MaxB
12th October 2002, 20:55
The New Left
Largely because its intellectual resources were so slender, Leftist advocacy as we once knew it in the Western world clearly suffered a body blow from the collapse of its great "alternative" and alleged exemplar of equality -- The Soviet Union -- so most Leftists have had to find new directions for agitation in recent years. Criticizing our unequal capitalist society has become much less plausible now that capitalism seems to be the only show in town.
So what is going on? What is Leftism/liberalism and why are people Leftist/liberal? What, if anything, do people have in common who describe themselves (and are described by others) as "Leftists", "socialists", "social democrats", "Communists" and (in North America) "liberals"?
Wanting to change the existing system is however the umbrella under which all Leftists at all times meet. Even at the height of British socialism, for instance, British Leftists still wanted more socialism. That permanent and corrosive dissatisfaction with the world they live in is alone what makes people Leftists. That is all they have in common. They are extremely fractious and even murderous towards one-another otherwise (e.g. Stalin versus Trotsky). It is in describing his fellow revolutionaries (Kautsky and others) that Lenin himself spoke swingeingly of "the full depth of their stupidity, pedantry, baseness and betrayal of working-class interests" (Lenin, 1952). He could hardly have spoken more contemptuously of the Tsar.
Racism
One thing that Leftists will not allow themselves to be seen as is racist. Leftists can grudgingly be Nationalists -- Gough Whitlam, the great hero of the Australian Left, certainly was an unashamed nationalist, as were those great champions of the Argentinean "descamisados", Juan and Eva Peron, and as is the Communist Kim dynasty in North Korea with their catastrophic doctrine of "juche" (national self-reliance) -- but Leftists cannot admit any significance for race. If they do, they are immediately relabeled as Rightist. Being racist is enough in the Left lexicon to make you Rightist regardless of anything else you might believe or advocate. They even managed to ignore the huge example of Hitler’s extreme socialism (income leveling, worker advocacy, heavy government control of industry and everything else) and call him Rightist. He was a Nationalist (that can be allowed) but he was a racist (not allowed). So people like Adolf Hitler and Pim Fortuyn (the homosexual Dutch political leader assassinated by a Green activist in May, 2002) are Rightist only by arbitrary definition. What they advocated was generally Leftist (The full name of Hitler’s political party -- generally abbreviated as "Nazi" -- says it all: The National Socialist German Worker’s Party). So Left-wing racism does not exist only because it is defined out of existence.
Leftist Racism
There are exceptions to every rule, however, and there is one form of racism that Leftists do allow themselves. A great Leftist cause for the last 30 or more years has been "affirmative action" -- which normally translates into deliberate discrimination against whites -- which is as blatantly racist as any policy could be. The policy is normally justified as needed in order to restore "balance" and reverse the discrimination of the past but if that were the motive such a policy would also be used to restore political balance in the social science and humanities schools of Western-world universities -- given the huge preponderance of Leftists teaching in such schools and the virtual barring of Rightists there (Kramer, 1999; Horowitz, 1999; Redding, 2001; Sommer, 2002). Needless to say, no affirmative action policy leading to the preferential hiring of conservatives exists in any major Western university. Clearly, then, affirmative action is a claim of righteousness and moral superiority for Leftists, nothing more. A Leftist will happily be racist if it enables him to make that claim.
Leftist Doctrine
Even a Leftist realizes that it is pretty vacant simply to be against the status quo. He has to have something a bit more substantial to say than that in order to get any attention at all. But his best attempt at finding something substantial to say is still pretty pathetic. What he says is: "All men are equal" and "The government should fix it". The proverbial Blind Frederick could see that all men are not equal and anybody who thinks that governments are good at doing things can only be pitied. Nonetheless, "Equality" is the Leftist’s claimed ideal and government action is the way he proposes to bring it about.
So given his slender intellectual and rhetorical resources, the Leftist has to make up for their emptiness by advocating them both blindly and vigorously. If all men are equal, then all races must be equal too, mustn’t they? So the Leftist cannot allow any form of race awareness unless he gives up one of the two slender straws that he clutches at in order to give himself something to say.
Why do Leftists rely so heavily on their two particular vacuous slogans? It is because they are not really interested in solving any problems at all. They are only interested in stirring up change. Really solving social and economic problems in our complex society requires thought, detailed enquiry, in-depth understanding of the problem, creative thinking and patience -- and the typical Leftist is simply not interested in all that. All he or she wants is change. "Get the government to pass a law" is the Leftist’s simplistic "solution."
