lifeline to cling to. TIME's 2019 Person Of The Year embodies these explanations. Like all good leftists, she seeks to dismantle just about everything.
With regard to chaos, Greta Thunberg wrote at the beginning of the month: "The climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice and of political will. Colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fuelled it. We need to dismantle them all."
As regards emotion and meaning, the BBC reports: "Greta Thunberg's father has opened up about how activism helped his daughter out of depression ... how activism had changed the outlook of the teenager, who suffered from depression for 'three or four years' before she began her school strike protest outside the Swedish parliament. She was now 'very happy', he said ... 'She stopped talking ... she stopped going to school,' he said of her illness."
The fact is life today is better, safer & more affluent, and offers more opportunities for more people, than ever. Just about all mature and reasoned, emotionally stable, intellectually unencumbered, mentally undisturbed people in the West should be walking around almost unendurably delirious and exhausted experiencing this great good fortune; in particular, and especially Americans should feel this way.
And yet, among young Americans (and perhaps Swedes), depression is at the highest levels ever. More and more, we find our secluar modern world has left a vast number of the West's citizens, younger people mostly, looking to fill Grand-Canyon-sized personal craters in their unfulfilled lives with leftist causes.
Until she saw a chance to literally save the world Greta Thunberg was so deeply depressed "she stopped talking." But after embracing climate activism and other left-wing causes, she is now "very happy" (an assessment I suspect many observers find hard to believe).
Feminism and "fighting patriarchy" (in an age when American women have more opportunities than ever, and more than almost anywhere in the world), fighting racism (in the least racist multiracial society in history), fighting white supremacy (which has almost disappeared from American life) and fighting to fundamentally transform society on behalf of myriad other leftist causes gives people with no meaning, meaning.
None of that is morally or rationally coherent. But it is very emotionally satisfying. Just ask Greta Thunberg's dad.
It Is not easy to understand the left. Asked for a treatise or two to read, every leftist will give a different answer or need some time to think it over. Few, if any, will suggest Marx's "Das Kapital" because almost no leftists have read it and because you will either not finish the book or reject it as incoherent.
So then, how is one to understand leftism? The fact is, it is nigh incomprehensible. What leftist in history would have ever imagined to be a leftist, one needs believe men give birth and have periods or it is fair that women have to compete in sports with biological males who identify as females?
There are two main reasons why what the left stands for is nearly impossible to describe. One is, ultimately, leftism represents chaos: -- Open borders -- "Nonbinary" genders -- Nonsensical & scatological "art" -- "Music" sans tonality, melody or harmony -- Drag Queen Story Hour for 5-year-olds...
-- Rejection of the concept of better or worse civilizations -- Removal of Shakespeare's picture from a university English department because he was a white male -- Ending all fossil fuel use even in transportation (as per the recent recommendation by the head of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization)...
-- Wholesale dismemberment of capitalist-free market based economic policies that have lifted billions of people out of abject poverty. And much more.
The other major reason leftism defies definition: it is key to the core emotion-driven. Leftism consists of causes offering those who otherwise lack meaning a lifeline to cling to. TIME's 2019 Person Of The Year embodies these explanations. Like all good leftists, she seeks to dismantle just about everything.
With regard to chaos, Greta Thunberg wrote at the beginning of the month: "The climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice and of political will. Colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fuelled it. We need to dismantle them all."
As regards emotion and meaning, the BBC reports: "Greta Thunberg's father has opened up about how activism helped his daughter out of depression ... how activism had changed the outlook of the teenager, who suffered from depression for 'three or four years' before she began her school strike protest outside the Swedish parliament. She was now 'very happy', he said ... 'She stopped talking ... she stopped going to school,' he said of her illness."
The fact is life today is better, safer & more affluent, and offers more opportunities for more people, than ever. Just about all mature and reasoned, emotionally stable, intellectually unencumbered, mentally undisturbed people in the West should be walking around almost unendurably delirious and exhausted experiencing this great good fortune; in particular, and especially Americans should feel this way.
And yet, among young Americans (and perhaps Swedes), depression is at the highest levels ever. More and more, we find our secluar modern world has left a vast number of the West's citizens, younger people mostly, looking to fill Grand-Canyon-sized personal craters in their unfulfilled lives with leftist causes.
Until she saw a chance to literally save the world Greta Thunberg was so deeply depressed "she stopped talking." But after embracing climate activism and other left-wing causes, she is now "very happy" (an assessment I suspect many observers find hard to believe).
Feminism and "fighting patriarchy" (in an age when American women have more opportunities than ever, and more than almost anywhere in the world), fighting racism (in the least racist multiracial society in history), fighting white supremacy (which has almost disappeared from American life) and fighting to fundamentally transform society on behalf of myriad other leftist causes gives people with no meaning, meaning.
None of that is morally or rationally coherent. But it is very emotionally satisfying. Just ask Greta Thunberg's dad.