What the Left Seeks
Listening to Mark Levin on Thursday evening, I wondered if the Great One fully understood quite what he was saying. He went on a bit of a rant about the immorality of the left, and their willingness to bankrupt the country in the name of their Utopian dreams, but as I listened, I began to realize that Dr. Levin doesn’t understand the root of the left’s central motive. As I listened to him damning their behavior and tactics, cursing the statists as immoral, I think he missed the whole truth. You see, it isn’t that the left is immoral, or even that they are amoral, but instead, the left adheres to a completely different moral system with an alien motive at its root. There are all sorts of moral systems, some religiously based, while others are entirely secular. The question is always: What is the root of one’s morality. For most people, morality is an expression of their fundamental values, and this is where the difference manifests. Some have noticed that the left seems to readily ally with the Islamist front, both domestically and internationally, and to the degree this is true, it is because they share a central value: Theirs is the morality of death.
It’s easy enough for most Americans to understand that the militant Islamists value death over life, and indeed, one of their now-deceased leaders made the matter plain:
“We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two.” – Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Sharkbait was at least honest about it, but even had he been inclined to lie about it, his actions and those of his cohorts would still make the truth obvious. Theirs is a system of morality that places the value of the paradise in death they pursue above the value of anything here on Earth, but since guaranteed entry into paradise is only obtained through martyrdom, they are quite motivated to pursue both through mass murder in suicidal acts of monstrous proportions. Their rabidly single-minded pursuit of this end gives rise to the grim spectacle of a mother raising her children to be future suicide bombers. This is a value base so thoroughly removed from what we in the West would consider “normal” that we have a good deal of difficulty accepting that any person, never mind a loving mother, could so callously send her children to their deaths. In falling prey to this naive view, it permits us to overlook the fact that the equally rabid left is no less committed to the cause of death, though they don’t seem to be strapping-on suicide vests at the moment. Or are they?
What separates the virulent statist left from the garden variety “liberals” is that they are equally willing to impose death and mayhem, to include mass murder, if it is in the service of their aims. It is true that the average “liberal” is what might be termed a “useful idiot,” inasmuch as he or she is unwilling or unable to form the thoughts necessary to consider the ultimate meaning of their advocacy, so that they become true tools of the more virulent sort who happen to know full well what it is that they intend, and why. It’s at this point that some of my more moderately conservative friends will interrupt me to suggest that I really couldn’t possibly believe this of some of my fellow Americans, and yet I will be blunt with you as I am with them: I not only believe it to be true based on the logic, but know it to be true based on their actions.
The drooling left composed of the dictatorial thugs-in-waiting are much more discreet in many cases, and much less honest than bin Laden about their aims. They know that many of their useful idiots would abandon them if they fully understood the meaning and intent behind their actions, so that while they are no less enamored of death than their Islamist friends, they are much less willing to state it openly to the hearing of the world. The left’s intelligentsia cannot wait, however, to inflict their vision upon the rest of us, and it is chafing them something terrible to wait to see if Obama is re-elected. If he is, we might well expect them to try to have their way, and depending upon how you read this President, he may not be the least bit unwilling to go along or even lead them.
I am asked for evidence, and so I will give you a few morsels, of which you are already aware, but that you have permitted yourself to set aside as evidence of intent. I would ask my readers simply: What is the meaning of a mandated health-care law that destroys the private insurance market, imposes government-run death panels, decides who will get treated and under what conditions, and holds all people who work to pay for all people who do not? What is the meaning of a health-care law that will, by its sheer budgetary gravity, wreck the whole of the health-care delivery system of the United States of America, that for all its flaws, had been the most modern, the most capable, and the most thoroughly life-giving implementation of health-care anywhere on the planet, and had provided more treatments, cures, and therapies than any other on the entire planet? What must be motivating any person who knows this will be the result of their system, and yet goes on with it in what we perceive as defiance of the naked truth?
I allow that we conservatives perceive their desires as being in spite of the facts because I firmly believe, and indeed now know that this isn’t the case at all: They know their system will result in disaster. They know their economic practices are lies intended to destroy the country. They know that their view of criminal justice merely lets criminals off the hook, while making their victims doubly accosted. They know all of this. I speak not of the useful idiots, who don’t know much of anything except that they want their “Obama-phones” or “Cash for Clunkers” or “EBT cards,” or their truckload of free contraceptives, or whatever they’re after on any particular occasion. Instead, I am talking of the cloistered, ivory-tower intellectuals of the left, who fancy themselves geniuses of social organization, but who without the forcing hand of government could not assemble an afternoon tea for lack of practical knowledge and experience. These are the people who sit about thinking over the problems of what to do with millions of intractable, un-rehabilitated conservatives and capitalists once the statists finally attain their end-to-end control. Their answer is the same for this problem as for any other: Death. Kill them.
When it comes to the environment, the radical left tells us in coded language that the Earth can only happily support some fifty to one-hundred millions of us. What they do not state is their intention to reduce the global human population to that number, and the way to accomplish that will be…what? They also tell us we must reduce our energy consumption, but how is that to be done without reducing our condition and standard of living? If our standard of living is an expression of the pursuit of life, what must be the intention at the heart of the desire to diminish it? What you will find as you study the radical left is that their every policy is not merely anti-American, but anti-human, and anti-life. It is not merely the unborn who they wish to abort. Their blood-lust knows no bounds, and their hit-list stretches to the limits of the globe.