"Government" as a Solution
One hardly needs to give examples of government inability to solve problems but, if an example is needed, the way Argentina’s Juan Peron proposed to deal with rising prices is at least amusing: He threatened to shoot any shopkeeper who put his prices up. Needless to say this was a good way of getting shopkeepers to shut their doors and turn Argentina into one big black market -- thus driving prices up -- but it was not a solution to anything. Risible though Peron’s ideas may have been, however, the reliance on coercion by Communist regimes was not dissimilar and was equally counterproductive and impoverishing. Coercion of any sort or degree -- whether by governments or anybody else -- is generally a poor and ineffective way of doing things.
Furthermore, governments everywhere remove large slices of the workforce out of productive activity and into paper-shuffling so are principally successful at impoverishing their communities but Leftists in some way manage not to care about that despite their vocal claim to be concerned about poverty. If they really were concerned about poverty, they would want to reduce the number of things government did! That they do not shows the hollowness of their "concern".
The now worldwide trend towards privatization and deregulation, however, shows that even governments themselves eventually have to admit that their cures are often worse than the disease. When governments as diverse as the "Communists" of China and the Hindu nationalists of India have now embraced deregulation and privatization (with great success), the continuing Left/liberal infatuation with government exposes them as the dinosaurs in the world of ideas.
Not that old ideas need be wrong: The seminal conservative political philosopher, Edmund Burke (1907), was a great advocate of limited power for government and saw in the 18th century that government attempts at "compulsory equalizations," would lead to "equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary" -- and 20th century Socialist and Communist governments amply validated that prophecy.
Equality?
And "all men are equal" (to the extent to which it is seriously meant rather than being merely a rhetorical ploy) is perhaps even more vacant an idea than the idea of relying on government -- since almost our entire social arrangements are predicated on all men (and women) not being equal: We don’t regard criminals and honest people as the same, men and women as the same, sane people and mentally ill people as the same, kind people and unkind people as the same, attractive and unattractive people as the same, clever and dumb people as the same, athletic and unathletic people as the same, scientists and roadworkers as the same etc., etc. And there is no doubt that tall men and busty women have an easier time with the opposite sex. There is fierce discrimination rather than equality in the mating game. So why are Leftists so enamoured of their absurd "equality" idea? Because if the Leftist is right and all men (and women) are really equal then everything in our society is wrong and in need of change. It is a way for the Leftist to say (paradoxically) to others: "You are all wrong and I am better and wiser and kinder than you".
The New Left
Largely because its intellectual resources were so slender, Leftist advocacy as we once knew it in the Western world clearly suffered a body blow from the collapse of its great "alternative" and alleged exemplar of equality -- The Soviet Union -- so most Leftists have had to find new directions for agitation in recent years. Criticizing our unequal capitalist society has become much less plausible now that capitalism seems to be the only show in town.
There have therefore arisen various new foci for Leftist discontent. One of these is the "political correctness" movement -- which is an attempt to move the focus of agitation away from economic reform towards social reform. This movement functions in two major ways: It attempts to change the way we think about less fortunate groups in the world by altering the words we use to describe them, and, in good Nazi book-burning fashion, it also attempts simply to suppress knowledge and debate. For example, it suppresses mention of any proposition that offers explanations of why some groups are less fortunate and are likely to remain so regardless of any amount of Leftist agitation -- the claim that blacks have an inherited lower average IQ than whites, for instance. For a quite recent and striking example of such a suppression effort, witness the recent pulping of Brand’s (1996) very scholarly book on IQ by his own publisher (Wiley of the US) when the political unpalatability (to Leftists) of his inheritance data became obvious. There is obviously no way that Leftists/liberals believe in such "bourgeois" ideals as freedom of speech. Ray (1972a) also pointed out long ago how not even the most overwhelming evidence on any question is ever deemed sufficient if it contradicts Leftist preconceptions.
How heavily the Leftist obsession with equality (and their consequent procrustean unwillingness to handle the complexities of the real world) influences the PC movement can perhaps be seen most clearly in the actions of a British welfare agency who banned a job advertisement because it discriminated against unfriendly people! A company placed the advertisement looking for a "friendly person" for a catering-related job but the local Job Centre rejected it because they said it "may discriminate against certain applicants". (See the Bolton Evening News of June 7, 2002.)
Censorship is however obviously not a dramatic enough pursuit for many Leftists so they have turned to such unlikely targets as globalization and the World Trade Organization as foci for their ire. The sole aim of the WTO is to increase co-operation and interdependence between nations and thus reduce barriers to the free movement of goods and people between nations, so one might naively have thought that the advocates of "all men are equal" would approve of it. That modern-day Western Leftists oppose the WTO and other summit organizations with broadly similar aims (such as the Davos World Economic Forum) is, then, an index of how desperate they have become for something to protest about in the post-Soviet world.
