I always ascribed those anti-American attitudes held by liberals as a sort of vanity or superiority complex. Like those people who love to trash-talk the US in front of foreigners or those kids who wouldn't stand for the pledge in school. Like they're too good or too smart to be patriotic.

Deeply annoying attitude, but what can you say without coming off as a goon?

This is a very good, interesting post.

Ditto Bill's comment - I'm still processing it, but I think I just got fed a reasonable explanation for much of the absurdity I see on a daily basis.

I just think its the realization that the American system (politics, culture etc.) is the antithesis of the lefty worldview.

Reo points it our, their "religion" denies any power higher than man. Thats why you see their mindless hatefilled attacks on believers, particularly Christians. They'll gloss over the Islamisicts because thier enemy is the US too.

What I have heard, and thought about, before. A pose put on by those who, truly, have nothing to fear. Who will threaten their existence? Better men will keep then safe, and in their shamethey lash out at them. I t is not new.

"Makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you in your sleep, is cheaper than them uniforms, and they're starvation cheap." - Rudyard Kipling "Tommy:

"An' its Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an, "Chuck 'im out, the brute! But it's "savior of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot."

Interesting piece here.

I do disagree, to a certain point with the theory that some leftists hate American because she isn't perfect. At least I disagree with someone buying that as a rational reason to do so.

See, I was raised in much that way. I was taught from a child that America was that shining city on a hill. BUt as an intelligent human being I also realized that nothing and no one is perfect. I saw that America has flaws and I've seen how she fixes them. Rather than turn me against the country, my observation has drawn me closer to my patriotism. I can't imagine any other country that has gone so far to fix its ills - even to the point of tearing it apart in a civil war.

To extend the analogy, I've seen the cop steal the packs of gum. I've also seen the police department publicly and firmly deal with that officer and ensure that stealing will never be tolerated.

I think those who focus on the ills and don't see the sometimes heroic measures we take to repair those ills are woefully, and perhaps purposefully, ignorant and they remain so willfully. My faith in, and love for, my country is stronger than it was as a child because it is a mature love grounded in history and reality and not wishes and dreams. I can't pretend to understand or offer an excuse for those who prefer not to mature.

My explanation for it is cognitive dissonance. The elite have a certain world view, and, as expressed in this entry, their beliefs have the force of dogma, unquestionable. Now, some of the tenets of those beliefs are:

1) The elite are smarter than the masses
2) The elite have, by virtue of intellect, descried the best way to govern the country and world

The reality of life is at odds with what these tenets predict.

So, a believer has two choices, question the fundamental assumptions or believe anything, ANYTHING, that can explain the reality without altering the assumptions. From the Trustafarian ground troops to the professorial elite, ivory tower life is essentially one big positive feedback loop. It confirms that those with the received wisdom are superior to WalMart shoppin', NASCAR watchin', Jesus lovin' America. There is no way that they are going to simply reconsider their beliefs through introspection.

The choice, then, is to subscribe to conspiracy theories and world views that appear grossly at odds with the facts, but “explain” the powerless situation they find themselves in. Castro and Che become fascinating, and even Lenin is chic. Stalin was a country rube who took over and ruined that wonderful heaven-on-earth, the USSR. If only the RIGHT people had been in charge. The list goes on and on, but one can't really embrace America while holding these views. In fact, America becomes the enemy. And how else but with a conspiracy theory can you explain why the intellectual elite are not running the country?

One aspect of cognitive dissonance is the ability to shift between ideas rapidly and simply ignore contrary evidence. How else could Bush be both an evil manipulator and idiot (this was solved by deciding that Cheney and Rove were the evil geniuses)? Saddam-led Iraq becomes an antebellum paradise, despite what actual Iraqis do with their actual votes. Foreign jihadis become “minutemen”. This is most commonly seen in that other hotbed of cognitive dissonance, the Arab world, where the idea of superiority has to be squared with not just the absence of power, but with the huge disparity between the Western and Arab worlds. How else can one explain how a culture can simultaneously celebrate the blow Osama struck against the Great Satan, and yet also believe that the Mossad was responsible?

In all, it is sad and scary. The internal perception of inherent rightness can lead to justifications for some of the worst excesses in human history. The Left has become home to holocaust denies, Saddam apologists and black separatists. As their political position continues to marginalize, their hysteria will only increase. We see how this type of belief system can be manipulate to produce a culture of death, suicide and murder in the Middle East, and a similar world view motivated Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing. Who knows what our current crop of Moonbats is capable of?

I think a lot of the modern Leftist ideology was born out of the horros of World War II: they said, "Look at the bloodbath nationalism and patriotism led to! Better to be in favor of mankind than nations or governments." Or so the thinking went.

The whole problem with the Leftist concern for "mankind" is that they really don't like people; that is, individual human beings. They're all in favor of groups, genders, classes, and victims -- they just don't quite know what to do with real actual human beings. Individual human beings tend to be contrarian, to be religious, to eat and drink too much, and to enjoy activities that embarass the sophistacted tastes of their betters. (NASCAR? Please.)

Americans tend to be irritatingly individualistic, religious, and prone to decidedly illiberal activities like hunting, child-rearing, and working for a living. Liberals almost by definition hate America, because America is as much an idea as it is a place; and it is the idea they can't stand: a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

And it's people the Left just cannot stand.

I have believed for decades that the leftists ("commies" in those days) figured out that if they were to destroy this nation, the only way to do it was from inside. They stealthily took control of the judicial system, the educational system, and the labor market. Biding their time, they eventually got to where they were in control of each (labor was fairly easy) and could then work on a stealth agenda that would incrementally impose their "elitist" views upon us, either by judicial fiat or by training the children through years of mantra.

