Lessons Learned From Years Among the Left Or Why Being A Moderate Is Somehow Worse Than Being MAGA

 

I’ve been called a lot of names on this site by people who claim to be on the side of righteousness but the strangest insult by far I ever received was when I was called a moderate.

In days of old moderate and centrist was the ideal position and I think it is the only rational one for any elected official to take. It’s one of the ones that is most reliable with a democracy and I was baffled why that was why, in the minds of this person, as bad if not worse then being a MAGA extremist. Then in the last few days I read an article by a leftist publication in which they said, in all sincerity, that when any politician moves to the center they are, in fact, actually moving to the right.

This is the oddest reasoning I’ve ever heard and I’ve heard some pretty odd ones over the years. Not only does it go against how geometry and geography work, but by that rationale if Bernie Sanders or AOC ever won the Presidency and started to compromise to get their agenda passed, they would be moving closer to Donald Trump by doing so. 

But having spent  a lot of time on this blog, other publications both conservative and progressive and with my own knowledge of history over the years I came to a realization that this mindset perfectly encapsulates why I loathe everything the left has come to stand for. To be clear I also hate everything the far right stands for but I hate them for a completely different reason, one that the left themselves is aware of but can’t seem to make the obvious connection when it comes to their relative unpopularity in the American and world political system. I shouldn’t entirely be surprised by this: for all the intelligence that leftist writers and intellectuals have, they seem incapable of making the leaps as to why their almost always morally and legally right principles have never led them to the same place in the party system that the far right has always been able to find with ones that are morally, legally and ethically bankrupt.

Election day is a week away and I’ve already read more than my share about it over the last year.  And I need to assure a certain group of people something. Not the ones that really need to hear it; if I’ve learned anything the last few years it’s that they are impervious to hearing anything that does not align completely with how they view the world. No, this article is for the rest of us: the ones who are afraid of what might happen on election day but are willing to do something about it and far more than the loudest voices on this site will ever be willing to do and won’t commit to even now.

But to get to that point, I have to explain some fundamental flaws about the leftist thinking that is prevalent on this site and others. I’d be worried about offending them but by this point I know that offense is there go to reaction for anything that resembles dissent from their bubbles.  As I said, this article isn’t for them.

 

1.       The left has not learned a single new thing to say in two hundred years.

When The 1619 Project came out five years ago, it was polarizing along party lines. In truth the only original thing about it was that it was written by an African-American woman. Nothing in her argument had not been made a dozen times before over the last two hundred years and there was certainly nothing new.

William Lloyd Garrison had been writing about the evils of slavery and how it was responsible for the moral rot of the Republic in his very first issue of The Liberator in 1830. From the start he believed that slavery was so deep in the republic that the Constitution itself was immoral and no elected official who swore an oath to it was trusted to solve the problem. To him, in order to rid America of slavery if that meant dissolving the union or ripping up the Constitution that was fine with him. And he didn’t think politics could solve what he consider a moral issue. He has no real idea of how it could be solved beyond a nebulous idea of non-violent resistance and right up to the Civil War he refused to take the threats of secession seriously, even joking about it as late as November of 1860.

Since then every generation has some version that comes around to these conclusions, the only difference being that they are African American. We’ve had Marcus Garvey, we had James Baldwin, we’ve had it expressed more militantly by the Huey Newtons and Bobby Seales’s. In my lifetime Howard Zinn’s said the same thing and we also had Ta-Nahisi Coates say it. And yet none of them have any solutions as to how this society of white supremacy can be fixed nor if we can or even should move pass it.  Their anger is justifiable and completely understandable, no question. But you’d think after two hundred years they’d at least be willing to acknowledge that there have at least been some improvements for African-Americans since, well, 1619.  But there is little acknowledgement of that fact here nor any suggestion as to how we can bridge the divide. Of course bridging the divide is not something that the left has ever been interested in – but I’ll get to that.

 

2.      Nearly every major progressive leap forward in American society has been done despite the work of activists, rather then because of it.

When Lincoln finally managed to get the 13^th Amendment through Congress  - something I’m well aware that people like Ava Duvernay are still on the fence on that it was a good thing – he did so almost entirely without the help of Radical Republicans when it came to writing the bill. Men like Thaddeus Stevens and Ben Wade were left on the outside because Lincoln knew their views were so radical that if he tried to get their version through Congress it would not pass or be ratified.

When Bob LaFollette, one of the most progressive Senators in history came to Congress Theodore Roosevelt, arguably are more progressive President, granted him an audience about a commerce bill. LaFollette responded by lecturing him that his bill was too weak and that he should throw his weight behind his stronger bill. When TR pointed out that bill would never get through Congress LaFollette made it very clear that passage of his bill was not his primary concern. Thus began a more than a quarter of a century career where some of the most progressive legislation to that point in America’s history was passed and LaFollette constantly biovating in Congress that these bills, by necessity built by compromise, were not good enough.

