On June 20, 2023, Dennis Prager wrote his weekly column in Townhall, and the editorial was entitled, Can You Define Leftism. I will quote from his editorial, where interesting, and then respond to those quotes.
Prager: “After a speech in Romania last week, I was asked a question by a young member of the audience that, remarkably, I don’t remember even having been asked: what is leftism?
The question seems so simple and so basic to understanding contemporary life that you would think it would be posed frequently—and if it weren’t, the reason would be that almost everyone who cares about society would already know how to answer it. But the question is rarely posed, and few know how to answer it.
‘What is leftism?’ is not all the same as ‘What is liberalism?’ Leftism and liberalism share almost no values, Indeed, perhaps the greatest tragedy of America today is that liberals do not vote their values. Leftists vote their values, and conservatives vote their values. But the liberals vote for left-wing values, almost none of which they hold.”
My response: Prager has studied Leftism, or soft Communism for 50 years, and he knows what it is, knows it when he sees it, knows how to define it and how to defeat it. He repeats on his show every day, on his radio program, that truth is not a left-wing value, and the Left destroys everything it touches. These two truths are accurate, profound, and worth heeding as key to defining and defeating Leftism.
It helps, I think to characterize, what Prager is referring to as Leftism, as a fanatical ideology, an active, cruising mass movement, beloved by its promoters. Those followers, of said ideology, are true-believing adherents whose only purpose for living is to advance their holy cause as far as they can in their generation, so that, eventually, this ‘lovely’ cause and their fervent, fearless, stubborn, tireless advocacy of its advancement overthrows Western civilization and sets up all over the world a Communist totalitarian state that rules every aspect of every human life for hundreds of years going forward.
Unless we recognize Leftism is a Marxist mass movement on the march and winning the cultural battle in America, we do know understand or enemies, and then we will not be able to stop it and defeat them. Prager talks endlessly about Leftism, and he should, but any other ideology as a mass movement on the march in its generation, would be as dangerous and vicious as Leftism, ideologies like Chinaism, Envirostatism, Nazism, Islamism, Secularism, etc. My point is Prager’s definition of Leftism mostly applies to and define other mass movements too
How Prager defines Leftism, an active, existent, mass movement, does the apply closely to any other competing mass movement that rear its ugly head, and by learning his definition of Leftism, we will know how to defeat it, or any other threatening holy cause, or coming mass movement unleashed upon poor humanity that has suffered enough.
The moderate approach is not only the ethical gold standard but it the gold standard of establishing what is true and what is false. If a searcher for truth is emotional more than rational, then he is lying more than truth-telling. If he is passionate more than sensible in his mood pursuing truth, this will make him fanatical more than moderate; he is lying more when he is fanatical. If he practices altruist-collectivist ethics but not egoist-individualist ethics, on average he lies more than he tells the truth. When he group-lives and does not individuate, he is self-deprived of values and meaning in his life, so he must compensate or go mad, because no one stays sane very long without some values or meaning to latch onto, so he and his ilk often find meaning through excess devotion to a holy but empty, fraudulent cause, whose followers are a mob, and their holy cause, in its active, revolutionary phase, is a mass movement.
Once the true believer renounces his individuality and independent thinking to find refuge in and be accepted wholly into the holy cause pack, his whole person is immersed in a world of hurting and hurtful fantasy, the whole way of life is a lie. When the Leftist ideologue has absorbed all these debilitating loyalties and hang-ups, at that point lying is breathing for him and he is a radicalized fanatic. That is why lying is a left-wing value (not a liberal value or a conservative value). Lying as a way of life results when one is a true-believer, serving a holy cause. The entire social construct is complex, entangled with the lives of thousands or millions of like believers, and it is a lived, group-speak, group-think, social orgy-festival of Big Lying Big Lies, that culture of mass mendacity typifies how not just Leftists but Fascists or any other holy cause ideologues metanarrate about themselves, others and the world.
Dennis also laments that Leftism destroys everything it touches, and this is true, demoralizing and very scary. They cannot help it when they are guided by high ideals and good intentions, not realizing what they are actually doing the world.
When they can help it, they smirk while maliciously disguising their plan to corrupt, undermine and overturn all that is good, fair, free, beautiful, and logical, replacing it with chaos, lawlessness, crime, hatred, poverty, totalitarian government, collectivist economics, multiculturalism, tribal rivalry, factionalism, getting the people to abandon the Western first principles, and civilized, peaceful norms.
When a Leftist has personally completed the inner conversion to true-believer living, then there is no self left. Where there is no self, and all that survives is pure self-surrender to the collective and its fetishized abstraction, the religion that they now worship as perfect, at that point the complete loss of self-esteem leaves a raging, inner monster of utter self-loathing, in a state of heightened mental suffering and inescapable pain. That person is filled with anger, bitterness, resentment and is without hope or relief. The burning desire for revenge impels in him a destroy to smash, crush, subvert, corrupt, soil, murder and wipe out existence itself for his having been born. When you assemble thousands or millions of these people on social media, all serving one cause, Communism as culturally sold to Americans, as seeking justice and compensation for many oppressed identity groups of various kinds, they use their substituted, inferior altruistic-collectivist moral values of group identity, group rights and grievance-victimhood-mongering to uplift the putatively downtrodden, intersectionality of victim groups, defined as oppressed, exploited, subjugated and humiliated by competing groups on top (white, heterosexual, male, Christian, capitalist and conservative) of the social heap.