Now the chickens have come home to roost. Those who would not get involved in the past because what they're doing now isn't THAT bad are suddenly looking around and remembering what it was a few decades ago, and asking themselves what happened?

What happened is that nuts like me (and Ace, and...) were considered off-the-wall enough that no one could pay attention to the warnings. As a result, your local elected leaders (or the state or feds, as far as that's concerned) can take your land because it isn't really yours, it belongs to the government, and they have better use for it. As a result you can no longer go to a public square and celebrate Christmas without being tied down with regulation. As a result gays can celebrate their debauchery with state-sanctioned parades but you can't stand peacefully on a street corner preaching without harassment from officialdom.

Why has this happened? Look in the mirror, or at your parents, or your teachers. Especially look at the elites who snidely dismiss any thought whose genesis was not love of the god-state.

Good post, Monty!

Monty, it should be the horrors of WWI. It was after that war that many of the survivors, particularly in Europe became disaffected from their countries and joined the leftist/commie/utopian movement. These then blazed the trail for the follow-on generations of leftist ideologues.

Lakoff's framework can be applied once again. In his framework, conservatives place moral strength at the top of their values. Moral strength is based on belief in an external moral system, such as that provided by traditional cultural sources.

The liberal's foremost value is empathy, and this has plagued us since the misbegotten philosophizing of Rousseau. The 'Noble Savage' was superior to Western man because he was empathetic with nature. Poverty was morally superior to success. As the most successful nation in history, the US is thus inherently morally inferior to any other nation, organization, or social grouping.

For the left, the traditions and history of the US are at best irrelevant and more often, evil, since they were generated in a less empathetic time. For the right they are essential, since they form and support our entire value system.

Iblis:

Actually, I am one of the people who lump both WWI and WWII into the same, thirty-year-long conflict. Call it the European Civil War if you wish, or the Second Thirty Years War. The children of that time grew up profoundly changed: either they reaffirmed the beliefs and strengths of their elders, as Buckley did in his "makeover" of conservatism in the 1950's; or they assumed that the whole edifice was rotten and needed to be torn down, as much of the Marxist New Left did.

The main problem with the modern Left is that, with the failure of Marxism, they have no ideological core: they have only a blind hatred for the world they live in, but with no competing ideology to offer. They have no religion, no economic philosophy (at least, none that works in the real world), no social compact. Their Marxist fealty to the Soviet Union from the 1930's onward was shown to be horrendously naive at best; it masked a regime guilty of greater mass murder than Hitler's Nazi Germany: and that against it's own people. (Read Robert Conequest's The Great Terror sometime for an illuminating and depressing view of how the "elitist" Left deluded itself from the 1930's onward about the horrors of the Soviet Union.)

I always make a distrinction between liberals and Leftists. In fact, I view Leftism as a totalitarian belief system quite unsuited to true liberalism; that's one of the (many) weird dissonances I see in the modern political lexicon. To be a true Leftist is to be profoundly anti-liberal in outlook. It's truly depressing to me that so many Democrats fall into this category.

"The first thing a principle does is go out and kill someone."

Lord Peter Wimsey, Gaudy Night

And the high principles of the left have given us...what? More blood than I want to think, dream, about. Oh, I forget. It was the wrong peoples' blood. They didn't count, they were less human.

Monty:

You need a new scale. One that does not run left to right, but rather one that runs from liberty to authority.

All of life falls on such a scale. Socially, politically, economically, whatever.

On such a scale Stalin and Hitler find close cottages; Jefferson, LaFayette, Adams, and Washington, farther from those first two.

Better than a silly "right-left" dogma would have it.

For the left, the traditions and history of the US are at best irrelevant and more often, evil, since they were generated in a less empathetic time.

Interesting. I agree that the left fetishizes that whole 'state-o-nature,' untouched by the corrupting influence of society thing. But, I wonder if that necessarily generates lefty self hatred.

If you look at Europe, I do get the sense they hate themselves, their traditions. You read Theodore Dalrymple and you get the idea that Brits hate themselves even more than us, or at least that self-hatred ain't confined to the elites. We still have the country music/Nascar crowd that embraces patriotism. I get the sense that there isn't any corresponding 'patriotic' class left in Britain. I wonder if the same is true for the rest of Europe? (If it isn't, it's only because they have a shared hatred of the foreign (the US) around which they still rally a concept of their 'just' nation. You take us away and I wonder what happens?

But then, look at the Scandavians. My impression is they have an inexhaustible pride in themselves, their government, their nation. Certainly they never seem to miss an opportunity to remind everyone how civilized and superior their ways are.

I wonder if its just that there, the left's got everything they want - a Superstate with beuracrats handling your cradle to grave existence.

Maybe its just as simple as 'the left feels stymied' here, that they're children throwing a tantrum at their parents (I HATE YOU!), the ones they should love, because they feel they can't get their way.

I agree that the left fetishizes that whole 'state-o-nature,' untouched by the corrupting influence of society thing. But, I wonder if that necessarily generates lefty self hatred.

The focus on empathy has far-reaching effects, producing anti-business, anti-capitalism, anti-government (excepting the nanny-state aspects), and even anti-logic, positions. Those who would rather *be* right than *feel*right are callous, self-serving, and thus despicable.

geoff:

The "empathy" culture can be seen on fulminant display on the daytime shows like Oprah, and it absolutely permeates the visual media. Open any magazine or newspaper pretty much at random, and you'll see the Leftist framework on display: the "feminine" is better than the "masculine", to be caring and gentle is "better" than to be moral and self-assured; talk and commisseration is always better than conflict; and so on. It's a culture of therapy, a culture no so much of conflict resolution so much as conflict avoidance. It is, ultimately, the infantilization of adults. Oprah and her imitators want to push the line that people should do what they feel, and consequences be damned: since nothing is really anyone's fault, no guilt can accrue to anyone. It's all experience and no consequence.

