Protest march against the election of Donald Trump in Saint Paul, Minnesota on November 9, 2016
Wikimedia Commons / Fibonacci Blue

On many occasions I have mused about why anyone would want to be a member of the political Left. See my posts The Dirigiste Mind, Human Values and the Dictates of Reality, Delusions of Progressives and Other Dirigistes, and Values. Reality, and Politics for the products of this musing. This morning while reading the morning’s crop of posts, I came across a reason I had not seriously considered before: The power of human emotion.

The Power of Human Emotion

The first of the posts that restarted my reflections was The Exhaustion of American Liberalism by Shelby Steel, published in the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, declares the spate of riots, marches and demonstrations of progressive hatred directed toward Donald Trump and the Republicans reveals what modern progressivism has become: “a politics shrouded in pathos.” In his view progressivism has almost completely exhausted its store of emotional and intellectual resources, To the extent it can still propel itself, the fuel that animates it is almost purely emotion.

During the 1950s and 1960s progressive Democrats seized the American imagination with the fight against racism, the worst blight  on the American soul that had infested it since before the American Revolution. The issue of slavery cost us more deaths during the American Civil War than all the Butcher’s Bills from all other American wars combined up until the Vietnam War. There can be no doubt the emotional trauma created by the Civil War and racism would continue as long as that disease infested us.

Politically, racism and its opposition has served the Democratic Party very well up until the present time. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is beyond any doubt the greatest accomplishment of the Democratic Party, albeit with significant Republican support.

The Democratic Party has lived on this legacy ever since. Even as history began to show the faith of the party in Keynesian economic doctrine to be greatly misplaced, the glory of overcoming racism continued to attract Americans of all races. To this civil rights legacy the progressives of the Democratic Party sought to add law that prohibited discrimination against other categories of people, such as women, homosexuals, and illegal aliens, thereby inventing the identity politics they hoped would keep them in power.

To continue in this manner, the Democratic Party would have to continually stoke the fires of white guilt for their ancient sins. Concerning this white guilt, Steele wrote,

America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.

White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.

Indeed, any human being can feel guilt legitimately only for his or her own sins. Our own acts and beliefs, not those of our ancestors or our fellow citizens, are all to which we can lay claim. That does not mean we cannot feel outrage at the sins of others and work to eliminate them, but it does mean we do not have to accept personal culpability. If we no longer feel the scourge of personal guilt and the evidence for the sins of racism become more scarce under the weight of law, what happens? The previous existence of racism then becomes progressively less important compared to other issues.

Concerning this, Steele notes that after America was stigmatized “as racist, sexist and militaristic” in the 1960s, it had an overwhelming desire to regain its moral authority, its moral innocence. Progressives (aka liberals) made themselves the keepers and guarantors of this moral innocence, while the poor neoliberals (aka conservatives) were concerned only with freedom and wealth and had very little moral authority. Steele remarks that

This was the circumstance in which innocence of America’s bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of hardcore political power. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation’s past. “I had to vote for Obama,” a rock-ribbed Republican said to me. “I couldn’t tell my grandson that I didn’t vote for the first black president.”

For this man liberalism was a moral vaccine that immunized him against stigmatization. For Mr. Obama it was raw political power in the real world, enough to lift him—unknown and untested—into the presidency. But for Mrs. Clinton, liberalism was not enough. The white guilt that lifted Mr. Obama did not carry her into office—even though her opponent was soundly stigmatized as an iconic racist and sexist.

As we view racism and sexism as a receding image in the rear view mirror of careening history, those images will hold less power over us. Other issues will begin to possess a more immediate hold over our imaginations. However, the receding figures of racism and sexism are still not negligible, which you can ascertain by noting how many times Trump is castigated as a racist. Yet, if Trump were truly a racist, why would he have so many black people strongly supporting him? Why would he have a black man as an important cabinet member? Consider the video below of Trump’s recent meeting with black leaders.

Donald Trump has also been accused of being an anti-semite. Yet if he is such an anti-semite, why would he accept his daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism, and why would he take his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a modern orthodox Jew, as a close advisor? In fact if Trump were such an anti-semite, why would he consider the alliance with Israel to be of the highest importance?

The desperate attempts by progressives to label Trump (and other Republicans) as a bigot show how little else progressives have to engage the public’s imagination. Currently, having achieved little by making Trump out to be a bigot, they have tried to label him as a Russian agent and a traitor. The wilder these accusations become, I suspect the less they will be believed by the public outside of the already fanatic true-believers.

In his closing paragraphs, Shelby Steele predicts an epitaph for progressivism.

Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge. 

This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame. This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness. Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.

Indeed, to call a progressive a liberal is in fact a misnomer. Liberals are most concerned with insuring the freedoms and liberty of individuals from the power of the state, while progressives are focused on centralizing increasing amounts of power in the state to increase its powers over individuals. Of course, progressives would tell you this is all for the good of the individuals, to protect them from other, primarily wealthy individuals. Such protestations do not shield progressives from the accusation they are anti-liberty, and therefore anti-liberal.

