PrintOctober 2, 2010
Political Extremism, Left and Right
The post-Cold War era has seen an unprecedented rise in America of European-bred, radical-Left political thought. The radical Left is defined here as any authoritarian Collectivism in which individual freedom is increasingly subsumed by the dictates of a dominant central government: Communism in particular, but revolutionary Socialism in general under its Fascist, Third Way, or Progressive pseudonyms. Regardless of descriptor, the common denominator is the elimination -- or at least the emasculation -- of Capitalism as the hated engine of disparate wealth distribution.
Today, this Collectivist ideology travels under the sanitized, if disingenuous, banner of "social justice" but remains essentially Marxist nevertheless. As Marx so succinctly put it, "Communism is the elimination of private property." This is an idea that may have been feasible in a tribal world of small, mono-cultural, agrarian communities, but it is completely irrational in today's world. Worse, it's a fatally flawed ideology built on the Left's implicit denial of human nature: man's "out-of-the-herd" evolutionary progress toward individual achievement and self-actualization.
To suppress human nature and human difference is, in essence, the Left's utopian ambition -- an ambition that requires the totalitarian state [1].
It requires a totalitarian state because it is a delusional quest to return man to an egalitarian herd from which he evolved thousands of years ago. And as the history of the twentieth century shows, humanity rebels against such coerced devolution. Marx's elimination of private property coincidentally strips incentives to produce. The result is social decay to a dismal level of perpetual shortages and shared poverty -- just ask the citizens who stood in the endless bread lines of the former USSR.
The radical Left's denial of human nature carries with it the arrogant assumption that humans are little more than replicated androids content to do whatever government mandates. This is simply elitist wishful thinking which projects sheep-like docility on independent beings which are more feline than bovine in nature -- and you can't herd cats.
The revolutionary socialists' road to its egalitarian fantasy world is less about achieving an altruistic "social justice" than it is about pursuing a self-serving, compulsive quest for personal redemption: The revolutionists denied human nature at work. It is a zealotry which, history shows, has led to the perverse belief that wholesale executions, killing fields, mass starvations, and forced-labor gulags are perfectly legitimate, even necessary, means of creating the perfect socialist world. These slaughters were done solely to extinguish the educated, innovative, entrepreneurial, productive "bourgeoisie" -- the "greedy" middle class whose existence was/is intolerable to the priesthood of this ostensibly egalitarian, if murderous, Collectivist ethos.
The ideologically warped mindset of the Marxoid Left is evident in a remark that "we must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life" attributed to the Communist Leon Trotsky (in the context of the Communist Revolution). He need not have worried. History has demonstrated that the Communists of the world have had no trouble ignoring the "sanctity" of human life. Trotsky himself became a victim of his own philosophy when an assassin jammed an ice pick into his head.
Though Trotsky et al. are long departed, the perverted mission of what Horowitz [1] has termed "the radical project" lives on. It lives on in the Gramscian capture-the-culture Marxist subversion that has succeeded spectacularly in injecting Communist ideology into our schools, all branches of government, the communication/information industries, and now, most ominously, the Obama-led Democrat Party. It lives on in the Left's belief that it's the government's function to arbitrarily confiscate and redistribute wealth and decide who gets what and how much while wasting most of it in the process. It lives on in the knowledge that massive governmental transfers of wealth from the few to certain designated others (supportive voters) will insure perpetual political power. It lives on in America with the Left's unstated but now obvious four-part agenda: 1) Neuter/emasculate Capitalism as noted above; 2) end national sovereignty as too divisive or jingoistic (re: the Arizona border issue); 3) abrogate the Constitution (too restrictive of government power); and 4) expunge Christianity (intolerably theistic. God is dead. Contact the ACLU for details).
Political symmetry would seem to require an aggressive, politically motivated Radical Right to balance that of the activist Left. But the existence of an agenda-driven "far Right" seems obscure, if not completely invisible. The closest approximation seems to be a purported "religious" Right which the Left sees as an ever-present threat to impose a Christian theocracy. If such a movement exists, it does so as a model of incompetence. Individuals like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the occasional televangelist have loomed ominously on the Left's hypersensitive radar as potential leaders of a Christian inquisition which, so far, has failed to materialize. If there have been any crucifix-wielding, Bible-waving, window-smashing, car-burning street marches calling for the death of Clinton or Obama in the vein of those antics from the anti-Bush professional Left, none seem to have made the six o'clock news.
Another threat perceived by the Left to be far-Right is the occasional ragtag "militia" men scattered about the backwoods in near-comic disarray. From the few rare (staged?) sightings shown on TV, these individuals seem more concerned about insulating themselves from intrusive government than in attacking it. This paranoia was made evident by the FBI sniper assault on Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge which killed his wife Vicki and their 13-year-old son, who was shot in the back.
Then there was the Branch Davidian religious enclave at Waco annihilated by the FBI in a tank-led military assault also ordered by the Clinton administration. Some 76 individuals, including 21children, were needlessly incinerated in an ill-conceived, bungled, and unnecessary act of government tyranny.
It's deadly clear that the Liberal and revolutionary Left have near-zero tolerance for the civil rights of any individuals who choose to live in opposition to the Left's gestating Collective. It's also clear that there is nothing on the Conservative, yet-to-be-defined "far Right" that represents a threat to the constitutional fabric of the country in the way of the activist, ideologically driven Left and its Kafka-esque Postmodernist relativism.
Conservatives are mostly passive law-abiding individuals who wish to live their lives with minimal intrusion of government as the Constitution intended. If Right-wing extremism did exist, it would be in the form of individual anarchy, not as some coercive organizational conspiracy. Conservatism is individualistic, not socialistic, and that's exactly why the revolutionary Collectivists find it intolerable. The existence of any Right-wing, Capitalist threat to the rule of law and our constitutional sovereignty is simply a "bogeyman-under-the-bed" ruse contrived by the Left to deflect attention from its own agenda to "fundamentally transform America."
The advent of the Tea Party movement is clear evidence that traditional America has no desire to be "fundamentally transformed." But will it be too little, too late?
[1] Horowitz, D. H., The Politics of Bad Faith, The Free Press, NY, 1998