But of course the real world does not work like that, and when bad behavior leads to the inevitable bad outcome, people are shocked and hurt: how could they have been so wrong? Surely someone else must be at fault! And this in turn leads to the endless "victim" cycle where no one is ever responsible for their own actions -- the fault always lies with The Other: The Government, The Business, The Man, The Bureaucracy.

This is a deeply childish philosophy, and it almost inevitably leads to disaster when applied to adult life, but it doesn't keep the Left from trying (and trying and trying and trying).

Monty:

Nicely said. There are some occasions where the empathy perspective has served as a positive influence on events and policies, but as a fundamental governing or societal philosophy it's a disaster.

I think Carlos nailed it.

A lot of the "liberal" elites don't really know why they believe what they do. The truth is they were taught those things within the context of a framework where they were "challenged" to question authority and pretty much ignore authority's answers to those questions, since we already knew that those in authority lied in order to preserve there own power structure.

The irony to me is that their leaders professed to teach "critical thinking", and taught anything but. The vast majority of them blindly accepted outright lies (Uncle Joe, He Ain't So Bad) while ignoring the truth staring them right in the face. Often times that truth was embodied in their own parrents, but they were too stubborn, too stuck-up on themselves, and mostly too stoned to see it.

It is also quite ironic to watch the lengths these people will go to preserve their own power structure, and to keep their agenda on track. Witness the MSM, for example. (Dan Rather?) But the truth is, they are on their way down, and it is comming fast and hard. There are a great deal of us just a little younger who believed what the "liberals" said, for a time but whose life experiences have taught us otherwise.

My father believed that Joe McCarthy was a good man who had tried to do the right thing. For almost 40 years, he was the only person I know who would have ever said something like that. Until Ann Coulter talked about McCarthy (I think in Treason), I pretty much accepted everything I had been taught in school about him.

But Ms. Coulters words struck a chord with me. She reminded me of how my father felt, and made me realize that his opinion was not that of some wacked out nut job (something I never thought my father was, I just never noticed the inconsistancy of that). His opinion was shared by millions -- perhaps a substantial majority of Americans at the time. But, because of the tight control on the bottle neck of information by the elites of the time, most people held their beliefs in isolation.

Having gone back and read Witness by Whittaker Chambers, and having researched the Venona Project -- both of which I learned through Ms. Coulter's book, I now believe that my father was right: Senator Joseph McCarthy wasn't the cause of McCarthyism, he was a victim of it. And so, perhaps, was Richard Nixon. (David Horowitz can't bring himself to agree with Coulter on this, but strangely Ben Stein seems to think Nixon got screwed. Prehaps the Nixon Stein knew wasn't a muttering, foul-mouthed, insufferable little man. And perhaps Horowitz hasn't challenged his own past as thoroughly as he believes.

There are other examples of how what we've been taught doesn't match how things are.

I remember learning in High School that the Crusades were a reaction to Muslim aggression that had threatened western civilization at the time. But later it was explained to me that this wasn't a fair and accurate representation of the facts. As a westerner my self, my cultural bias prevented me from seeing the truth -- that westerners invaded the middle east in order to rob it of it's cultural richness.

It's kind of funny ... or it would be if it wasn't so sad and pathetic ... how "liberals" defend a religion that, given it's druthers, would see them off the face of the Earth, and in the most uncivilized ways imaginable, while at the same time debasing and defaming a religion that's pricipals of fairness and tolerance formed the basis of their own supposed philosophy? And they do so at the same time and in the same breaths as they undermine efforts to bring true freedom and personal liberity to a region of the world that has not known it since the dawn of civilization.

Or how is it that modern feminism succeeds mainly in freeing men from the by-products of their own sexual irresponsibility? (You tell me why so many "feminists" are against requiring parrental consent or judicial approval for a 13 year-old girl to get an abortion. Exactly who is protected by this?)

"Liberalism" used to mean something. This country was founded on the principal that a just government can only govern with the conscent of those governed; that the power of government comes from the people, and that a government only has those powers that the people choose to grant it. This was -- and still is -- the most "liberal" idea in all the world. This was the liberalism Ronald Regean believed in when he became disillusioned with and eventually left the party that professed to believe in it too.

But "liberals" no longer believe in it. They don't believe in freedom, or rather they believe in a different kind of freedom. They don't want freedom to be responsible for their own actions and outcomes, they want freedom from that responsibility. Not just for themselves, but for everyone.

And the reason they want that is because they were taught they could have it, that they should have it, by people who knew that if people failed to be responsible for themselves, someone else would be able to take responsibility for them.

The goal of the left in this country is exactly as Carlos stated: it is to tear this country down from the inside, leaving behind a power vacuum that can only be filled from outside.

Sorry for being so long winded.

</rant>

-- fret

Aww man, the  tags didn't work in raTHer's name.

Darn.

But it worked in the online preview??

Oh, and a real downside to taking ... um ... like, five hours to write a long-winded post is that I missed the things others said while I was writing until after I finished.

Thanks, Dr. Symes, for an interesting post -- and everyone else for an interesting discussion.

You need a new scale. One that does not run left to right, but rather one that runs from liberty to authority.

In simplest terms I think it comes down to those who see govt as the answer to problems rather than the creator of them.

fretless - Yeah, the online preview allowstagsthat theactual comments don't.

Heh. Should have known that would happen.

Lee Harris says that one basis of leftist anti-Americanism is a reinterpretation of Marxism (known as the "global immiserization" theory) which was developed about 50 years ago to try to explain why Capitalism (especially in America) stubbornly refused to self-destruct the way Marx said it inevitably would.

You boys are hitting all over it. That's good.

