Bruce Thornton asks at Front Page:
“How is it that an ideology so graphically repudiated by history and so bloody in its application, has managed to endure, especially in the West, which has provided the greatest and most widespread prosperity, political equality, and freedom in human history?”
And he answers, in a summary of his argument:
“In short, human weakness and frailty––its susceptibility to … political religions; its thirst for status and superiority, and its indulgence of showy feelings that signal one’s superior virtue and compassion––have kept Leftism alive despite its manifold bloody failures, and has helped it to persist by making it immune to empirical evidence and rational argument.”
But are those the reasons why Leftism persists - and not only persists but continues to spread and gain ever more power?
Maybe they are contributing reasons. But they seem to me insufficient to account fully and convincingly for the dominance in the Western world now of the “woke” development of Leftism.
Don’t emotions of envy, malice, revenge, prurience, cruelty motivate the Communists, Schwabians, Warmists, Genderists, Floydists, America-Haters, Anti-White Racists, and Nancy Pelosi?
Because - perhaps - a tremendous lot of human beings are fundamentally bad?
Yes, good question - why does it persist.
I agree that the answers he gives may be contributing factors, and the ones you give, even more so.
There truly are alot of fundamentally bad people in the world, and among them are those who see the ideology of Leftism as a vehicle to acquire power, by convincing the ignorant and gullible to give them that power by trusting the government to take care of them.
“Leftism is predicated on dubious, if not wildly absurd, assumptions and ideas about human nature and motivation: secularism, philosophical materialism, determinism, and the technocratic fallacy that “science” can discover and exploit the timeless forces and laws of human progress and social improvement. The latter claim in particular has been repudiated by Marxism’s ghastly toll…”
But “secularism, philosophical materialism, determinism” are all good (secularism) or true (the other two), so why should he denigrate them by lumpimg them in with Marxism? (In their place, he seems to favor a “faith in a justifying, transcendent narrative”.) Those are the obvious things Marxism gets right (but interpreted in its own stupid way), and they still provide it with a seductive draw to many thinking people who disdain the way conservative Christianity rejects them in favor of metaphysical and spiritual claptrap (a “faith in a justifying, transcendent narrative”). Part of the reason leftism survives is because of the animosity engendered by the survival of Christianity.
I agree that the reasons Thornton supplies don’t seem sufficient. He didn’t mention that pet peeve of mine I just referred to about the survival of Christianity. He does mention the long march through the universities and then high and grade schools, but not the broader march through most other institutions. His points about class snobbery (in reaction against smug and self-satisfied Christianity, I wonder?) seem very on the mark. But to a question like, ‘Why does the left survive’ there can be many levels and kinds of plausible explanations offered. Some are as much answers to ‘how’ as answers to ‘why’ (The Long March; public funding for radical activism, etc.) It’s not a good sign that there are so many plausible answers, together pointing to the enormity of this question.
It could be. It’s like parents with a bratty, spoiled child. They were too weary of it to discipline it, so it grew into a monster who now plagues them.
Because, perhaps, a tremendous lot of human beings are fundamentally stupid?
The bad and powerful hoodwink the stupid into believing that Marxism of some sort is going to work if the right people…the aforementioned “bad and powerful”… are in control.
Indeed, if we want to live in a “civilized” world, we must act as though free will exists. I do not accept that unadulterated free will exists, but it doesn’t really matter. It just is as it is.
