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| Does Iraq Have an Army? | New Party Leader Addresses Brit "Broken Society" |
The Mind of the Left
by Christopher Chantrill
December 06, 2005 at 2:45 am
WHAT IS IT like to belong to the left? How does the left think? Conservatives ponder this from time to time, as we think about our political adversaries, and as we formulate our ideas.
One of the best ways to look into the mind of the left is to ask a former member. You could ask, for example, Tammy Bruce, the lesbian writer and talk-show host who used to be the head of a National Organization for Women affiliate.
In an interview with John Hawkins to promote her new book The New American Revolution, she tells what it is like to be a left-wing activist. Asked by Hawkins
You said victimhood is the cornerstone of the identity of many liberals and for that reason, it’s very difficult for many of them to give it up. Why do you say that?
Bruce replies:
With an identity that’s based in victimhood, if you find either that you’re not a victim or you find personal independence and power, it literally becomes a threat. (If) your identity (is) based in victimhood (and) that is removed, it literally strikes at the core of the identity of that person.
What about hate mail and death threats? As a person who has had a public life on the left and on the right, is there a difference in the level of hate that you experience from the other side? Says Bruce:
When I was on the left my activism began on abortion rights and even in facing pro-life individuals, I would get the occasional death threat but really nothing to speak of. Upon my being honest and coming out and writing my book and dissenting from the left as a liberal, the threats and attacks are extraordinary. It is a remarkable window into the kind of venom, the kind of hate that drives the left.
And Bruce found that Christian conservatives were happy people.
[I was] quite surprised by how happy they were. I mean, I remember being on the left; no one is happy, trust me. They (are the) biggest group of miserable people you would ever want to meet. Everything is wrong, everything is going bad, everyone is after you, everyone wants to get you, people are building camps.
Modern developmental psychology has quite a lot to say about all this. You can check out one model, Spiral Dynamics, here. In the Spiral Dynamics model it is perfectly natural for many people to live as “red” victims. But they grow out of it, For many people, the way they do this is by accepting the Christian framework of God’s love for sinners and victims.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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