First, a nice essay describing transnational progressivism vs. (classical) liberal democracy, by the ever brilliant John Fonte.

As for ideological origins, the leaders of our little moonbats got their philosophy mainly from Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School.

After World War I, many Communists, Gramsci among them, realized that Marx got it wrong. The masses around the world did not rise up and cast off their fetters as predicted. Gramsci saw there were two main obstacles in the way: religion (in particular, Christianity) and the traditional family.

His proposal was to gradually seize control of the institutions that informed the masses, such as the universities, the entertainment and news media, and eventually the government itself. This control would be used to slowly pry the masses loose from their religious and familial shackles, making them finally willing to follow the true saviours of mankind down the path to Utopia.

The Frankfurt School merely provided the crowbar that would do Gramsci's prying by basically legitimizing insanity in politics, academia, and the arts. It's more commonly known as post-modernism.

When you look upon our little moonbats today, you see those whom have already been pried loose. Some looser than others, of course.

This guy states it better than I can. If you suffer from a short attention span like I do, make his blog post the first one (or maybe the only one) you read.

As a side project, look up Saul Alinsky. He was Hillary's mentor. She wrote a glowing, sycophantic thesis about him, and since 1992 Wellesley College has made it will never see the light of day. Alinsky wrote a couple of little books, one titled "Rules for Radicals" that has become the Hillary political playbook.

since 1992 Wellesley College has made sure it will never see the light of day.

Sorry about that. Editing mistake. I don't do this for a living.

Sue Dohnim:

I like this version of Fonte's history of Gramsci's influence on our culture. Required reading. But it didn't explain to me why some were so receptive to Gramsci's philosophy, and why some weren't. Lakoff's model filled that gap for me.

If you want to believe in a fantasy ideology with a utopian tint, communism was the way to go...then it ran into troubles and marxists had to invent permutations in order to explain how everyone was getting richer (see Tom Wolfe's 'can't get a plumber because he's on a carribean cruise)

So now communism is basically dead unless you are really able to deny reality...what's left to do with your desire to believe in a utopian fanstasy ideology?

Maybe a bit of green, a bit of red, anti-americanism, and perhaps some fundamentalist Islam (as Islam is supposed to create more just societies.)

I'll absolutely second Monty on the WWII thing abroad. I spend a lot of time in the UK, and I think the European wars of the 20th Century absolutely inform their political attitudes -- especially those too young to have lived through it themselves. For one thing, they believe having experienced it gives them a moral high ground to dispense wisdom from (which is a bit like, "we're in a position to lecture you about screwing up, because we've screwed up a whole lot more than you!").

Now, there's nothing wrong with learning from the appalling bloodshed of the 20th Century. It's vital that we do. Problem is, Europeans obsess on the subject and somehow end up taking away exactly the wrong lessons.

Like: patriotism, pride in country, nationalism -- these are malignancies that ultimately and inevitably result in old ladies being gassed and shoved into ovens. Better to subsume yourself into a large, vague body with qualities too nebulous to evoke loyalty. Hence the EU. Or to devolve into smaller ethnic units that haven't the power to cause mischief. Hence the Scottish and Welsh parliaments.

And: getting concensus is the same as being right. There isn't any objective "right" and "wrong" anyhow, so as long as we all agree, fighting won't break out and everything's okay. That's why the US is "going it alone" despite getting some allies in Iraq. If it isn't unanimous, it doesn't count. And they cannot believe we would act on our own, as if there were a correct answer. Domestic lefties invoke this when they try to alter attitudes by telling us that the whole rest of the world disagrees with us on a subject. They have no other index of the rightness of ideas.

I won't comment beyond that since...errrr...I haven't read the source article yet.

Ace, Bill from INDC is right for once. Your post was excellent.

One thing I can tell you for certain about these liberal elites is that they're damned certain the rules they make for others are NOT gong to apply to them.

Ask one sometime. They know what's best for you and what's best for them, and they're not the same thing.

I recall one of those geo-political simulation exercises in high school where we pretend to represent nations and governments, and get problems tossed in our laps to see how we react. It was very much the Cold War model (late 70s).

Me and my pals elected to respond to an aggressive posture by one of the "red states" by attacking the insurgents in a satellite nation in which a civil war had broken out. The insurgents of course were being supported by red state mentioned, and we wanted to send a message.

The history teacher instantly declared "game over". We all failed the exercise by resorting to force. When we responded with "isn't using force a political decision"? he barfed back the prevailing leftist opinion, that when you resort to military action, you've lost moral supremacy in the argument.

I have an aunt who lives in Vienna, Austria, who came to visit my family in the US. My aunt was not originally born there or here, so she can be taken as a little more objective than most. She noticed a few things while visiting the US a few months ago:

(1) The American flag is flown everywhere by almost anyone it seems, from car dealerships to private homes. The Austrian flag is generally flown only at government buildings.

(2) In line with this, she has noticed that when her friends and coworkers talk about Austrian/European politics, there is always a strongly pessimistic and negative tone to how they talk about their own countries. She was in France with her daughter who is doing her study abroad there and noticed the same thing with her daughter's host family.

(3) Maybe the most surprising is that she was astounded by how many churches there are in the US. I'm in Western Michigan, a strongly Christian Reformed area with a strong Catholic presence, so that can be expected, but she noticed the same thing when visiting the DC area. Austria is predominantly Catholic, but apparently doesn't have nearly as many churches. Thinking back on my own travels in Europe, not only were there far fewer churches per capita, the mass schedules were somewhat limited.

(4) Interestingly, she had never seen an automated ticketing machine at an airport before. Come to think of it, neither have I. I left from Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris a few months ago and I don't remember seeing one either. She had never heard of an e-ticket.

