Dennis Prager wrote June 20, 2023:
Leftism is the attempt to destroy the past—every value and every institution, the good as well as what it regards as the bad.
That is why leftists, by definition, hate conservatism. Conservatism seeks to conserve the best from the past. The Left seeks to destroy the past, including the best.
The first of the modern left-wing revolutions, the French Revolution, quite consciously sought to destroy every major institution and value of French society—not just the monarchy but God, religion, the legal system, traditional notions of good and evil, the calendar, the old way of telling time, the old weights and measures, and even the names of the days of the week. In other words, the past.
Just like the Left in contemporary America, the leftists of the French Revolution toppled statues—in their case, the statues of every king of France.
The next major left-wing revolution, the Russian, did the same. As the Soviet dissident joke went, “In the Soviet Union the future is known; it’s the past which is always changing.”
Now you can begin to understand leftism.
In a very real sense, today’s leftism began in the 1960s with the infamous clarion call “Never trust anyone over 30.” That phrase meant nothing less than “value nothing from the past.” Precisely what all leftism has been about—from France under its revolutionaries to Russia under the Bolsheviks to China under Mao to America under the Left.
That is why, as I have said almost every day on my radio show for years, “The Left destroys everything it touches.”
Whatever its noble-sounding rhetoric, the Left stands for nothing and therefore builds nothing (other than state power). Aside from state power, it only destroys.
Leftism in music, art, sculpture, and architecture destroyed everything beautiful and noble that had been created over all the preceding centuries.
It is destroying the universities, the high schools, and the elementary schools.
It is destroying science. More and more medical schools, for example, no longer speak of “pregnant women” but of “birthing persons.” The American Medical Association has come out in opposition to listing the sex of newborns on their birth certificates; children, the AMA holds, will eventually decide whether they are male or female, neither or both.
Like the French revolutionaries, it has redefined moral categories. It has substituted class and racial categories for moral ones. Good and evil have been replaced by black and white, male and female, rich and poor.
It is destroying the ideal of the nuclear family—a married man and woman with children. The Left has made war on “heteronormativity” and has redefined marriage.
And most telling—even the French Revolution did not conceive of this break with the past—the Left is working to destroy the distinction between man and woman.
Days before the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Barack Obama told a wildly cheering crowd, “We are five days away form fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
That’s all the Left does: fundamentally transform. Destroying everything it touches is not a byproduct of leftism. It is its aim.
I don’t find Prager’s analysis useful.
The Wikipedia entry on the left-right political spectrum said:
Political scientists and other analysts regard the left as including anarchists, communists, socialists, democratic socialists, social democrats, left-libertarians, progressives, and social liberals. Movements for racial equality, as well as trade unionism, have also been associated with the left.
Political scientists and other analysts regard the right as including conservatives, right-libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, neoconservatives, imperialists, monarchists, fascists, reactionaries, and traditionalists.
In his 2015 book, Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations, Andrew Heywood wrote:
In a narrow sense, the political spectrum summarizes different attitudes towards the economy and the role of the state: left-wing views support intervention and collectivism; and right-wing ones favour the market and individualism… Ideas such as freedom , equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism are generally seen to have a left-wing character, while notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism are generally seen as having a right-wing character.
…The central themes of conservative ideology are tradition, human imperfection, organic society, authority and property . For a conservative, tradition reflects the accumulated wisdom of the past, and institutions and practices that have been ‘tested by time’; it should be preserved for the benefit of the living and for generations yet to come. Conservatives view human nature pessimistically in at least three senses. First, human beings are limited, dependent and security-seeking creatures; second, they are morally corrupt, tainted by selfishness, greed and a thirst for power; third, human rationality is unable to cope with the infinite complexity of the world (hence conservatives’ faith in pragmatism and their preference for describing their beliefs as an ‘attitude of mind’ rather than an ideology). The belief that society should be viewed as an organic whole implies that institutions and values have arisen through natural necessity and should be preserved to safeguard the fragile ‘fabric of society’. Conservatives view authority as the basis for social cohesion, arguing that it gives people a sense of who they are and what is expected of them, and reflects the hierarchical nature of all social institutions. Conservatives value property because it gives people security and a measure of independence from government , and encourages them to respect the law and the property of others.
