SOME WISHFUL THINKERS believe the current crisis will deal a deathblow to the Left. After all, the blame-America-first crowd will find themselves permanently damaged if they protest too shrilly United States military action, given the horrendous carnage wrought against innocent Americans by misogynistic, homophobic religious nuts of the sort the Left always rails against. But reports of the Left's demise have frequently been exaggerated. Like Rasputin, the Left is going to take a lot of killing.
The hardiness of the Left has nothing to do with the quality of its ideas, which have been discredited many times. Leftist determinist assumptions about human nature and behavior have never been confirmed in the real world of quirky human experience. In fact, history has shown that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy suit human nature pretty well, no matter what culture people come from. Whether from Africa, the Middle East, or China, continuous immigration to the West proves that most humans want to be free and materially prosperous. And the experience of this century has also shown that societies organized along Leftist principles create people who are enslaved and materially miserable.
The survival of the Left, then, cannot be attributed to its incoherent and muddled ideas. Instead, we must look to sociological and psychological causes. One obvious reason for the Left's persistence is that most Leftists are associated with universities, where tenure and a lack of outside accountability mean that Lilliputian lunacy can flourish unchecked and be transmitted to the next generation. Throw in robber-baron foundations, the NEH, and the various centers, think-tanks, and subsidized publications, and you can understand how discredited ideas not only can survive, but turn a profit.
But it is psychology that will best illuminate for us the Left's tenacity. Here follows a brief taxonomy of the three major types of Americanus sinister.
The Fundamentalist. Leftism is a revealed religion for the fundamentalist, one impervious to experience, logic, or evidence. Who are you going to believe, The Nation or your own eyes? This Manichean creed comes complete with a whole host of angels (vanguard intellectuals, progressive professors, noble-savage minorities, Third World revolutionaries) and devils (Republicans, global capitalists, fundamentalist Christians, white males with too much testosterone) against whom the chosen ones battle. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the fundamentalist has been wandering in the American desert, but he does not lose faith in the second coming, when the wicked capitalist will be overthrown and the Church of State will usher in the new age of gold, a paradise of prosperity, leisure, peace, harmony, and pleasure for all. You know you're dealing with a fundamentalist by the hysterical vehemence of his response to criticism.
The Snob. The triumph of egalitarian democracy has made it tough for elitists who look down their noses at the grubby middle class. Leftist politics provides the perfect camouflage. By espousing vaguely the liberation of the oppressed victims of capitalism, the snob can show his superiority to the vulgar entrepreneurs, manufacturers of unmentionable products, and commercial hucksters who generate all the wealth. The Leftist device of "false consciousness" also conveniently allows the snob to champion the masses afflicted by this malady at the same time he sneers at their taste and pastimes. The snob thinks he's better than everybody else because he knows what's politically true just as he knows which films or novels or restaurants or music is superior. Leftist ideas, then, are like designer labels, emblems of class superiority. Only the vulgar rich vote Republican.
The Sentimentalist. The therapeutic Leftist opposes free-market capitalism because it creates winners and losers and so hurts people's feelings, not to mention trees and snail-darters and other living things. The sentimentalist feels bad about all the suffering in the world, but he practices what Dickens called "telescopic philanthropy," the conspicuous display of sensitivity to suffering, but from a safe distance. Endorsing romantic illusions about the perfectibility of human life, the sentimentalist chafes at tragic limits and human corruption, seeing these as distortions of a fundamentally sweet and cooperative human nature. If only we could get the capitalists and Republicans into counseling, we could liberate their inner children and restore the world to its pristine peace and harmony once enjoyed by Native Americans and other noble savages.
The Leftist response to the terrorist attack reveals all three of these types. The fundamentalist believes that the United States, as head demon of the oppressive global economic order, is to blame and had it coming. The snob is disturbed by the display of flags and militancy and patriotism, which is all so déclassé and redolent of monster truck rallies. And the sentimentalist feels that absolutely nothing is worth making more people suffer. Let's just bomb them with love and granola bars. These three types are not exclusive of one another. You can often find combinations of all three in the same person, for they answer fundamental human needs. The decline of traditional religion doesn't mean that the need for religion disappears. We still must have a meaningful narrative that makes sense of the world, explains evil and suffering, and gives us a starring role as one of the elect. The desire to stand out from our fellows and assert our uniqueness is as old as Homer's Achilles. And egalitarian individualism makes feeling and its display the most important standard of human worth. After all, everybody has feelings, but not everybody has talent, brains, or the drive to succeed.