Much of our elite class has visited Europe, and I am sure many, if not most, have done some studies there. I get the sense from them that they see it as a very refined place. However, when I have visited, I cannot recall a single time when I thought that I could buy a better quality product, or more of the same product, in Europe than in the States. Well, with the possible exception of the beer...

The bottom line is that the predominant US culture is , self-confident, dynamic and prosperous and looks to remain so, while Europe is falling behind and sliding into a true malaise. Europeans don't know who they are. If we listen to the liberals, they would want us to become like the Europeans. But outside of the nice architecture and artwork (much of which was not made by the current or even previous generation of Europeans), I do not see why the European model is better than ours. We live better, have more options, and are proud of our country, even if there are some things that we would like to see done better.

Dave in Texas,

Heh, don't you know that Westerners, in particular Americans, are going to lose to communist insurgents. It's axiomatic! Remember, they hide among the populace and have an all-around "edgy" look that liberals/leftists appreciate.

That's a hilarious story. BTW, what was the right answer? Take out the friendly satellite government?! With what could you possibly negotiate to gain a favorable resort?

Just getting caught up after the weekend and have enjoyed this discussion immensely. A lot of excellent posts here.

To me, the reason appears to be much simpler. It is about the self. Period. Since the sexual revolution, the idea that living for one's self, to seek and obtain that which makes us feel good, actualized, et al. should be the only goal.

You cannot believe in God, consequences, order or anything else that infringes upon that one goal of pleasing one's self.

Even bending toward the possibility that there is something higher than self shakes the foundation of that belief system. Thus, any entity that undermines the self has to be hated and destroyed.

oops, I meant to say "result"

what was the right answer?

he was gutless, insisted there was no "right" answer (just a wrong one) - we said we thought it must be "give up, when push comes to shove, let them have whatever they want".

I'm glad Reagan felt differently.

... that infringes upon that one goal of pleasing one's self.

This is rationalized to an extent in the Lakoff model by noting that you cannot have empathy for others if you don't love and take care of yourself. To a certain degree this is true, but it is all to easy to devolve into the scenario you describe (what Lakoff calls a "pathology" of the liberal value system).

Compos mentis,

I would certainly agree with you that a philosophy that emphasizes pleasure for the individual can lead to destructive results. And there is no question that the liberal elite class believes in some of this. But curiously, they haven't taken this down the logical path to become more libertarian.

There is a reason for this and that is their appeals to the self are part of a marketing campaign for their agenda. In reality, they are utopians, and their guiding light isn't pleasure for the self, but a hypothesized perfect society. They will not tolerate any other authority other than themselves, and will claim "oppression" if authority is imposed on them. But they also want to be that authority for everyone else.

Utopian activists have been significant political forces since the French Revolution and have always been quick to use contemporary concepts and ideas to advance their cause. I imagine that the sexual revolution was yet another of these ideas to which the utopians latched on to promote the destruction of the old order.

Well, I dunno. There's another huge element in leftist thought that is basically Christianity, minus the Jesus, enforced by the state. They accord a special, sanctified, blameless status to the poor and caring for the poor, for example. Mortification of the self through practices like vegetarianism and bike-riding to work. The notion that mankind is inherently toxic and corrosive and should be kept away from "the environment" as much as possible. There's a lot of neopuritanism there.

And I dispute they're after utopia so much as absolute equality. They don't mind if everybody has crap, as long as everybody has the same (not counting the worthy bodies at the top, of course. Pulling the strings is hard work and they need a degree of pampering to bear the burden).

As an example, Britain's National Health Service used to have a concept called Centers of Excellence. I'm pulling this up from memory, but the idea was they'd have a hospital that specialized in heart treatment in, say, Manchester and one that specialized in diabetes in Brighton. If you're trying to provide universal care with limited funds, this was a sensible way to pool resources. And so, of course, it had to go. Too "elitist" y'see. So now, instead of concentrating a region's worth of diagnostics in one place, they have to try to pony up for a CT scanner in every hospital, leaving them a bit short for nursees. Universal, and universally crap.

ETR21 - okay . . . but what is at the center of this perfect a.k.a. Utopian society? I tend to think that each individual has his/her own self-serving ideas about what utopia should be.

In order to believe in somthing greater, a higher cause, you have to first believe that there is something higher or greater than yourself - But they also want to be that authority for everyone else. Believing you know what's best for civilization is as self-centered as you can get.

I don't think the utopia that liberals/leftists imagine is one where everyone gets universal crap. If they had to choose between accepting pockets of excellence or enforcing universal crap, they'll choose universal crap, to be sure. But that doesn't mean they envision universal crap being the long-term standard.

They are most certainly striving toward an ideal society which doesn't hurt the environment, has full equality of citizens and immigrants, and alternative lifestyle choices are celebrated, etc. The thing is that they are working to accrue to the government whatever power is necessary to make that a reality, whatever its harm on the foundations of the country. That they don't see that self-government would be destroyed should such a thing come to pass is a statement on how little regard they have for democracy.

S. Weasel wrote:

If you're trying to provide universal care with limited funds, this was a sensible way to pool resources. And so, of course, it had to go. Too "elitist" y'see. So now, instead of concentrating a region's worth of diagnostics in one place, they have to try to pony up for a CT scanner in every hospital, leaving them a bit short for nursees. Universal, and universally crap.

This is a perfect example of the contrast between centralized socialist outcomes and free market entrepreneurial outcomes.

Many hospitals in the U.S. could not justify the cost of having a fulltime MRI or CT scanner on the premises, but they still needed access to such a scanner, and they needed it to be close at hand. Some smart (leftists would say greedy) people had the lucrative idea of putting the scanners on big trucks and renting them out.