…Liberalism is a political ideology whose central theme is a commitment to the individual and to the construction of a society in which individuals can satisfy their interests or achieve fulfilment. The core values of liberalism are individualism , rationalism , freedom , justice and toleration . The liberal belief that human beings are, first and foremost, individuals, endowed with reason, implies that each individual should enjoy the maximum possible freedom consistent with a like freedom for all. However, while individuals are ‘born equal’ in the sense that they are of equal moral worth and should enjoy formal equality and equal opportunities, liberals generally stress that they should be rewarded according to their differing levels of talent or willingness to work, and therefore favour the principle of meritocracy . A liberal society is characterized by diversity and pluralism and organized politically around the twin values of consent and constitutionalism , combined to form the structures of liberal democracy.
Significant differences nevertheless exist between classical and modern liberalism. Classical liberalism is distinguished by a belief in a ‘minimal’ state , whose function is limited to the maintenance of domestic order and personal security . Classical liberals emphasize that human beings are essentially self-interested and largely self-sufficient; as far as possible, people should be responsible for their own lives and circumstances. As an economic doctrine, classical liberalism extols the merits of a self-regulating market in which government intervention is seen as both unnecessary and damaging. Classical Classical liberal ideas are expressed in certain natural rights theories and utilitarianism , and provide one of the cornerstones of libertarianism . Modern liberalism (sometimes portrayed as social or welfare liberalism) exhibits a more sympathetic attitude towards the state, born out of the belief that unregulated capitalism merely produces new forms of injustice. State intervention can therefore enlarge liberty by safeguarding individuals from the social evils that blight their existence. Whereas classical liberals understand freedom in ‘negative’ terms, as the absence of constraints on the individual, modern liberals link freedom to personal development and self-realisation. This creates clear overlaps between modern liberalism and social democracy.
Liberal ideas and theories have also had a major impact on the discipline of international relations, and constitute the principal mainstream alternative to realism. Liberal international theory is based on the assumption that the belief in balance or harmony that runs throughout liberalism can also be applied to the relations between states. This disposes liberals to believe in internationalism, and to hold that realists underestimate substantially the scope for co-operation and integration within the state system. However, in the liberal view, international co-operation does not arise spontaneously; instead, it is a consequence of economic, political or institutional structures. So-called commercial liberals have drawn attention to the capacity of free trade to generate peace and prosperity. Republican liberals highlight the pacific tendencies inherent in democratic governance , in line with the democratic peace thesis. And liberal institutional-ists argue that stability and order can be introduced into state systems by the construction of international organizations Liberalism has undoubtedly been the most powerful ideological force shaping the Western political tradition. Indeed, some portray liberalism as the ideology of the industrialized West, and identify it with Western civilization in general. Liberalism was the product of the breakdown of feudalism, and the growth, in its place, of a market or capitalist society. Early liberalism certainly reflected the aspirations of a rising industrial middle class, and liberalism and capitalism have been closely linked (some have argued intrinsically linked) ever since. In its earliest form, liberalism was a political doctrine. It attacked absolutism and feudal privilege, instead advocating constitutional and, later, representative government. In the nineteenth century, classical liberalism, in the form of economic liberalism, extolled the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism and condemned all forms of government intervention. From the late nineteenth century onwards, however, a form of social liberalism emerged, characteristic of modern liberalism, which looked more favourably on welfare reform and economic intervention. So-called ‘end of ideology’ theorists such as Francis Fukuyama (1992) argued that the history of ideas had culminated with the final, worldwide triumph of liberalism. This supposedly reflected the collapse of all viable alternatives to market capitalism as the basis of economic organization, and to liberal democracy as the basis of political organisation.
The attraction of liberalism is its unrelenting commitment to individual freedom, reasoned debate and to balance within diversity. Indeed, it has become fashionable to portray liberalism not simply as an ideology but as a ‘meta-ideology’, that is, as a body of rules that specifies the grounds on which political and ideological debate can take place. This reflects the belief that liberalism gives priority to ‘the right’ over ‘the good’. In other words, liberalism strives to establish conditions in which people and groups can pursue ‘the good life’ as each defines it, but it does not prescribe or try to promote any particular notion of what is good.
…Socialism is an ideology defined by its opposition to capitalism and its attempts to provide a more humane and socially worthwhile alternative. The core of socialism is a vision of human beings as social creatures united by their common humanity; as the poet John Donne put it, ‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ This highlights the degree to which individual identity is fashioned by social interaction and the membership of social groups and collective bodies. Socialists therefore prefer co-operation to competition, and favour collectivism over individualism. The central, and some would say defining, value of socialism is equality, socialism sometimes being portrayed as a form of egalitarianism. Socialists believe that a measure of social equality is the essential guarantee of social stability and cohesion, and that it promotes freedom in the sense that it satisfies material needs and provides the basis for personal development. The socialist movement has traditionally articulated the interests of the industrial working class, seen as being systematically oppressed or structurally disadvantaged within the capitalist system. The goal of socialism is thus to reduce or abolish class divisions.
