The Left Drinks Itself to Death. Again

[Sandra]

Most radical position possible is always the one that is the most Anti-American, the most Anti-European, and Anti-Israeli

The Left Drinks Itself to Death. Again

 By Daniel Greenfield  Thursday,
December 23, 2010


It wasn’t long after Obama’s victory that liberals began trying on
patriotism like an old ill-fitting coat, admiring themselves in the
mirror, and even denouncing conservatives as unamerican (yes it
happened). Caught in the afterglow of their win, basking in the radiance
of their man addressing the country, beaming down from the carefully
arranged set pieces and choreographed events, guzzling the myth like
hopeandchangey brew­they could almost believe that the great clock of
history had wound back to the Kennedy Administration. Before the Vietnam
War or the shot in Memphis that killed Martin Luther King. That golden
moment between FDR and LBJ, only briefly broken by McCarthyism and Ike,
when hating your country hadn’t yet become the mandatory liberal
position. When it was still possible to look up admiringly at the flag
and be a liberal, even if Phil Ochs and the SDS might mock them for it.
When America to them was still the hope of the world, not the shame of
the world.

More than anything else, the rise of Obama offered them that. A return to
loving their country and being loved by it. Of course some things would
have to go. Many things. But there could be a reconciliation of some
kind. A new unity after the ‘nightmare years’ of the Bush Administration
when the local Borders could never keep enough Bushisms books in stock,
for reasons that they were sure had something to do with the Patriot Act,
and their European friends didn’t like them anymore. The new golden
moment was here. Obama was the new JFK. And this time he wouldn’t be shot
and no one would have to be drafted to go to Vietnam. Altamont would end
peacefully. Jimmy Hendrix would never die. Neither would Jim Morrison.
All the culture clashes and racial hatreds would be reconciled. And all
the national traumas would be healed again.

But despite what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thought, there is no
‘Reset Button’ on history. You don’t need one. History naturally repeats
itself because history is nothing more than people following patterns.
Liberals who talk about being traumatized by the America of the sixties
and the seventies, and the death of their dream of the Age of Aquarius,
have never understood that they created their own traumas. And
manufactured their own history. Their ‘traumas’ were created by their own
cultural war against America. A cultural war that did tremendous damage
to America as a whole. But even more damage to them.

Vietnam was the work of two Democratic Senators with no executive
experience, who promised the country that a new age was coming. The JFK
assassination was the act of a misfit turned radical socialist who ate up
all the paranoia being dispensed by the left, and decided to jump the gun
on the revolution. All the overdoses and assassinations were spawned by
the cultural chaos that the counterculture itself had unleashed. An
anarchy that rebounded on itself in murder and suicide. And of course the
great legacy of drug abuse and insanity, by counterculture figures who
had made their living celebrating both, until it killed them.

The moral of the story is that the left destroys itself

The moral of the story is that the left
destroys itself. At the beginning of the 20th century, Moscow was
swarming with every breed of socialist, radical, anarchist and leftist. A
generation later they were all dead or rotting in gulags waiting for
Stalin to die. It wasn’t the right that it did to them. It was the left
devouring itself. Ideological factions forming alliances against each
other. Declaring zero tolerance for minor deviations. Denouncing each
other and staging executions. By the time they were done, there was no
more ‘left’ left in the Soviet Union. Only illiterate thugs mouthing
party slogans that they couldn’t understand. Eventually those thugs, like
Khrushchev and Brezhnev, became the leaders of the Soviet Union and
destroyed it from within. And today there are far more leftists to be
found in Germany, than in Russia. Because even the Nazis didn’t wipe out
the left nearly as thoroughly as the Motherland of Socialism
did.

The left always destroys itself. Every time it takes power, it unleashes the seeds of its own destruction

The
left always destroys itself. Every time it takes power, it unleashes the
seeds of its own destruction. And the same greater thinkers who can write
entire treatises on the perfect society, and have hair-pulling
eye-gouging fights over the precise definition of working class, can no
more run a country, than they can run a farmhouse. They are moralists by
nature, bureaucrats by inclination and tyrants by inevitability. On paper
they scribble governments of theories, but when they are forced to govern
people, they no sooner encounter a setback than they reach for the whip.
People are naturally governed by consensus. But the left cannot even find
consensus within its own ranks.

Had the left been able to unite, Hitler would have never come to power.
And if it cannot find consensus within its own ranks, how can it possibly
govern by the consensus of a population with diverse views and needs? It
can’t. It tries to force them to comply with its theories and when they
don’t, it declares an economic war against the rich, a cultural war
against the bourgeoisie and the morals of the working class, it denounces
its own parents, burns the flag and announces that if it doesn’t win the
next election, it’s moving to Canada. We’ve gone through this farce many
times before. And it all ends with the country in worse shape than ever
and elderly leftists waxing nostalgic for the radical days of their
youth, when they protested whichever war was happening, smoked illegal
substances and practiced spiritualism.