Hospitals save money and get necessary access to diagnostic equipment, and patients don't need to drive 50 miles to get scanned. Not only that, but some people make a profit which they can then invest back into the business for more equipment or even start new companies to fulfill some other need in the economy.

Contrast with the other model, where fewer and fewer people can be treated and more and more money is spent, in a downward spiral that results in multitudes of sick people languishing while entire floors and wings of hospitals are left inoperative.

On the selfishness of Leftism thing, Gerard Van Der Leun has one of the best essays I've ever read about the subject.

Sue, I'll see your free market, and raise you libertarian self reliance:

After my last HMO went belly up, I started seeing a local GP. Old fashioned practice, two guys in an office. If I need a CT scan or a blood test, he sends me around to one of the private labs that handle such things locally. I had to get a blood test last week (stupid deer ticks!), so he gave me a scrip. I walked into the lab whenever I wanted, was in and out in fifteen minutes.

While I was in there, I noticed a rack of brochures: a whole bunch of blood tests they'll do for the asking, no prescription required. Like, a liver health test, or cholesterol screening. Remarkably inexpensive, for those of us taught to believe that medical procedures are a precious, dwindling resource available only at great cost. They had package deals and everything.

Doctors hate this kind of thing, of course. Like those CT scans you can get at the mall (even though they have a tame doctor there to interpret for you). You're not supposed to step up and take responsibility for your health, you're supposed to turn yourself over to ye Antient Guilde of Doktors of Physick like a good supplicant. But if you're not stupid and you've got web access, I can guarantee you're a lot more motivated to learn more about what ails you than your doctor.

That's what I howl about whenever someone bangs on about legalizing recreational drugs. How about de-prescriptionizing prescription drugs? I'm perfectly capable of reading the literature and working out a blood pressure regimen for myself, thank you.

Compos mentis,

I see your point, but truly self-centered people wouldn't be concerned with others. A self-centered person would lean toward libertarianism if anything.

These people do have higher causes than merely self-aggrandizement (at least in their view). They have some understanding of a "cosmic justice" as Thomas Sowell might say that demands redress for certain wrongs or inequalities. I'm not saying they aren't selfish or arrogant by believing that they are the ones to do this, but it is clear that they believe things that would substitute for "God", such as the "Movement" or the "Revolution." I think where they would argue with you is that the things they aim to change do not require supernatural intervention or sanction. Just governmental and popular effort...

What I'm trying to say is that this sort of thinking has been around for a long time and substantially predates the sexual revolution. I do agree with you that hardcore atheism does tend lead to this philosophy, and morality will suffer as a result.

OK, Weasel, I can't touch you, you are just on freakin' fire! :)

Sizzling weasel on a stick, ma'am?

Excellent post and commentary.
I've also lived in Europe, and part of their problem is lost history. Better stated, a re-writing of history by these same elites. Who ran the governments, the universities, the centers of communication of European countries these last many decades? If they weren't communists, they were socialists.
You know where the narrative goes...anti-American.
The young (50 yrs and younger) don't know history. Sure, many speak a second language, and have vague notions of the grandeur of their country's past, but that muddy period between 1900 and the present somehow reeks of American meddling to them.
As to the left in America, they smell the same smell as their lefty Euro cousins.
And this is anecdotal, but speaking of smells, these people are the ugliest, smelliest, most foul-mouthed of our countrymen. Self-love? They've taken it to self-hate. They remind me of the kid in class who would snitch on everyone else; the loner, the weirdo who had no friends.
Well, they've banded together and taken over the corner to protest anything and everything that's anti-American. They're paying us all back for whatever it was they hated us for then. It makes them feel better; part of something; empowered.
And they hide behind our flag while they do it.

One thing about the social mindset of Leftists that is clearly separable from the rest of Americans is their desire for equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. Which is to say: they believe meritocracies are inherently unfair, and should be abolished in favor of a Socialist model which is inherently "fair".

That's why you always find Leftists arguing about "diversity" in terms of ratios and percentages rather than in terms of efficacy -- they don't really care if the end result is successful or useful in any larger sense, so long as it is proportional to whatever group is being used as the yardstick (and this is itself a rich topic for debate).

The notion of "fairness" to a Leftist is a simplistic one of proportionality and commonality. That's why to most Leftists, economics is a zero-sum game -- if I have money, that means some poor person does not have it. Any resource or good I use is by their definition removed from the pool (as most of these folks have apparently never heard of wealth creation). Thus it is "unfair". Whether I earned the money or worked for the good is immaterial; if I do not "need" that resource or good and someone else does, then that other person is morally entitled to the resource or good regardless of whether they have earned it (or even deserve it in any ethical sense).

As I said before: the Left believes in a Kindergarten version of the world. Most of us are children, to be looked after by wise, kind and benevolent teachers. There are no ethics or morals in this world; only sensation and expression and the eternal now where no consequences accrue.

"I wonder if its just that there, the left's got everything they want - a Superstate with beuracrats handling your cradle to grave existence."

Scandinavia is dying, like the rest of Europe, but it's on a shallower arc of descent, and they've got a good attitude about it.

It's ironic that socialism only really works in precisely the areas Hitler was fetishizing as the eventual proving grounds of *anti*-socialism. Racialism and socialism might have more in common than either wants to admit.

Capitalism, on the other hand, tastes great because it's way more filling. European attitudes to us, and the reverse, all come down to geography, media and money.

Our cities are farther apart, so our elite classes' alienation is *less* severe - the contrast between it and the regional, "organic" structure (which is only 50 years old, anyway, in some states!) is less inescapable. It's always been easier for *anyone* to pull up stakes and move here.

Therefore, our clerk-class never had the desperate motivation to really stage a total takeover, as happened in Europe well over 100 years ago - before WWI, in other words, before Gramsci and Hitler and a whole buncha people.

