PrintApril 28, 2008
The Moment of Truth for the Left has Arrived
If you haven't listened to Jeremiah Wright's hate sermons at Hugh Hewitt's website, you must do so. Every American with open eyes and ears has to listen to the voice of racial hatred, coming not from the Klan but from a clergyman of the Christian Left. Reading his words isn't enough, because you won't hear the unmistakable meaning of his vocal intonations. If you are a person of good will you will feel upset. But it's of the utmost importance to understand this moment of truth.
Because Jeremiah Wright -- the respectful word "Reverend" seems grotesquely out of place now -- is shouting out the slander catechism of the Left. His sermons say exactly what other Leftists say in calm voices, over and over again. Mr. Wright just does it with real, raw hatred, and every new slam is cheered on by his jubilant congregation. His is not a lone voice. He just sings the music to fit the words.
We have been nursing a viper in our national bosom. Seven years after September 11, 2001, this is the moment of truth, when the Left must finally decide what side it's on. Wright's sermons may signal the end of the Obama campaign, and they may mean the breakup of the Democratic Party as we know it. I don't see how any centrist Democrat can still belong to this party if Obama is its nominee. Jeremiah Wright may mean the historical end of the Civil Rights Era, because fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Left's presumption of Victimhood and innocence is now gone.
The Rev is only the visible bulge of this lethal political tumor. This is Saul Alinsky's sociopathic teachings on display, and this is what Hillary Clinton learned back at Wellesley College. It is the voice of feminists who hate all men, and of radicalized blacks who hate all whites.
Hate mongers collect injustices. If you and I did that, we could collect an endless laundry list about all the bad things somebody did to us. Maybe we have been hurt by men, or by women. Maybe we have been hurt by rich people, or by the angry poor. Maybe we have been hurt by Jews or blacks or whites, and we can put all our built-up rage on their heads. It's been done many times in the human past; that's exactly the psychology we see at work in Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, and various Muslim nations (among others), when explosive massacres take place. Mob psychology has been manipulated by demagogues throughout history. This is simply the another version of the Kluxers and Jim Crow lynch mobs. Today I see that psychology clearly enough on the Left, but outside of the ranting rooms of verifiable paranoids I don't see it many other places in this country.
Selectively collected injustices can keep us on the boil for a lifetime, because we ruminate on and on in all our waking hours about all the terrible things people have done to us. That is what the Left feeds itself in an endless stream; it is not a healthy thing to do. But it's what Jeremiah Wright has done to himself and to his congregation -- and who knows to how many thousands of other people? -- for almost all of his adult life. This is the Grand Inquisitor's view of America, the enraged prosecution case, without even imagining the possibility of innocence. This is what demagogues and witch hunters have always done, but I had never thought I'd see it in my lifetime.
Most of us take a more balanced view on our lives; we've had undeserved good fortune some of the time, and we've suffered undeserved pain at other times. That's life. If you look at the facts of Jeremiah Wright's life, he has been a child of good fortune -- excellent schooling well into graduate school, privilege and money, the support of a community of believers, vast political clout in Chicago. But hate mongers don't think that way. They just collect more and more injustices as they go through life, and load it all onto some enemy. They are constantly reading the minds of the enemy -- whites and especially Jews, in the case of Mr. Wright -- and all they see there is malevolence. Evil is what evil sees.
For Jeremiah Wright, the enemy comes with a white skin. He has taken historical injustices and turned them into a lifelong call for vengeance. This is the official doctrine of Black Liberation Theology, and it is freely supported by powerful institutions on the religious Left. BLT's founder, Dr. Jim Cone, is a professor of systematic theology at the Union Theological Seminary. It's utterly bizarre but true.
So it's not just Senator Obama who is stuck with Mr. Wright today. We are all stuck with a rageful Left, which really wants to destroy rather than to build. They mentally rehearse perceived injustices over and over again, and they blame this country for all the evil in the world, including AIDS in the black community. They never look at another side. Many have no honest conception of other countries, other cultures, or other points of view. They are not balanced people.
So the entire American body politic has a festering sore on its hands. This will not go away by itself. It will not be bought off by more money. It must be repudiated by the sensible Left, if it is still there. Just as William F. Buckley denounced the anti-Semites on the right, and sensible Americans rejected segregation and the Klan, just as American unions expelled Stalinist unions from the AFL-CIO, the time has come for the decent Left to draw a bright line in the sand, and keep the hate mongers out.
James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com