The Dangers of Progressives’ Fanaticism

How long can such fanaticism continue  before we are plunged into a second Civil War? This is the very real and present danger presented by the second post that caught my eye this morning. The link on RealClearPolitics.com to it, entitled Nothing Good Comes From Dehumanizing Your Political Enemies, actually led to a Facebook post by one Allison Stanger. Dr. Stanger is a professor of political science at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, and she invited neoliberal Charles Murray to make a speech and participate in discussions afterwards. Murray stated afterwards he expected to be protested by students, but the response went far beyond what he expected. In the video below, you can see what happened (and what did not) inside the lecture hall.

After a while Murray concluded he would not be allowed to speak, and gave up. Prof. Stanger and Murray then went to a nearby Middlebury College studio where Murray delivered his talk, followed by a few questions from Prof. Stanger. The college posted this recording on their website, which you can see by clicking here. Be aware the video is, as the college says, “of mixed quality,” stopping and starting intermittently and with volume varying. Every now and then Murray’s talk was interrupted by fire alarms and pounding on the door by demonstrators. Occasionally, you can hear the sounds of demonstrators shouting and chanting outside. A couple of times Murray wonders what he is saying that is so horrible his talk must not be allowed to proceed. If you patiently pay attention to Murray’s talk, I think you will wonder the same thing. What he does say is very interesting if not fascinating. (After seeing the video, I definitely intend to buy and read his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.) Unfortunately, the student body of Middlebury denied themselves the privilege of listening to Murray’s thoughts by denying him his freedom of speech.

Afterwards, Murray and Stanger left the studio, escorted by security for protection. Prof. Stanger relates the rest of the story best, and I urge you to read her Facebook account. I will excerpt from her account to present the bare-bones story.

When the event ended, and it was time to leave the building, I breathed a sigh of relief. We had made it. I was ready for dinner and conversation with faculty and students in a tranquil setting. … We confronted an angry mob as we tried to exit the building. Most of the hatred was focused on Dr. Murray, but when I took his right arm both to shield him from attack and to make sure we stayed together so I could reach the car too, that’s when the hatred turned on me. One thug grabbed me by the hair and another shoved me in a different direction. I noticed signs with expletives and my name on them. … For those of you who marched in Washington the day after the inauguration, imagine being in a crowd like that, only being surrounded by hatred rather than love. I feared for my life. … What I want you to know is how it felt to land safely at Kirk Alumni Center after taking a decoy route. I was so happy to see my students there to greet me. … Then Bill Burger charged back into the room (he is my hero) and told Dr. Murray and I to get our coats and leave—NOW. The protestors knew where the dinner was. We raced back to the car, driving over the curb and sidewalk to escape quickly. It was then we decided that it was probably best to leave town.

Prof. Stanger then discovered that something was wrong with her neck from when she was grabbed by the hair and shoved by the mob. Her husband drove her to the emergency room.

And this is happening in America?  How long before we start killing each other for our differences in belief? If you take the former Attorney General of the Obama administration, Loretta Lynch, seriously in the video below, it will not be long!

Why Progressivism Has a False View of Reality

So now I shall repeat my question: Why would anyone be a progressive? Certainly not for their non-existent traits of tolerance! Also, many of their primary beliefs about objective reality seem to be more than a little faulty. I will paraphrase what I wrote about their basic assumptions of Reality (with a capital ‘R’) some time ago in Progressives’ Basic Assumptions.

1. The first of the progressives’ premises is that most of the population is an uneducated, unthinking herd with neither the power nor the understanding to keep corporate predators from feeding on them. The progressive university elite must do the job for them by  seizing the reins of government and defending the common people, by centralizing power in the government (particularly economic power), and by changing laws and regulations. Authoritarian government by technocrats is their ideal. The flaw in this particular premise is that social systems in general tend to be chaotic systems, in which global perturbations by government affect different parts of the system differently, and not necessarily in predictable ways. This is particularly true for that chaotic social system we call the economy. The few times government has been successful in instituting a global social change has been in those cases where the population was almost unanimous in agreement.
   
   
2. A second progressive assumption is that Capitalism and free-markets are inimical to the material well-being of the people. Any disastrous economic event is necessarily a “free-market failure”, and greedy businessmen and investors are free to loot ordinary workers of the wealth they created. For these reasons, progressives must use intrusive regulatory power to keep corporations and the wealthy from causing economic downturns and oppressing the people.

Because progressives believe they must use government and its powers to make life tolerable for the vast hoi polloi, each new government failure to surmount a problem leads them to believe they must increase government’s power by a little more to take care of new exigencies. This is the well known Road to Serfdom, which if followed long enough will lead to a totalitarian fascist government.

Yet progressives seem to be oblivious to these aspects of Reality. Given all the history that authoritarian government just does not work, why do progressives continue in their faith? The only remaining possibility of which I can think is that they enjoy the emotional highs of being the highest arbiters of moral behavior.

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