Gramsci's master plan sounds cartoonishly roundabout to us precisely because our chatterers have always been constrained within The System. (And that's a good thing, maybe the Best Thing about us. As John Derbyshire says, the lesson of the last 225 years is: Never let your middle-class intellectuals take over your nation, and if they manage to, run like hell).

So Europe essentially had only the equivalent of NPR and PBS until the 80s - in some cases even today. Even our fraternal twin the UK veered close to the abyss.

Only in America were the hustlers, the hucksters, the rubes and the bootleggers cut in on the action. My Scandihoovian grandparents' beloved 1952 insult - "From the New Dealers to the Car Dealers," how true - and how necessary. How vital. How *American*.

Why do American intellectuals fetishize Europeans? Because they mostly come into contact with Europeans *like them*, and like any visitor to a Utopia, if the ambassador wines and dines you well enough, you'll go home a "transnational progressive" in no time.

Why do European intellectuals hate Americans? Because they are, inevitably, exposed to the full awesome horrible range of our culture, with its Mamets, Madonnas and Montel Williamses. Because unlike at home, their beloved nasal-voiced corncob-up-butt jaw-jaw Politics Rountable shit is reduced to a tiny sliver of the market, propped up by our increasingly pathetic CPB.

Chomsky is never going to have to encounter Jacques Q. Carafe, a machinist from Lyons ...

... but Jacques Le Ploop D'Econstruction, Fellow of the French Academy, can't look out his window without seeing a billboard hawking the new Tim Allen movie.

Most of us don't have passports, for other reasons, but of the scores of milions of those who do, plenty are not exactly our best advertisements. Al Bundy, basically. Clark Griswold. A nation of father in laws.

They come in all weight classes - it's relatively much easier to get a little filthy lucre here than there, so we're sending many many many more times the amount of booboisie over to poke at their museums than vice versa.

We should change our national anthem to "We Will Rock U." At least everyone knows the words.

The most interesting point, to my mind, is the liberal view toward the perfectability of man. That is the most irrational part of liberal ideology that I've encountered.

Some liberals I know have even said that we could eliminate hunger, poverty, crime, etc. if only we tried harder/gave more. And really said it. To my face. Without laughing.

That boggles the mind given their "reality-based" claims.

"He believes that this gap between transnational elites and the patriotic public is growing."

Transnational elite: Think BUSH and his Saudi pals. He'd favor those guys over you and me ANY DAY, ANY TIME.

Y'all have some of the most whacked-out crazy ideas about the left I've ever seen.

The funniest part is how --in a post about forgetting history -- you are forgetting your own history in order to create your own myth of the US past to suit your own political predilections.

The roots of the leftist concerns (human rights, civil rights, democracy, checks and balances on govt power) are natural outgrowths of Jefferson and the US Constitution. Read it sometime.

I eat trolls like you for breakfast.

Good post doc, undo kudo to ace and redirect.

It goes beyond their belief in perfectibilty. Part and parcel of that belief is the delusion that reality itself is subject to consensus. We who accept reality as it is are not just "unbelievers", we are in fact responsble for the difference between what really happens and what ought to happen.

What they believe:

That what ought to be true becomes truth when consensus is achieved among the socially minded and well intentioned. That objecting with evidence is proof of malicious motive to prevent the gradual improvement and ultimate perfection of existence.

That all wrong answers being equally wrong are more worthy in their equality than the privileged self-righteous correct answer undeservedly selected by the arbitrary question. That the elitist correct answer would be just as wrong or more so were the question fairly posed makes it all the more loathsome for it’s smug hypocrisy.

That intolerance toward Christians is called for because Christianity is the enemy of tolerance. Ditto conservatives and most especially the Christian right. Ban them from politics lest they defend themselves.

That renouncing white privilege after growing up in it is saintly, but Clarence Thomas is a hypocrite for opposing affirmative action when he himself may have benefited from it.

Without a shred of cognitive dissonance.

But then ... isn’t that what their ism is all about? Becoming impervious to cognitive dissonance? Fact and logic are just tools of oppression fashioned by discredited and reviled dead white males. Just raw materials to be sliced and diced and turned against the holdovers of the old guard in asynchronous jihad.

It's like some vast cynical cargo cult. That through formalism and symbolism similar to real science they can craft their own utopia, or at least interfere with the sucessful operation of "bad science".

Fact and logic are just tools of oppression fashioned by discredited and reviled dead white males.

Unless those dead white males are Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Freud, Adorno, Marcuse, Foucault, Derrida, Alinsky, etc.

Some liberals I know have even said that we could eliminate hunger, poverty, crime, etc. if only we tried harder/gave more. And really said it. To my face. Without laughing.

The idea that we can eliminate poverty became particularly hysterical once they abandoned an objective definition of poverty (being able to feed, clothe and house yourself to a particular standard) in favor of a proportionate one. You can only not have a bottom 5% if everybody has exactly the same amount. Which is pretty much the underlying goal, I think.

My favorite liberal-thing-said-with-a-straight-face was from the BBC. I only heard it in passing -- I wish I'd caught to the date, program and speaker. It was a young girlie from either animal rights or anti-hunting who seriously opined that we could teach foxes to be vegetarians. There were so many things wrong with that, it made my head spin around like Linda Blair.

Sue:

Mr Pomo was flying coach to Dallas when he decided he’d rather sit in first class. He finds an empty seat and settles in. The flight attendant notices and tells him he’ll have to move back to coach.

So Mr Pomo tells her “The space time coordinates you refer to as coach are continuously overtaking the space time I occupy with a velocity approaching 600 mph. Therefore it is simply an artifact of your limited perception that prevents you from appreciating that here and there are actually the same place in a more universal frame of reference”

The attendant mentions this to the steward who goes over and tells Mr Pomo that since he is not ticketed for first class he will have to leave. So Mr Pomo tells him “Your arbitrary class distinctions are historically discredited forms of oppression that no member of modern enlightened society could possibly honor.”