You might readily understand how the Islamic Supremacists values agree with their actions, as well as their words, but you might still wonder what sort of value system constructs the ethos of the left. You might not understand why their anti-human reflexes translate into anti-American sentiments. These are people who seek the finality of death, not because they imagine themselves in a paradise accompanied by some arbitrary number of virgins, but because at their heart, they hate themselves in the most fundamentally thorough way. These are the people who hate their own lives with the passion of the radical Islamists, but who lack the courage of their convictions. The best analogy might be the depraved, maniacal man, who murders his wife and children before turning the gun on himself. In a social and psychological sense, this is the motive of so-called “intellectuals” of the left. It is as irrational as the distraught young woman who aborts her child because she cannot bear the thought of giving the child up for adoption, to live on without her in the care of other parents. This, she pleads, she does from her heart, a motive she claims is born of motherly love(!) but what motivates it is something else entirely: “If I can’t have you, no one will.” We once institutionalized people of that mindset, but now they serve openly in government, and we have a society that has been rigged to produce bumper crops of them.
You might argue that I had been wrong about all this, and that the evidence lies in their “compassion” for the poor as expressed through their welfare state. It is true that there is evidence within the welfare state, but it supports my thesis, and it can be seen in the manner in which the welfare state is funded, administered, and executed. As lavish as our welfare state has become, it still represents a degradation in moral underpinnings that is lethal. When a welfare recipient’s morality is reduced to “I want what I want because I want it, and somebody should be compelled to provide it,” what you’re really witnessing is a human being who has had their entire purpose in self-efficacy replaced with a government hand-out. This person may be free to move about, to speak, to worship, and to own their persons, but they are no longer free. At the same time, all those Americans forced to pay for the welfare state do so only at the point of a gun, because it is to their own gruesome detriment to have such a monstrosity in existence. Their standard of living is reduced, which means that their lives and their trajectories are diminished, advancing the leftists’ cause of accosting their lives. There is a reason that every socialist or communist revolution begins with its aim of destroying the “middle class.”
The favorite target of the statists is “the rich,” and they pretend that there is some natural dishonesty implicit in the accumulation of wealth. They set about to destroy wealth wherever they find it, for the pleasure of having done so, but their reason is the same: An unending hatred of life. A person of wealth has made it easier to sustain his or her own life against the circumstances nature may impose. Wealthy people are every bit as subject to cancer or other diseases, but their wealth enables them to fight on against it with a greater arsenal of weaponry. More treatments are at their ready disposal, and in the end, barring some unforeseen accident, their lives will be extended. The truth is that we all have a finite amount of time, but what wealth permits any of us who obtain it to do is to extend that time marginally, but also to more thoroughly enjoy such time as we have, enjoy more frequently the company of those we love, and to pass along such wealth as we leave unused to our heirs and to the causes we value. In that sense, the value of our wealth can live on in perpetuity. One could argue that such men as Bill Gates obtain a sort of immortality because the foundations they establish can theoretically go on as long as society endures.
The institutional left abhors that notion. The sort of people who comprise the hard-core left will never obtain wealth by creative, life-giving means. Instead, they must trick and coerce, and the ready vehicle for such schemes is government. It is this reason that has always led leftists to seek positions in governing authority. They wish to be able to impose their schemes, and the pile of bodies they leave in their wake is a historical proof of my thesis. From Stalin’s “Five-year Plan(s),” to Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” and now Obama’s “Forward,” they always have the same approach, and the identical means as their tool: The naked force of coercion and the threat of death.
When a man lies about his infidelity, you can easily guess his motive is to conceal the truth from his wife and to preserve his reputation. When a man lies to all the people of a country about the results of his course of actions undertaken on behalf of the country, you might guess his motive had been to conceal his failures, while preserving his job. When a man lies to the country about the whole body of his intentions, attempting to disguise not merely what he has done, but what he is going to do, you must wonder about his motives. If a man’s plan is to destroy the wealth of a nation, and the evidence lies in his past performance, and in his continued advocacy of the same policies, there can be only one possibility: The destruction of the country is the object that man seeks.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have been told that the radical left is immoral, but I caution you that they are immoral only by our standards and values. By the values they hold dear, they are perfectly consistent, and unflinchingly “moral.” Barack Obama doubtless views himself as a moral paragon, because in his system of values, diminishing America is the good. America has been through most of its history the country of life. America had been that place and that system of laws and morals in which men and women have been free to establish their own futures, by their own efforts. It was this self-efficacious characteristic of the American culture that had made ours the most prosperous nation on the planet. For you and I, who hold life as a value to be pursued and cherished, America had been our place. Millions of immigrants from around the globe have come here, most in pursuit of that same basic value system.
The morality of the left recognizes in that America an enemy that must be defeated. It must be throttled. It must be diminished and bankrupted and ultimately abolished. What they value is death, and for more than two centuries, America had been death’s most lethal opponent. A life-giving prosperity had spread slowly across the land, but it spread only because its people had valued life. In its relations around the globe, the United States had gone to war many times, always in the name of punishing the wicked, and always in the name of life and its prerequisites: Justice and Liberty. It is sad that by his twisted moral standards, Osama bin Laden recognized in America a simple truth its own people have too often neglected:
“The U.S. loves life.”
What kinder compliment could he have paid our nation? He thought it a smear. He believed life a trivial matter. It’s among such men that life is always a disposable quantity, particularly the lives of others, and it’s why when Barack Obama says “there will be bumps in the road,” your curiosity should be piqued. Those “bumps” are lives, Americans, but he dismisses their deaths as “bumps in the road.” What moral system permits a man to view his countrymen in this way? What kind of ethos views life as a trivial matter? If you wonder why the left has an obvious affinity for the Islamic Supremacists, wonder no longer. While the Islamists do not hide their contempt for life, the leftist intelligentsia seeks to conceal it lest their useful idiots recoil in terror at their motive. That is their grim secret. That is the truth all their euphemisms are designed to shade. If you wish to defeat them, you must not hesitate to unmask them.