…The moral strength of socialism derives not from its concern with what people are like, but with what they have the capacity to become. This has led socialists to develop utopian visions of a better society in which human beings can achieve genuine emancipation and fulfilment as members of a community. In that sense, despite its late-twentieth-century setbacks, socialism is destined to survive if only because it serves as a reminder that human development can extend beyond market individualism.
…Fascism is a political ideology whose core theme is the idea of an organically unified national community, embodied in a belief in ‘strength through unity’. The individual, in a literal sense, is nothing; individual identity must be entirely absorbed into the community or social group. The fascist ideal is that of the ‘new man’, a hero, motivated by duty, honour and self-sacrifice, prepared to dedicate his life to the glory of his nation or race , and to give unquestioning obedience to a supreme leader. In many respects, fascism constitutes a revolt against the ideas and values that dominated Western political thought from the French Revolution onwards; in the words of the Italian fascist slogan: ‘1789 is dead’. Values such as rationalism , progress, freedom and equality were thus overturned in the name of struggle, leadership , power , heroism and war. In this sense, fascism has an ‘anti-character’. It is defined largely by what it opposes: it is anti-rational, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, anti-communist and so on. Fascism represents the darker side of the Western political tradition, the central values of which it transformed rather than abandoned. For fascists, freedom means complete submission, democracy is equated with dictatorship, progress implies constant struggle and war, and creation is fused with destruction.
Fascism has nevertheless been a complex historical phenomenon, and it is difficult to identify its core principles or a ‘fascist minimum’. For example, while most commentators treat Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship in Italy and Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship in Germany as the two principal manifestations of fascism, others regard fascism and Nazism as distinct ideological traditions. Italian fascism was essentially an extreme form of statism that was based on unquestioning respect and absolute loyalty towards a ‘totalitarian’ state. As the fascist philosopher, Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), put it, ‘everything for the state; nothing against the state; nothing outside the state’. German Nazism, on the other hand, was constructed largely on the basis of racialism. Its two core theories were Aryanism (the belief that the German people constituted a ‘master race’ and were destined for world domination) and a virulent form of anti-Semitism that portrayed the Jews as inherently evil and aimed at their eradication. Neo-fascism or ‘democratic fascism’ claims to have distanced itself from principles such as charismatic leadership, totalitarianism and overt racialism. It is a form of fascism that is often linked to anti-immigration campaigns and is associated with the growth of insular, ethnically or racially based forms of nationalism that have sprung up as a reaction against globalization and supranationalism .
While the major ideas and doctrines of fascism can be traced back to the nineteenth century, they were fused together and shaped by World War I and its aftermath, and in particular by a potent mixture of war and revolution. Fascism emerged most dramatically in Italy and Germany, manifesting respectively in the Mussolini regime (1922–43) and the Hitler regime (1933–45). Some historians regard fascism as a specifically inter-war phenomenon, linked to a historically unique set of circumstances. These circumstances included World War I’s legacy of disruption, lingering militarism and frustrated nationalism; the fact that in many parts of Europe democratic values had yet to replace older, autocratic ones; the threat to the lower middle classes of the growing might of big business and organized labour; the fears generated among propertied classes generally, and elite groups in particular, by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and the economic insecurity of the 1920s that deepened with the full-scale world economic crisis of the early 1930s. According to this view, fascism died in 1945 with the final collapse of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes, and it has been suppressed ever since by a combination of political stability and economic security. The late twentieth century nevertheless witnessed a renewal of fascism in the form of neo-fascism. Neo-fascism has been particularly influential in Eastern Europe, where it has sought to revive national rivalries and racial hatreds, and has taken advantage of the political instability resulting from the collapse of communism . However, it is questionable whether fascism can meaningfully adopt a ‘democratic’ face, since this implies an accommodation with principles such as pluralism , toleration and individualism.
…Racialism is, broadly, the belief that political or social conclusions can be drawn from the idea that humankind is divided into biologically distinct races. Racialist theories are thus based on two assumptions. The first is that there are fundamental genetic, or species-type, differences among the peoples of the world – racial differences are meaningful. The second is that these genetic divisions are reflected in cultural, intellectual and/or moral differences, making them politically or socially significant. Political racialism is manifest in calls for racial segregation (for example, apartheid) and in doctrines of ‘blood’ superiority or inferiority (for example, Aryanism or anti-Semitism)….