Leftists promote a million small causes, all involuntarily to be accepted by the masses, and to be federally administered after the revolutionaries overthrow society and the bourgeois, republican government, and replace it with an authoritarian socialist or Marxist dictator. They destroy and pervert all that is good and noble, and America, the best country the world has ever seen, is to be reduced to rubble, burned to the ground. The reason that Leftism destroys all that it touches is that is their goal, for destroying everything is their vehicle for removing opposition to their push to gather all power unto themselves, and they are very clever, credible, appealing and resourceful in their revolutionary effort.
The third point that Prager lays out above that is so original, insightful, and critical to grasp is that liberals are still rathermoderate, democratic, willing to share power with conservatives depending on how elections turn out.
Liberals are reasonable, individualistic, and sensible, but they have bought the lie from Leftists that Republicans and conservatives--who also are reasonable, individualistic, peaceful, law-abiding, moderate, and willing to wait their turn to run the country once they win elections again, accepting how the last elections went--are not conservative but are fascists and the liberals believe it. Liberals do not want fascist true-believers running things so they vote leftist into power when leftists have lied to liberals, and have been believed by liberals that their values are the same, when they are not; liberals are moderate and democratic, as are conservatives, but Leftists and the almost non-existent, alt-right are radicalized, extreme and totalitarian, suppressing all dissent, opposition and free speech if they can. The Leftists and alt-right thugs are totalitarian thugs with slight ideological differences to brandish.
Prager gave me these three insights: liberals are not leftists, the left destroys all that it touches, and truth is not a left-wing value, and these traits I then recognized as applying to any radicalized ideology including but only pertaining to leftism.
Prager: “To cite but two examples: Liberals do not believe in racial segregation, whereas the left does: all black dorms, all-black graduation exercises, different standards for blacks, etc. And liberals do not believe that males who say they are females should be allowed to compete in women’s sports; only leftists do.
If you ask people, ‘What is leftism?’ most will respond by listing left-wing positions not by defining it. People confuse identifying left-wing positions with knowing what leftism is. But naming left-wing positions is not the same as defining leftism.
To be fair, many people, including conservatives, cannot define conservatism either. In fact, the inability of millions of American conservatives to define conservativism is a major reason so many conservative parents don’t have conservative children. (See my two-part column, ‘Explaining Conservativism’)
Ironically, if conservatives had not defined conservatism but had only defined leftism, that alone would have ensured that many of their children would never have embraced left-wing views. The moment you understand leftism, almost everything that is happening in and to America at the present time becomes clear. And the moment that becomes clear, most people reject the Left.
What then, is leftism?
Leftism is the attempt to destroy the past—every value and every institution, the good as well as what it regards as the bad.”
My response: Orwell and others warned that Communists and other totalitarians sought to wipe out the past as history, religion, and the culture of the citizens, so that the new metanarrative and the now ruling collectivist ideology could be brainwashed into the masses.
Prager: “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 Go, 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 that always is 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 for 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.”
My response: When the Left stands for nothing, it is standing for something, chaos and the rule of the devil being expanded on earth, though his foot soldiers are hard-headed, nonbelievers in religion. When they build nothing, they are spreading and building the kingdom of hell on earth.
Prager: “Leftism is 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.”
My response: This last paragraph is another ingenious insight from Prager for he has contrasted real moral values (Judeo-Christian values) with identity groups rights (Favored or ‘oppressed, victimized’ groups are good and one is only moral if one champions their cause so they become the inheritors of the to be set up, new ruling elite (post-successful revolution) of society as contrasted with disfavored, victimizing patriarchal, traditional European identity groups –white, male, heterosexual, capitalist, individualist, conservative) groups that are to be cast out of their privileged seats of power and wealth. They will be disenfranchised, reduced, and humbled: they are now the new poor, downtrodden exploited, oppressed, out of favor groups, and to defend them is immoral, and to hod them down or even do genocide to them is moral and just).
As a rational egoist, I agree with Rand that individuals and selfishness are moral and the collective and unselfish are evil. Prager the altruist would disagree with me here, but I line up Judeo-Christian values as real values because they are individualist and egoistic more the collectivist and altruistic; these values are moral because they are from God the Father and God the Mother, those Enlightened Egoists, the supreme artists, creators, engineers, and individuators that made and operate the world.
Note that Prager contrasts Judeo-Christian moral values against amoral (I would add immoral) values of identity group competitors of black and white, male, and female and rich and poor, all variations on Marx’s the rich versus the poor, or the Islamist binary of believer versus unbeliever.
The Left abandoned God (if one abandons God then one knowingly or unknowingly is moving towards Satan) and real objective moral values, so by adopting good identity groups (ones they favor) over those they despise (the bad Western identity groups on top) and basing good and bad on group rights, they have aligned themselves with Evil Spirits and hellish values, and sold these to the world as compassionate, social justice efforts.
Prager: “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 men and women.
Days before the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Barack Obama told a wildly cheering crowd, ‘We are five days away from 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.”
My response: Well-written and definitive.
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