Read more facts and not cheap Commie propaganda at:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadA...cle.asp?ID=1226 (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1226)
Largely because its intellectual resources were so slender, Leftist advocacy as we once knew it in the Western world clearly suffered a body blow from the collapse of its great "alternative" and alleged exemplar of equality -- The Soviet Union -- so most Leftists have had to find new directions for agitation in recent years. Criticizing our unequal capitalist society has become much less plausible now that capitalism seems to be the only show in town.
So what is going on? What is Leftism/liberalism and why are people Leftist/liberal? What, if anything, do people have in common who describe themselves (and are described by others) as "Leftists", "socialists", "social democrats", "Communists" and (in North America) "liberals"?
Wanting to change the existing system is however the umbrella under which all Leftists at all times meet. Even at the height of British socialism, for instance, British Leftists still wanted more socialism. That permanent and corrosive dissatisfaction with the world they live in is alone what makes people Leftists. That is all they have in common. They are extremely fractious and even murderous towards one-another otherwise (e.g. Stalin versus Trotsky). It is in describing his fellow revolutionaries (Kautsky and others) that Lenin himself spoke swingeingly of "the full depth of their stupidity, pedantry, baseness and betrayal of working-class interests" (Lenin, 1952). He could hardly have spoken more contemptuously of the Tsar.
Racism
One thing that Leftists will not allow themselves to be seen as is racist. Leftists can grudgingly be Nationalists -- Gough Whitlam, the great hero of the Australian Left, certainly was an unashamed nationalist, as were those great champions of the Argentinean "descamisados", Juan and Eva Peron, and as is the Communist Kim dynasty in North Korea with their catastrophic doctrine of "juche" (national self-reliance) -- but Leftists cannot admit any significance for race. If they do, they are immediately relabeled as Rightist. Being racist is enough in the Left lexicon to make you Rightist regardless of anything else you might believe or advocate. They even managed to ignore the huge example of Hitler’s extreme socialism (income leveling, worker advocacy, heavy government control of industry and everything else) and call him Rightist. He was a Nationalist (that can be allowed) but he was a racist (not allowed). So people like Adolf Hitler and Pim Fortuyn (the homosexual Dutch political leader assassinated by a Green activist in May, 2002) are Rightist only by arbitrary definition. What they advocated was generally Leftist (The full name of Hitler’s political party -- generally abbreviated as "Nazi" -- says it all: The National Socialist German Worker’s Party). So Left-wing racism does not exist only because it is defined out of existence.
Leftist Racism
There are exceptions to every rule, however, and there is one form of racism that Leftists do allow themselves. A great Leftist cause for the last 30 or more years has been "affirmative action" -- which normally translates into deliberate discrimination against whites -- which is as blatantly racist as any policy could be. The policy is normally justified as needed in order to restore "balance" and reverse the discrimination of the past but if that were the motive such a policy would also be used to restore political balance in the social science and humanities schools of Western-world universities -- given the huge preponderance of Leftists teaching in such schools and the virtual barring of Rightists there (Kramer, 1999; Horowitz, 1999; Redding, 2001; Sommer, 2002). Needless to say, no affirmative action policy leading to the preferential hiring of conservatives exists in any major Western university. Clearly, then, affirmative action is a claim of righteousness and moral superiority for Leftists, nothing more. A Leftist will happily be racist if it enables him to make that claim.
Leftist Doctrine
Even a Leftist realizes that it is pretty vacant simply to be against the status quo. He has to have something a bit more substantial to say than that in order to get any attention at all. But his best attempt at finding something substantial to say is still pretty pathetic. What he says is: "All men are equal" and "The government should fix it". The proverbial Blind Frederick could see that all men are not equal and anybody who thinks that governments are good at doing things can only be pitied. Nonetheless, "Equality" is the Leftist’s claimed ideal and government action is the way he proposes to bring it about.
So given his slender intellectual and rhetorical resources, the Leftist has to make up for their emptiness by advocating them both blindly and vigorously. If all men are equal, then all races must be equal too, mustn’t they? So the Leftist cannot allow any form of race awareness unless he gives up one of the two slender straws that he clutches at in order to give himself something to say.
Why do Leftists rely so heavily on their two particular vacuous slogans? It is because they are not really interested in solving any problems at all. They are only interested in stirring up change. Really solving social and economic problems in our complex society requires thought, detailed enquiry, in-depth understanding of the problem, creative thinking and patience -- and the typical Leftist is simply not interested in all that. All he or she wants is change. "Get the government to pass a law" is the Leftist’s simplistic "solution."
