After God’s Own Heart

A good look at what leftists really are, not liberals, but totalitarians, and the insane self delusions from which they suffer.

From A Sign of Hope

By Charlie Johnston

Dennis Prager observed a few years back that leftists destroy everything they touch, adding that they are not liberals; they are totalitarians. After destroying their target, they offer nothing to replace the function it had.

The fiasco with the Iowa caucuses is yet more evidence of that observation. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz noted that Democrats are the party of government, determined to tell you how to run everything in your life, yet can’t count who stands under which sign in a gymnasium. Just before the caucuses began, Iowa Dems were bragging that they had worked three years to put together this brilliant system. It rivals the Obamacare website in its disastrous rollout. When Democrats say, “We have a plan for that,” we should be terrified.

Not all major cities run by Democrats are hellholes – but all cities that are disintegrating hellholes have been run by Democrats for several decades or more.

The left is inordinately proud of considering themselves the smartest folks in the land – to the point of routinely mocking the “rubes” who are conservative. It’s a peculiar vanity, given that objective tests generally show that conservatives are smarter and better informed than liberals. While the previous link limits itself to vocabulary and linguistic facility, I have seen the same data for economics, history, knowledge of current events and foreign affairs. When it comes to generosity and overall happiness, conservatives have it in abundance, liberals barely at all. Odd, when the left prides itself on being the “compassionate” ideology. Claiming these characteristics seem much more important to the left than to the right. For the left, smarts are vital to their identity, their self-image, while the right tends to regard smarts as a tool by which to accomplish and produce good and useful things. The left insists on being judged by its good intentions, while the right demands actual good results. In the end, the left’s self-image is based on the same foundation of the mean girls’ clique in high school: the mean girls are the coolest in the school because they say they are, evidence and reality be damned. The left is the smartest and the strongest and the noblest because they say they are. I guess it is a survival strategy: when disaster follows in the wake of everything you attempt, you have to have something to assure you that you are not as bad as the consistent results would indicate. This trait would not be so irritating if the left would just confine its pratfalls to their own lives, but they insist that because they are the smartest and noblest and most generous that they should be able to autocratically ruin everyone else’s lives, too. I know misery loves company, but they have enough company already.

Even so, some on the left are very intelligent. The problem is that intelligence, like physical strength, is merely a tool which can be used well or badly. A very strong man might use that strength to help his fellows – or to bully them. Same thing with an intelligent man, but intelligence brings with it a greater danger. Combined with hubris, intelligence can cause a man to badly delude himself. A man can use intelligence to assess what a situation is, in itself, and then prudently considering human nature, craft means to practically alleviate various problems and ills. This is wisdom; to assess a situation accurately, apply means of action that account for human nature, respect individual autonomy and produce actual good results. It requires real humility combined with self-confidence – a willingness to act, along with the resolve to correct course when, inevitably, some approaches simply don’t work. It requires acknowledgement from the start that no one can know everything – and that producing good fruit that will last is what counts, not showing off an imagined superiority.

I think the truth is that it is unchecked vanity that destroys everything it touches. Because it is so fragile, it cannot acknowledge failure or error because that would strike at its very identity. Thus, it is always doomed to ultimate failure, lurching from disaster to disaster like Mr. Magoo -and incapable of the candid self-reflection that would allow it to correct course. Leftism is not so much an ideology as it is a vanity project. Their limited knowledge and unlimited presumption make them like Dostoevsky’s Russian schoolboy – the sort of people who, given a map of the stars, which they had previously never heard of, would return the next day filled with corrections. And now, as a ruling class that has been completely infected with vanity and is crumbling, the left is reduced to smugly insulting the intelligence of those who actually accomplish things for the betterment of all.

It has been a very rough week for the crumbling vanity project that is the American elite. We are seeing the beginning of the end of days for that cohort. They won’t go gently into the night, but average Americans have become “woke” to the danger of indulging elitist fantasies.