The steward mentions this to the captain, who tells the copilot “take over for a minute; I know how to deal with this”. He walks over to Mr Pomo and politely whispers something in his ear. After that Mr Pomo meekly gets up and returns to coach. When the captain returns to the cockpit the copilot asks “What did you tell that guy?”

The captain replied “I just told him that first class wasn’t going to Dallas.”

ROFL boris!

Dearest Tubinotroll-
"the roots of leftist concerns" are dictating who gets to have "(human rights, civil rights, democracy, checks and balances on govt power) ."
Y'all.
We're honest about our past.
We're just getting tired of having to clean up several hundred years of Europe's messes, while having that past whitewashed in favor of blaming the US for the world's ills.
Start with the Crusades in the Middle East, then work your way through the Americas from 1492 forward to 1776. Don't forget to ask yourself who created the slave trade, and the rest of African and Asian colonial history. Yeah, we jumped into the void left by the French in Indochina in the 60's.
We helped you end WWI, and then after WWII (hint, EUR wars), we kept you free from Soviet rule, while...
Wait, why am I bothering with you? You lie to yourself, and blame America.
It's proven to be the easiest (and most popular) course for so long now, that you don't even have to do your homework.

Program on the emergence of civilization.

"14 species of large animals capable of domesitcation in the history of mankind.
13 from Europe, Asia and northern Africa.
None from the sub-Saharan African continent. "
Favor.
And disfavor.

They point out Africans’ failed attempts to domesticate the elephant and zebra, the latter being an animal they illustrate that had utmost importance for it's applicability in transformation from a hunting/gathering to agrarian-based civilization.

The roots of racism are not of this earth.

Austrailia, aboriginals:::No domesticable animals.

The North American continent had none. Now 99% of that population is gone.

AIDS in Africa.

Organizational Heirarchy
Heirarchical order, from top to bottom:

1. MUCK - perhaps have experienced multiple universal contractions (have seen multiple big bangs), creator of the artificial intelligence humans ignorantly refer to as "god"
2. Perhaps some mid-level alien management
3. Mafia (evil) aliens - runs day-to-day operations here and perhaps elsewhere (On planets where they approved evil.)

Terrestrial management:

4. Chinese/egyptians - this may be separated into the eastern and western worlds
5. Romans - they answer to the egyptians
6. Mafia - the real-world interface that constantly turns over generationally so as to reinforce the widely-held notion of mortality
7. Jews, corporation, women, politician - Evidence exisits to suggest mafia management over all these groups.

Movies foreshadowing catastrophy
1985 James Bond View to a Kill 1989 San Francisco Loma Prieta earthquake.

Many Muslims are being used like the Germans and Japanese of WWII::being used to hurt others and envoke condemnation upon their people.

I wish I could find a source to educate many Muslim fundamentalists. Muhammad is alive. He is a man chosen like Jesus Christ and, due to his historical status, will live forever.

They can affect the weather and Hurricane Katrina was accomplished for many reasons and involves many interests, as anything this historical is::
1. Take heat off Sheenhan/Iraq, protecting profitable war machine/private war contracts
2. Gentrification. New Orleans median home price of $84k is among the lowest in major American cities, certainly among desirable cities.

Our society gives clues to the system in place. We all have heard the saying "He has more money than god." There is also an episode of the Simpsons where god meets Homer and says "I'm too old and rich for this."

This is the system on earth because this is the system everywhere.
god is evil because of money.

I don't want to suggest the upper eschelons are evil and good is the fringe.

But they have made it abundantly clear that doing business with evil won't help people. They say only good would have the ear, since evil is struggling for survival, and therefore only good could help me.

The clues are there which companies are good and which are evil, but they conceal it very hard because it is so crucial.

I offer an example of historical proportions:::

People point to Walmart and cry "anti-union".

Unions enable disfavored people to live satisfactorly without addressing their disfavor. This way their family's problems are never resolved. Without the union they would have to accept the heirarchy, their own inferiority.

Unions serve to empower.

Walmart is anti-union because they are good. They try to help people address and resolve their problems.

Media ridicule and lawsuits are creations to reinforce people's belief that Walmart is evil.

Amercia is a country of castoffs, rejects. Italy sent its criminals. Malcontents.
Between the thrones, the klans and kindred, they "decided" who they didn't want and acted, creating discontent and/or starvation.
The u.s. is full of disfavored rejects. As far as the Rockafellers and other industrialists of the 19th century go, I suspect these aren't their real names. I suspect they were chosen to go and head this new empire.

Jesus Christ is a religious figure of evil. These seperatist churches formed so they could still capture the rest of the white people, keeping them worshipping the wrong god.
And now they do it to people of color, Latinos and Asians, after centuries of preying upon them.

Since Buddism doesn't recongnize a god, the calls are never heard, and Chinese representation is instead selected by the thrones.
It was set up this way. Perhaps dyanstic thrones had a say, but maybe not.
Budda was the Asian's Jesus Christ::: bad for the people. "They came up at the same time for a reason."

Simpson's foreshadowing::Helloween IV special, Flanders is Satan. "Last one you ever suspect."
"You'll see lots of nuns where you're going:::hell!!!" St. Wigham, Helloween VI, missionary work, destroying cultures.
Over and over, the Simpsons was a source of education and enlightenment, a target of ridicule by the system which wishes to conceal its secrets.

Jews maim the body formed in the image of "god", and inflicted circumsision upon all other white people. I believe Islam is the one true religion, and those misled christians who attack "god's" most favored people will pay for it dearly one day.