The origins of
the modern left can be traced back to the famous passage in Rousseau’s
Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, in which he condemned
the institution of private property:
“The first man, who after enclosing
a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘this is mine,’ and found
people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”
Added Rousseau: “How many crimes, how many
wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man
have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the
ditches should have cried to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor;
you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally
to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!”
Around the 1830s, a faction of French
liberals gravitated toward Romanticism and the philosophy of the late Rousseau,
proclaiming that capitalism, private property, and the increasing complexity
of modern society were agents of moral decay -- both for the individual
and for society at large. This is essentially the worldview that has made
its way, through history, into the collective mind of the modern left;
it is a worldview calling for a revolution that not only will topple the
existing capitalist order and punish its corrupt leaders, but that also
will replace that order with a socialist regime where the utopian ideals
of perfect justice and equality will reign. Such an ambition can be put
into effect only by a totalitarian state with the authority to micromanage
every facet of human life, precisely the end-point toward which the policies
and crusades of the modern left are directed.
The contemporary left holds that non-socialist
societies are composed largely of dominators and the dominated, oppressors
and the oppressed. The alleged cause of this social arrangement is the
economic system of free-market capitalism, which is viewed by the left
as the root of all manner of social ills and vices -- racism, sexism, alienation,
homophobia, imperialism. In the calculus of the left, capitalism is an
agent of tyranny and exploitation that presses its boot upon the proverbial
necks of a wide array of victim groups -- blacks and other minorities,
women, homosexuals, immigrants, and the poor, to name but a few. That is
why according to the left, the United States (historically the standard-bearer
of all capitalist economies) can only do wrong.
To eliminate America’s inherent injustices,
the left seeks to invert the power hierarchy, so that the groups now said
to be oppressed become the privileged races and classes (and gender) of
the new social order. The left’s quest to transform the “dominated” into
dominators, and vice versa, draws its inspiration from the
Communist Manifesto, which asserts that “[t]he history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggle.” The struggle identified
by the Manifesto was that of the proletarians and their intellectual vanguard,
who, armed with the radical utopian vision of socialism, were expected
to launch a series of civil wars in their respective countries -- battles
that would topple the “ruling classes” and the illegitimate societies they
had established.
According to Marxist theory, these conflicts
would rip each targeted society apart and
create a new revolutionary world order from its ruins. In an effort
to bring about this utopia, the contemporary left has formed a broad alliance,
or united front, composed of radicals representing a host of demographic
groups that are allegedly victimized by American capitalism and its related
injustices. Each constituent of this alliance -- minorities, homosexuals,
women, immigrants, the poor -- contributes its voice to a chorus that aims
to discredit the United States specifically -- and Western culture generally
-- as abusers of the vulnerable. Nor is the left’s list of victim groups
limited only to human beings; in the worldview of leftwing environmentalists
and animal rights activists, even certain species of shrubs, trees, insects,
and rodents qualify as victims of capitalism's ravages.
The seeds of the contemporary anti-American
left sprouted in the New Left’s rebellion against the classical liberalism
of the post-World War II era. True to its tradition in the New Deal, that
liberalism was strongly supportive of the civil-rights movement, the eradication
of poverty, and other social causes based on an amelioration of inequality.
And on the international front, this “centrist,” post-World War II liberalism
stood firmly against communist totalitarianism. Indeed it was the “Cold
War liberals,” rather than the conservative movement, that recognized the
Soviet threat and engaged and fought the USSR through a policy of containment.
Then, in the 1960s, came the New
Left, a movement that rejected classical centrist liberalism because
of its gradualism in domestic policy and its anti-totalitarianism in foreign
affairs. At its beginning, the New Left also rejected Stalinism (though
it saw Stalinism as perilously close to being morally equivalent to the
U.S.). But the New Left also romanticized the charismatic revolutionaries
of the Third World as an alterative to the "red" on the one hand, and to
the "red, white and blue" on the other. As a result, the New Left wound
up romanticizing a whole new set of totalitarian heroes -- figures such
as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Daniel Ortega.
Changed by the war in Vietnam from a
movement theoretically hoping to make America better, into one that believed
America was unredeemable, the New Left became a “revolutionary” movement
in its approach to domestic policies and foreign affairs. Targeting “Cold
War liberals,” it made them an endangered species and attacked the Democratic
Party which had mirrored their beliefs and principles. By 1972, after the
trauma of the 1968 Chicago convention, the New Left “progressives”
had not only killed the post-war Democratic Party, but, through the nomination
of George McGovern for President, seized and inhabited its corpse.
The New Left effectively exiled the
leading figures of the old centrist liberalism, especially figures such
as Hubert Humphrey and Henry “Scoop” Jackson. After accomplishing this
parricide, the New Left not only controlled the Democratic Party but also
appropriated the classification of "liberalism," thus accomplishing something
that the Communist
Party USA (CPUSA) had long tried to do when it called communism “liberals
in a hurry.” The CPUSA had not succeeded in this because the true liberals
had refused to allow such a definitional outrage. But because their credibility
and self-confidence was so deeply shaken by their backing of the Vietnam
War, these genuine liberals were unable to hold the line against attacks
from the New Left “progressives,” and they lost not only their party but
also the term which had defined their principles. Many of these centrist
liberals wound up moving toward Reaganism and neo-conservatism when they
saw what those who now called themselves “liberals” actually believed and
wanted to accomplish through their control of the Democratic Party.
