What Americans Need to Learn about the Left

A retired English professor from Emory University recently wrote: “Stop wasting your time yelling, ‘Hypocrisy!’ Don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. They don’t care. Consistency is not a liberal virtue. Only the outcomes matter.”
 
Instead of “liberal” virtue, a more correct designation would be “progressive,” as in “far left progressive” virtue. Liberals are still around who think of themselves as moderate (and honest) mixed economy Democrats.
 
The professor was talking to conservatives and others who still think the communist-fascist leftists in our midst pay attention to things like logic, consistency, and truth.
 
“Don’t be so naïve,” psychologist Edith Packer, who herself escaped the Nazis, would often say. If bad people are going to kill you, throw you in solitary confinement with no recourse to habeas corpus, remove you from your tenured professorship without just cause, etc., ad nauseam, they will find a way to get rid of you. They are not going to pay attention to logic, consistency, or truth. “You can’t reason with these people, can you?” Dr. Packer would add. The answer to her question was rather obvious.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned, say the leftists! It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters.*
 
There are three points many fail to understand about the left. (1) Today’s far left progressives are in fact advocates of communism or fascism or some combination. (2) The communist-fascist progressive leftists are convinced that they are the ones who are doing what is moral and everyone else is not. And (3) the campaign to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, communism, or fascism has been going on in the United States for over a century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).
 
Thus, it appears to us that  “they just don’t care.” And they don’t care—about anything that relates to capitalism, individualism, or egoism. We are evil and, consequently, they hate us. Tear down the statues of America’s founders. That’s moral in their view. Oppose teaching children that they are racist oppressors. That’s immoral.
 
Today’s leftists are following Marx’s premise of the inevitability of socialism and the necessity of capitalism’s eradication. The sooner capitalism collapses—literally through physical destruction, preferably turned to ashes—the better.
 
To attempt a logical argument with the communist-fascist left is futile because Marx gave us that theory of many logics called polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-310). We subscribe to bourgeois (updated to white racist) logic and socialists to proletarian (updated to victim) logic. The two groups—us and them—cannot talk to each other. The “logics” are contradictory.
 
Sound familiar? “Your truth versus my truth”?? Postmodern epistemology is not so new!
 
Let me now elaborate point three above with a historical sketch of the left’s attempt to take over the United States in the last 120-30 years.
 
As I have written before (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the first progressives, from the 1880s to the early twentieth century, were educated in Germany by democratic socialists. They brought those ideas back to the United States to replace the move toward classical liberalism with a more “moderate” or “compassionate” social liberalism (Applying Principles, pp. 36-39; see also 1, 2). This gave us, among other increases in government power, the Pendleton Act of 1883, unelected “expert” and difficult-to-fire bureaucrats, and regulatory agencies to “regulate” businesses to make them more “compassionate.”
 
By the 1920s and ‘30s, with the latter called the “red decade,” communism and fascism were openly recognized and admired replacements for what was understood to be American capitalism. Communists and fascists at the time were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Thereafter, the communists started calling anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. They continue to do so.
 
Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Joseph Stalin in 1956 shook the American communist world such that the likes of David Horowitz’s parents (card-carrying communists) stopped calling themselves communists and resorted to progressivism as their preferred political moniker.
 
Horowitz himself became cofounder of the New Left, editor of Ramparts magazine, and participant throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s with such communist organizations as the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Indeed, Horowitz, who has now become conservative, asserts that the turmoil and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago enabled the left to take over the Party, which, he says, it still controls.**
 
In the years since progressives have only become stronger and stronger, and more and more irrational, moving their cause further and further left, with seemingly little rational or articulate opposition from the right. Early Party leaders had to moderate their views and intentions. In 2011, however, Barak Obama talked explicitly about “fundamentally transforming” the United States. To what? To socialism, following the lead of one of his influencers, Saul Alinsky, community activist and organizer who advocated open confrontation.
 
Though attributed to a member of SDS, the following could be the motto of Alinsky: The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. Which means, as Alinsky clearly acknowledges: the end justifies the means. As in: logic, consistency, and truth be damned, and physically destroy capitalism in order to rebuild a society of socialism.
 
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the left and their panic at the thought of losing the political war, especially to an unintellectual businessman who represented the American sense of life and catered to that sense of life in his constituents.
 
The 1960s erupted all over again, only worse. Putsch (German for coup) is the word Ayn Rand used to describe the “revolution” the 1960s leftists wanted to achieve. Putsch is the correct description of today’s mob terrorism. Its purpose, as Rand says, is to establish tyranny.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned.
 
It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters. As the communist-fascist progressive leftists say, “We are the ones who are doing good. You capitalists are evil and need to be destroyed by any means that works.”
 
 
 
* Many links in this post are references to previous posts where I have touched on the topics discussed. The purpose of the present blog is to give a more historical perspective on progressivism and its rise in the United States.
 
** Horowitz is not the only person to turn away from the socialist Garden of Eden. Max Eastman, a prolific writer and editor on the left in the early twentieth century admired Lenin and visited Russia in 1922 and ‘23. Over twenty years or so, he gradually abandoned socialism and started writing free-market articles, many in The Freeman, publication of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). During the years he was affiliated with FEE, he came to know Ludwig von Mises.