Not long after Obama had set down his laurel crown, the radical left set
off denouncing him for not getting everything they wanted done right
away. They weren’t listened to at first. They never are. But there’s
money in them that radical hills. The Michael Moores of the country know
that if they stick to their guns, sooner or later mainstream liberals
will become embittered and disappointed, and admit they were right. And
now that the elections of 2010 are over and done with. And Obama has to
govern with the Republicans, their hour has come round at last. Now they
can condemn every bipartisan compromise as treason. Embrace Assange. Rant
about robot drones bombing poor innocent terrorists from the sky. Now
they can tear down what Soros’ billions built for them.

The great ignorant failure of the left is that it never learns from history

The great ignorant failure of
the left is that it never learns from history. It improves its tactics,
but never its worldview. It learns how to get elected, but not how to
govern. When its black and white view of the world and the country has to
be leavened by a touch of gray, it retreats in a huff and sticks to its
principles. Those principles being that they are completely right.
Everyone else is completely wrong. And the rest of the country is a bunch
of FOX News brainwashed doodooheads for not seeing it their way. Then
when the next messiah comes along, the next JFK wannabe looking gravely
at the camera, and with just that right combination of hopefulness and
seriousness, invoking some great dream or another, they’ll swoon and rush
right out to faint at his speeches. But when the smelling salts of
bipartisanship and practical governance are waved under their noses, they
leap up and abandoning their newfound patriotism, begin burning the flag
again.

And so history repeats itself. Again. And again. And each time the left
is certain that this time they will get it right. But how can they get it
right, when they’re the problem? For all their cleverness at theory,
they’re hopelessly stupid about practice. And as good as they are at
staging elections as theater and governing through bureaucracy, they’re
terrible at dealing with people and keeping the books straight. There’s
no better formula for disaster than that.

Now the left has cast off its briefly worn flag, thrown away the pins and
banners, and gone to war against their country again. The embrace of
Assange marks the moral irrelevancy of liberals. Not just their
willingness to suddenly defend a rapist and demean his victims. Anyone
who remembers what actually went on behind the doors of the Clinton White
House, knows that isn’t new. But their sabotage of their own government’s
soft power strategy.

Wikileaks is not sabotaging the hard front line of warfighting with its
release of confidential diplomatic cables, but the soft power that
liberals promised would prove to be a more effective and respectable
method of fighting terrorism. Much as Michael Moore or Naomi Wolf may
posture, what they are actually doing is destroying the very approach
that liberals sold as an alternative to the occupations of Afghanistan
and Iraq. This is no longer Cindy Sheehan crying on cue for the cameras
or newscaster gravely intoning the latest death count, while showing
background footage of an anti-war rally. This is exactly what liberals
accused Cheney and Rove of in the Plame Affair… but on a vast and epic
scale. On such a vast scale that if you imagine Valerie Plame and Joseph
Wilson as a single fingernail, then the Wikileaks diplomatic cable
release is the entire population of the Houston metropolitan
area.

Wikileaks has helped the right, because the diplomatic cable leak mainly hurts liberals

Wikileaks has helped the right, because the diplomatic cable leak mainly hurts liberals. It undermines the diplomatic corps. It sabotages the Obama
Administration’s efforts at building international relations. It makes
the case for a War with Iran. It mainly leaks things that the liberal
side of the foreign policy aisle wanted to keep secret.

Michael Moore can put on his clown suit and pretend that he’s fighting
Sarah Palin on Twitter. But he’s not. He’s fighting the Obama
Administration. So is every liberal Assange supporter. And why? Why
sabotage the man they were on their knees for, in the winter of another
year. To answer that question is to understand why the left destroys
itself again and again. Why lemmings dash off cliffs and socialists
murder each other over the placement of a comma in a policy statement on
the role of the peasantry in agrarian socialism. Ideology is theory, not
reality. Theory promotes radicalism, because the radical position can
never be disproven in theory, only in practice. The easiest way to build
a cult of personality within a community where radicalism equates to
integrity is to take the most radical position possible. And the most
radical position possible is always the one that is the most
Anti-American. And the most Anti-European. And Anti-Israeli.

Drunk on theory, the left either seizes enough power to manage tyranny,
or defeated slinks away while its more moderate figures hammer out a
slightly less dysfunctional system whose only virtue is that it will
completely collapse in 20 years, instead of 20 minutes. And the drunken
theoreticians on the left assail them from the sidelines for selling out
the movement, the working class and the revolution. In a democracy, the
theoreticians get book deals. In a tyranny, they get the Gulag. The
system collapses either way and the cycle begins again. At least until
the barbarian hordes overrun the entire civilization. And then the clock
gets reset to zero.

The War on Terror is the hamhanded attempt by our civilization to keep
the barbarian hordes back a little. Like most such historical attempts,
it’s incompetent and futile. But the left is busy hammering holes in what
few walls we have managed to put up. Sabotaging even our meager efforts
to extend the life of our civilization by another decade or two. 
“Let it all burn,” they cry. “A better world will come in its place.” But
this time it will not be Gulags for them. There is no snow in Arabia.
Only dunes. And the always waiting headman’s axe.



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