So don't count the Left out yet. Like Rasputin, it may have been poisoned, shot, stabbed, and thrown bound into the Neva River, but the hands are still wriggling.
The hardiness of the Left has nothing to do with the quality of its ideas, which have been discredited many times. Leftist determinist assumptions about human nature and behavior have never been confirmed in the real world of quirky human experience. In fact, history has shown that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy suit human nature pretty well, no matter what culture people come from. Whether from Africa, the Middle East, or China, continuous immigration to the West proves that most humans want to be free and materially prosperous. And the experience of this century has also shown that societies organized along Leftist principles create people who are enslaved and materially miserable.
The survival of the Left, then, cannot be attributed to its incoherent and muddled ideas. Instead, we must look to sociological and psychological causes. One obvious reason for the Left's persistence is that most Leftists are associated with universities, where tenure and a lack of outside accountability mean that Lilliputian lunacy can flourish unchecked and be transmitted to the next generation. Throw in robber-baron foundations, the NEH, and the various centers, think-tanks, and subsidized publications, and you can understand how discredited ideas not only can survive, but turn a profit.
But it is psychology that will best illuminate for us the Left's tenacity. Here follows a brief taxonomy of the three major types of Americanus sinister.
The Fundamentalist. Leftism is a revealed religion for the fundamentalist, one impervious to experience, logic, or evidence. Who are you going to believe, The Nation or your own eyes? This Manichean creed comes complete with a whole host of angels (vanguard intellectuals, progressive professors, noble-savage minorities, Third World revolutionaries) and devils (Republicans, global capitalists, fundamentalist Christians, white males with too much testosterone) against whom the chosen ones battle. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the fundamentalist has been wandering in the American desert, but he does not lose faith in the second coming, when the wicked capitalist will be overthrown and the Church of State will usher in the new age of gold, a paradise of prosperity, leisure, peace, harmony, and pleasure for all. You know you're dealing with a fundamentalist by the hysterical vehemence of his response to criticism.
The Snob. The triumph of egalitarian democracy has made it tough for elitists who look down their noses at the grubby middle class. Leftist politics provides the perfect camouflage. By espousing vaguely the liberation of the oppressed victims of capitalism, the snob can show his superiority to the vulgar entrepreneurs, manufacturers of unmentionable products, and commercial hucksters who generate all the wealth. The Leftist device of "false consciousness" also conveniently allows the snob to champion the masses afflicted by this malady at the same time he sneers at their taste and pastimes. The snob thinks he's better than everybody else because he knows what's politically true just as he knows which films or novels or restaurants or music is superior. Leftist ideas, then, are like designer labels, emblems of class superiority. Only the vulgar rich vote Republican.
The Sentimentalist. The therapeutic Leftist opposes free-market capitalism because it creates winners and losers and so hurts people's feelings, not to mention trees and snail-darters and other living things. The sentimentalist feels bad about all the suffering in the world, but he practices what Dickens called "telescopic philanthropy," the conspicuous display of sensitivity to suffering, but from a safe distance. Endorsing romantic illusions about the perfectibility of human life, the sentimentalist chafes at tragic limits and human corruption, seeing these as distortions of a fundamentally sweet and cooperative human nature. If only we could get the capitalists and Republicans into counseling, we could liberate their inner children and restore the world to its pristine peace and harmony once enjoyed by Native Americans and other noble savages.
The Leftist response to the terrorist attack reveals all three of these types. The fundamentalist believes that the United States, as head demon of the oppressive global economic order, is to blame and had it coming. The snob is disturbed by the display of flags and militancy and patriotism, which is all so déclassé and redolent of monster truck rallies. And the sentimentalist feels that absolutely nothing is worth making more people suffer. Let's just bomb them with love and granola bars. These three types are not exclusive of one another. You can often find combinations of all three in the same person, for they answer fundamental human needs. The decline of traditional religion doesn't mean that the need for religion disappears. We still must have a meaningful narrative that makes sense of the world, explains evil and suffering, and gives us a starring role as one of the elect. The desire to stand out from our fellows and assert our uniqueness is as old as Homer's Achilles. And egalitarian individualism makes feeling and its display the most important standard of human worth. After all, everybody has feelings, but not everybody has talent, brains, or the drive to succeed.
So don't count the Left out yet. Like Rasputin, it may have been poisoned, shot, stabbed, and thrown bound into the Neva River, but the hands are still wriggling.