Calling themselves “liberals,” today’s
leftists (descended from the New Left) claim the moral high ground as self-anointed
exemplars of compassion and enlightenment -- counterweights to the supposedly
“reactionary” conservatives they depict as heartless monsters. The modern
left understands that in order to win the hearts and minds of Americans,
it must present its totalitarian objective -- the uncompromising destruction
of the status quo -- in the non-threatening lexicon of traditional Western
values; that is, it must cite, as its animating purpose, the promotion
of such lofty ideals as “human rights,” “civil rights,” “civil liberties,”
and above all, “social justice,” or the “correction” of the free market’s
inherent inequalities through political interventions of a Marxist nature.
As the perennial Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas once said:
“The American people will never
knowingly adopt socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will
adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will
be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”
Toward this deceitful end, the left co-opted,
in the years following the Vietnam War, the name of “liberalism,” long
honored in the West as the movement that had brought freedom, dignity,
economic opportunity, and legal protections to millions of people who had
been denied those advantages everywhere on the globe since the very dawn
of history. Draping their programs and objectives in the rhetoric of classical
"liberalism," leftists embarked on the revolutionary enterprise of redefining,
subtly and incrementally, what most Americans understood liberal policies
to be. Over the course of years and decades, the leaders of the left championed
crusades and ideals that bore ever-decreasing resemblance to the liberal
causes of a prior era, yet they invariably identified both themselves and
their evolving causes as “liberal.” Most significantly, they were largely
successful in getting the media and academic elites to parrot their redefinition
of that designation at every stage along the way. Thus, programs that were
in fact leftist and socialist were enacted by legislators and social reformers
in the name of “liberalism,” whose reputation for noble intentions served
not only to shield those programs from public criticism, but in fact to
win wide public approval of them.
When the term “liberalism” (from the
Latin word liberalis, meaning “pertaining to a free man”) first
emerged in the early 1800s, its hallmarks were a belief in individual rights,
the rule of law, limited government, private property, and laissez faire
economics.
These would remain the defining characteristics of liberalism throughout
the liberal epoch (generally identified as the period of 1815-1914). But
the contemporary version of liberalism is a parody of its predecessor.
It is a stalwart champion of group rights and collective
identity, rather than of individual rights and responsibilities (e.g.,
the racial preference policies known as affirmative action, and the left's
devotion to identity politics generally); the circumvention of law
rather than the rule of law (as exemplified by the flouting of immigration
laws and nondiscrimination laws, and by a preference for judicial activism
whereby judges co-opt the powers that rightfully belong to legislators);
the expansion of government rather than its diminution (favoring
ever-escalating taxes to fund a bloated welfare state and a government
that oversees virtually every aspect of human life); and the redistribution
of wealth (through punitive taxes and, again, a mushrooming welfare state)
rather than its creation through free markets based on private property.
Another hallmark of classical liberalism
was its spirit of toleration for divergent beliefs and ideas, and of respect
for individual freedom of thought. Yet in modern leftism, we find precisely
the opposite: intolerance of opposing viewpoints, and the promotion
of group-think. The left interprets as treason any deviation from
its own intellectual orthodoxy, if exhibited by a member of a so-called
“victim” group who theoretically ought to occupy a place in the phalanx
of revolutionary agitators. We see this phenomenon manifested with particular
clarity by black
leftists who excoriate black conservatives as “race traitors,” “house
slaves,” “Oreos,” and “Uncle Toms.”
David Horowitz has made the following
cogent observations
about leftist intolerance:
"Since ideologies of the left
derive from commitments to an imagined [utopian] future, to question them
is to provoke a moral rather than an empirical response: Are you for
or against the future equality of human beings? To demur from a commitment
to the progressive viewpoint is thus not a failure to assess the relevant
data, but an unwillingness to embrace the liberated future. It is to will
the imperfections of the present order. In the current political cant of
the left, it is to be 'racist, sexist, classist,' a defender of the oppressive
status quo.
"That is why not only radicals, but
even those who call themselves liberals, are instinctively intolerant towards
the conservative opposition. For [leftists], the future is not a maze of
human uncertainties and unintended consequences. It is a moral choice.
To achieve the socially just future requires only that enough people decide
to will it. Consequently, it is perfectly consistent for [leftists] to
consider themselves morally and intellectually enlightened, while dismissing
their opponents as immoral, ignorant, or (not infrequently) insane."
Contemporary “liberalism” is leftism in
disguise. Thus the travesty of the “liberal” label being widely attached
to individuals such as Michael Moore, George Soros, Noam Chomsky, Al Sharpton,
and Jane Fonda — all of whom are opponents of the classical liberalism
which defined America and the West for two centuries. |