"Government" as a Solution
One hardly needs to give examples of government inability to solve problems but, if an example is needed, the way Argentina’s Juan Peron proposed to deal with rising prices is at least amusing: He threatened to shoot any shopkeeper who put his prices up. Needless to say this was a good way of getting shopkeepers to shut their doors and turn Argentina into one big black market -- thus driving prices up -- but it was not a solution to anything. Risible though Peron’s ideas may have been, however, the reliance on coercion by Communist regimes was not dissimilar and was equally counterproductive and impoverishing. Coercion of any sort or degree -- whether by governments or anybody else -- is generally a poor and ineffective way of doing things.
Furthermore, governments everywhere remove large slices of the workforce out of productive activity and into paper-shuffling so are principally successful at impoverishing their communities but Leftists in some way manage not to care about that despite their vocal claim to be concerned about poverty. If they really were concerned about poverty, they would want to reduce the number of things government did! That they do not shows the hollowness of their "concern".
The now worldwide trend towards privatization and deregulation, however, shows that even governments themselves eventually have to admit that their cures are often worse than the disease. When governments as diverse as the "Communists" of China and the Hindu nationalists of India have now embraced deregulation and privatization (with great success), the continuing Left/liberal infatuation with government exposes them as the dinosaurs in the world of ideas.
Not that old ideas need be wrong: The seminal conservative political philosopher, Edmund Burke (1907), was a great advocate of limited power for government and saw in the 18th century that government attempts at "compulsory equalizations," would lead to "equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary" -- and 20th century Socialist and Communist governments amply validated that prophecy.
Equality?
And "all men are equal" (to the extent to which it is seriously meant rather than being merely a rhetorical ploy) is perhaps even more vacant an idea than the idea of relying on government -- since almost our entire social arrangements are predicated on all men (and women) not being equal: We don’t regard criminals and honest people as the same, men and women as the same, sane people and mentally ill people as the same, kind people and unkind people as the same, attractive and unattractive people as the same, clever and dumb people as the same, athletic and unathletic people as the same, scientists and roadworkers as the same etc., etc. And there is no doubt that tall men and busty women have an easier time with the opposite sex. There is fierce discrimination rather than equality in the mating game. So why are Leftists so enamoured of their absurd "equality" idea? Because if the Leftist is right and all men (and women) are really equal then everything in our society is wrong and in need of change. It is a way for the Leftist to say (paradoxically) to others: "You are all wrong and I am better and wiser and kinder than you".
The New Left
Largely because its intellectual resources were so slender, Leftist advocacy as we once knew it in the Western world clearly suffered a body blow from the collapse of its great "alternative" and alleged exemplar of equality -- The Soviet Union -- so most Leftists have had to find new directions for agitation in recent years. Criticizing our unequal capitalist society has become much less plausible now that capitalism seems to be the only show in town.
There have therefore arisen various new foci for Leftist discontent. One of these is the "political correctness" movement -- which is an attempt to move the focus of agitation away from economic reform towards social reform. This movement functions in two major ways: It attempts to change the way we think about less fortunate groups in the world by altering the words we use to describe them, and, in good Nazi book-burning fashion, it also attempts simply to suppress knowledge and debate. For example, it suppresses mention of any proposition that offers explanations of why some groups are less fortunate and are likely to remain so regardless of any amount of Leftist agitation -- the claim that blacks have an inherited lower average IQ than whites, for instance. For a quite recent and striking example of such a suppression effort, witness the recent pulping of Brand’s (1996) very scholarly book on IQ by his own publisher (Wiley of the US) when the political unpalatability (to Leftists) of his inheritance data became obvious. There is obviously no way that Leftists/liberals believe in such "bourgeois" ideals as freedom of speech. Ray (1972a) also pointed out long ago how not even the most overwhelming evidence on any question is ever deemed sufficient if it contradicts Leftist preconceptions.
How heavily the Leftist obsession with equality (and their consequent procrustean unwillingness to handle the complexities of the real world) influences the PC movement can perhaps be seen most clearly in the actions of a British welfare agency who banned a job advertisement because it discriminated against unfriendly people! A company placed the advertisement looking for a "friendly person" for a catering-related job but the local Job Centre rejected it because they said it "may discriminate against certain applicants". (See the Bolton Evening News of June 7, 2002.)
Censorship is however obviously not a dramatic enough pursuit for many Leftists so they have turned to such unlikely targets as globalization and the World Trade Organization as foci for their ire. The sole aim of the WTO is to increase co-operation and interdependence between nations and thus reduce barriers to the free movement of goods and people between nations, so one might naively have thought that the advocates of "all men are equal" would approve of it. That modern-day Western Leftists oppose the WTO and other summit organizations with broadly similar aims (such as the Davos World Economic Forum) is, then, an index of how desperate they have become for something to protest about in the post-Soviet world.
Read more facts and not cheap Commie propaganda at:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadA...cle.asp?ID=1226 (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1226)