Racial theories of politics first emerged in the nineteenth century in the work of theorists such as Count Gobineau (1816–82) and H. S. Chamberlain (1855–1929). They developed through the combined impact of European imperialism and a growing interest in biological theories associated with Darwinism. By the late nineteenth century, the idea that there were racial differences between the ‘white’, ‘black’ and ‘yellow’ peoples of the world was widely accepted in European society, extending beyond the political right and including many liberals and even socialists… The attraction of racialism is that it offers a simple, firm and apparently scientific explanation for social divisions and national differences. However, racialism has little or no empirical basis, and it invariably serves as a thinly veiled justification for bigotry and oppression. Its political success is associated largely with its capacity to generate simple explanations and solutions, and to harness personal and social insecurities to political ends.
If you don’t divide people up on the basis of race, you will inevitably divide people up on the basis of ideology or religion or geography or class or sporting allegiance. We’re wired to bond with a tribe and to feel suspicion of outsiders. The most left-wing egalitarian types will still feel the need to dismiss much of humanity as trash. They won’t do it on the basis of race, they will do it on the basis of a supposed lack of enlightenment, and they will bewail those primitives who “cling to guns or religion.”
Heywood wrote: “The attraction of racialism is that it offers a simple, firm and apparently scientific explanation for social divisions and national differences. However, racialism has little or no empirical basis, and it invariably serves as a thinly veiled justification for bigotry and oppression.” Aren’t most appealing explanations for in-group vs out-group differences thinly veiled justifications for bigotry and oppression or is it only racial ones?
I was the raised a Christian and I learned to divide the world into Christians and non-Christians. It wasn’t a particularly useful distinction. As I grew up, I saw there was virtually no moral difference, for example, between Christians and non-Christians.
I got older and divided the world into those who believed in God and those who didn’t. That didn’t turn out to be a particularly useful distinction. I found no moral difference between believers and non-believers (though believers tended to have a stronger in-group identity).
Then I divided the world into those who believed that God gave the Torah and those who didn’t. Again, it was a particularly useful division. There wasn’t much moral difference between the believers and the unbelievers. What the distinction did give me was a strong in-group identity as an Orthodox Jew. And those ties bind and blind me, to quote Jonathan Haidt.
The 2013 academic book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences said:
[T]he political left has been associated with support for equality and tolerance of departures from tradition, while the right is more supportive of authority, hierarchy, and order…
Approval of the other side is not what we advocate but the political system will be a happier and more productive place if political adversaries are viewed not with scorn but with a perhaps grudging recognition that they experience a different world.
This means accepting that political orientations are connected to deep physiocognitive predispositions in a broadly predictable fashion. Acceptance of this belief requires rejecting two widely accepted assertions. The first is that all politics is culturally and historically idiosyncratic since one society might be concerned with famines and droughts, another with the super-power across the river, and yet another with protecting mineral riches. If this assertion is true, it becomes pointless to try to generalize about political divisions, patterns, and viewpoints. The second assertion is that, though humans’ physical traits obviously vary, we all share the same basic psychological, emotional, and cognitive architecture. If, from a behavioral point of view, human architecture is all the same, it follows that differences in political orientations cannot be more than skin deep and physiocognitive predispositions are irrelevant.
Both assertions—one about the nature of politics and one about the nature of humans—are incorrect. In fact, they have it exactly backwards: Though traditional wisdom asserts that politics varies and human nature is universal, in truth politics is universal and human nature varies…
Evolution is the process of species adapting to their environments and, because the environment itself is a moving target, the process is never ending. Evolution is not a destination but a temporary and sometimes lagging accommodation to environmental realities that existed at a certain time. If the environment shifts again, evolution will begin to move in a different direction, so no genetically based political predisposition is rightly viewed as more or less evolved.
…existence in hunter-gatherer societies prior to the advent of mass agriculture was short and filled with a remarkable range of threats. Selection pressures in such environments would likely favor individuals with higher degrees of negativity bias, who approached novel situations with caution, who were loyal to their group, and who were suspicious of the tribe over the hill. These would be the individuals most likely to avoid danger given that they would be less likely to open themselves up to situations in which they would be vulnerable. Such individuals would be responsive and attentive to threats. Given the evidence presented in the previous chapters, they would also have been the individuals who, in a modern mass polity, would display conservative political predispositions.
