[natchina]

i am not posting this critique on leftism because i am a right winger. i am socialist myself, albeit one who is disillusioned with the modern left and its divisive politically correct hysterics.

just thought i would share that as i realise this type of post can easily turn into partisan mud slinging.


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The various forms the Leftist ideology has adopted — Marxism, Socialism, Neo-liberalism — are rarely the result of initially spontaneous mass movements. Rather, such eruptions are usually triggered by one or all of three classes of people: theory-ridden intellectuals for whom exalted but impractical ideas substitute for the real world of refractory human beings, ruthless opportunists intent on seizing power, and wealthy socialites and media types who like to play with forces they do not understand, expressing, in the words of Victor Davis Hanson, “a pathetic projection of their own elite tastes and guilty desires.” The damage they do is immeasurable but the detritus they leave in their wake has never deterred them from wreaking further havoc. For the political Left assumes that it represents the next step in human evolution. In reality, it embodies the next stage in civilizational decline.

This “new” state of affairs will often manifest as a condition of reversion, whether to an idealized vision of the past, as in Rousseau’s natural state of man, or to a more primitive, tribal-like mode of communal association predicated on an ostensible harmony among its members. It’s a compelling and destructive dream world. This is not to disparage those men and women whose sacrifice and commitment are genuine. But the suspicion remains that the majority are unaware of their true motives, which may have more to do with a sense of inadequacy, self-reproach, and inner lack, however overlaid by a varnish of self-satisfaction, than with a presumed nobility of purpose.

With its manufactured emphasis on peace, brotherhood, and dialogue, its generic sympathy for the poor, the oppressed, the fugitive, and the marginalized, and its mainstreaming of social and sexual deviance as a species of cultural sophistication, the Left as we know it today manages chiefly to assuage its own bad conscience. For the most potent advocates of the contemporary Left, especially the Liberal Left, are generally privileged people — politicians, academics, newspaper editors, Hollywood actors and TV personalities, intellectual mandarins, the parvenu rich, social patricians — who feel they have a debt to pay for enjoying their own prosperity, exemptions, and perquisites. They are like an extant version of that fossilized aberration known as Siphusauctum gregarium, aka the stomach-on-a-stick, which resembles a tulip on the outside but conceals a bulbous gut within. They rightfully belong in the Cambrian, but are regrettably with us still.



Uneasy or embarrassed by favored status and determined to present themselves as lofty egalitarians, they will do everything they can to mobilize those whom they regard as the disenfranchised — the young, the working classes, the destitute, the “undocumented,” the “different” — while refusing to surrender their own prerogatives. They will treat enemies as friends so as not to have to deal with obstacles to their need for absolution. Inwardly crippled, they will feign magnanimity. They will labor to change the world, not from the ground up but from the top down. And in so doing, they will bleed other people’s blood.

Clearly, then, the empathy they profess for the socially disadvantaged and the strangers in their midst is almost entirely fraudulent. There is a deep lesion between the rhetoric and the reality. They will embrace Rousseau’s argument in A Discourse on Inequality that “the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody”; in actual fact, they generally evince a distinct hankering for the fruits of the earth, which they guard jealously, and dispose of the earth as they see fit. Such is the operative “dialectic” of the socialist elite. Meanwhile, the dream must be protected in defiance of both concrete practice and ensuing results.

continued:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-lefts-gordian-knot/

[12lightf]

It's an interesting article but I think it's indicative that it concluded with a quote from David Horowitz, an American 'writer' who rose to fame by writing a book exposing the undoubtedly rampant Trotskyite-Maoist-Islamism among leading lights of American academia. I say indicative because it seems to share his very tribal bogeyman view of the left as swivel eyed Maoists desperate to have a new Cultural Revolution and whatever.

I really don't think such a view applies to any modern mainstream left which has overwhelmingly dropped the ideological baggage and devoted itself to moderated capitalism a little. In all honesty it's just the kind of thing one expects from American right-wingers - I don't know the affiliations of the author, but it reminds me very much of certain American conservative writers - especially the mindless sneering at the frankly immaterial issue of what social group the 'Liberal Left' fall into.

[anarchism101]

(Original post by natchina)
The various forms the Leftist ideology has adopted — Marxism, Socialism, Neo-liberalism

What the.......

[D.R.E]

All those paragraphs of nothing. I'm not left-wing in any sense but I think the guy is just an idiot with a knack for good rhetoric.

As an aside, why is it everyone who likes to use the word 'ostensible' a douchebag?

[tufc]

(Original post by anarchism101)
What the.......

Was just thinking that...

How did the Left form neoliberalism, when it was a school of thought created by the most radically right-wing PM we've ever had...

[Kiss]

That was interesting, and I agree in that there is a definite hollowness about the politically left - or rather those who want to appear left and PC. It's hard to tell where the real left and those who want to appear left stand now, and who they are.

[geetar]

Interesting. It reminds me of Richard Rorty's 'cultural left'; one which (he claims) abandoned being actively engaged in political and social life, and contented itself with just muttering vague politico-philosophical statements about society and inequality.

Good ole' Wikipedia explains it better.