Our best guess is that in the rough and tumble of the Pleistocene, individuals who tried new things, opened themselves up to members of other tribes, and had little to no negativity bias were rare—it simply seems a losing long-term strategy in the face of all the dangers swirling about. Social units relatively isolated from threats for long periods of time might have permitted some protoliberals in the mix, but most hunter-gatherer groups would likely have needed to keep a constant eye on the horizon and maybe even on the next hut. These were likely conservative societies in the sense that they did not often make big changes in the way they did things and those genetically inclined to take chances, to go through life marching to their own drummer, were probably selected against…
Most people in the developed portions of the world today simply do not have the same constant, life-threatening worries that existed in the distant past. As a consequence, people today can “expand their circle” of social contacts and ethical concerns beyond family and tribe to people far away and perhaps even to animals.44 Not everyone will take this opportunity, and the absence of strong selection pressures will encourage tremendous variation in genetically influenced predispositions toward what in modern mass-scale societies is called either liberalism or conservatism. Liberalism may thus be viewed as an evolutionary luxury afforded by negative stimuli becoming less prevalent and less deadly. If the environment shifted back to the threat-filled atmosphere of the Pleistocene, positive selection for conservative orientations would reappear and, with sufficient time, become as prevalent as it was then…
We believe that traits such as orientation toward out-groups, openness to new experiences, and a heightened negativity bias fit more naturally with social than economic issues, and we tend to agree with Congressman Weaver that economic positions are typically secondary. He points out that “ethnocentrics do not give a fig for individual rights” and sees the connection between conservatism and free market principles as a relatively recent development…
Conservaton is, for some people, the perfect place to live. Its neighborhood watch program is vigorous but hardly needed because people are law abiding, not to mention heavily armed. The schools emphasize discipline and respect for authority, and build their curriculums around rule-based instruction like phonics for reading and memorization of formulas for math. Conservaton’s similarly designed houses are well maintained, clad in pretty much the same two colors of vinyl siding, and fronted by beautifully manicured lawns. There is a church on nearly every block and congregants give generously to them. Conservaton is quiet after 10:00 pm. Actually, it is quiet pretty much all the time except for one Saturday night a month. That night, the racetrack on the edge of town attracts some of the fastest stock cars in the region along with over 1,000 loyal fans. The town takes pride in its high school football team, a perennial state championship contender that shares the field on Friday nights with a renowned, amazingly crisp, John Philip Sousa–playing marching band. The restaurants in town are cozy and familiar—they haven’t changed their menus in decades and specialize in American food and lots of it. People dress predictably and nicely. Conservatonians are a bit cliquey; they don’t take to outsiders much and are especially wary of the residents of the only other town of consequence in the county: Liberalville.
Though Conservatonians would never believe it, Liberalville is a perfect place for some people to live. The schools promote experiences rather than rules and their curriculums change with the latest educational fads and experiments. Houses are an architectural hodge-podge and Liberalites emphasize preserving the character of older buildings even if this means forgoing modern amenities. Wood floors get the nod over wall-to-wall carpeting. Lawns are unlikely to be showered with the copious amounts of chemicals and water needed to maintain thick carpets of green grass. Some residents don’t even bother mowing—they just let nature take its course and enjoy the results. The town is light on churches, but has some pretty hip bars and pubs. It also has a community theatre and coffee shops that sponsor interpretive readings and poetry slams. Along with the latest blockbusters, the movie theater makes an effort to bring in award-winning documentaries and foreign films. New restaurants are constantly popping up, and Liberalites can go out for Thai, Ethiopian, Greek, and sushi. The high school’s sports teams are a joke. The most successful is the girls’ soccer team, and even they only occasionally manage a .500 season. The marching band is equally bad, but the improvisational jazz group is nationally known and regularly wins awards. Local kids in Liberalville are always forming and reforming garage bands, some of which turn out to be very good. Liberalville is never quiet.
People come and go at all hours and something is always happening. The loudness extends to fashion; Conservatonians wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the togs that Liberalites delight in sporting. Liberalites tend to travel a good deal, sometimes even going abroad. The population of Liberalville is much more diverse than that of Conservaton and it is not uncommon to hear languages other than English being spoken. Liberalites like this and are always interested when new and different people with new and different ways of living move in. In fact, the people of Liberalville are pretty much open to all kinds and all lifestyles with one important exception: Conservatonians.