When FDR managed to get the first part of the New Deal through Congress he was accused by his enemies of enacting the 1932 Socialist Party platform. The perennial standard-bearer for the Socialists Norman Thomas was infuriated by the idea. “FDR did not carry the socialist platform through Congress unless he did so on a stretcher.”

When Hilary Clinton was campaigning for the Presidency in 2008 she was greeted with controversy when she said: “John Lewis may have marched for the Voting Rights Act but it took a President to sign it.” Now I’m far from Hilary’s biggest fan (readers of this column know this) but she was right. All the marching in the world would have meant nothing if LBJ wasn’t able to muster the votes to get it passed. Lewis himself made this clear every time he advocated for the renewal of it.

There’s always been the disconnect between the loudest activists between what change should come and what can be gotten. Elected officials by definition have to be pragmatists and they can’t afford the luxury of purity that activists advocate for.  It’s frustrating to see that these intellectuals still can’t grasp that basic function of how government works. Yet when Pramila Jaypal, a Justice Democrat, managed a compromise to get part of Biden’s infrastructure bill through Congress she was vilified on this blog by prominent leftists for compromising. There seems to be a belief among progressives of the so called ‘Green Lantern’ theory of Presidents, that they can just pass legislation with the sheer power of their mind regardless of checks and balances. You’d think that they’d comprehend that a President is not a superhero or that at the very least, this is a mirror version of the Grand Unitary Theory of the executive that they spent decades reviling Dick Cheney and other conservatives for. But such is not the case.

Even now there’s still an attitude of younger leftists against what democracy is. While The Nation endorsed Kamala Harris for President,  a recent article  by the ‘interns’ (no doubt endorsed by the editorial staff) contradicted it by saying that not only could they not support this endorsement, they didn’t believe in voting at all. Their fundamental issue with Harris involved the situation in the Middle East and they remained steadfast that no President nor any electoral action would make a difference. They advocated instead further activism, including marching to convince universities to divest from Israel (something that only a single minor liberal arts  college in Washington has agreed to do since the marches on campuses has begun) and doing little more than talking about the Middle East whenever you can. How this will lead to the kind of change in the Middle East that can only be done through international diplomacy and convincing all parties to go along with it – something that can only be done through government pressure – is not something that has occurred to these staffers.

 This shows that the left has not changed its approach on dealing with complex issues since the times of the abolitionists. The great societal problems are purely moral ones and should be solved entirely on those matters, regardless of economic, political or any other considerations by all parties. This is a simplistic way of thinking for people who are, more often then not, educated and well-read and who you would think would know the world doesn’t work based solely on morality. Yet after two hundred years, they seem convinced morality is the only principle that should guide the leaders of society. That it never is and never will be does nothing to convince them of their certainty that’s how it should be.

 

3.      The left has never wanted to build a coalition and seems happy when they push away people they could win over.

 

The rhetoric of Garrison and other abolitionists was so harsh that it very likely pushed away more people then it won over. Prior to 1830 there were several anti-slavery societies in the South. By 1837 there were none.

The 1960s was ‘the highpoint’ of the left’s influence. And to be clear, it amounted to nothing more than marching in the street, chanting and not caring who they offended. Polling has shown that a combination of the violence in the street in the leadup to the 1968 election as well as the rigid belief that Hubert Humphrey, one of the most progressive Senators in history, was as bad as Nixon, was enough to give a narrow margin of the election to Nixon. Their marching in the street indirectly led to the Vietnam War lasting another six years as well as the beginning of the conservative movement that we still feel the effects of today.

And as far as I know none of the leftists from that period ever seemed to learn a lesson from it: as far as they were concerned the people didn’t hear what they were saying. The idea that they heard and saw what they were saying – and were horrified by it – has either never occurred to them and more importantly, proven to them that the system was broken.

Even that would be forgivable if they ever had some kind of concrete plan as to what they wanted. But their own chants demonstrated that they didn’t have any idea. “What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now!”   Left out of either is how and what kind of change you want, which the left could either never agree on it or even come up with a way to implement it. And the implied threat in the latter question is “Or else.” I don’t deny their rage or even the justification. But it was dissent as means with no real end.

And in half a century the activists have taken full flower and there is still no concrete plan behind it. All of the marches – against globalism, against racist police, Occupy Wall Street, all of the recent college outcry – is shouting in the wind and not caring if it drives people against your cause. Even that would be one thing if you had a concrete plan how to realize it. But no one on the left does. They’re supposed to be the smart ones but they still can’t seem to get that politics is the only way to get these changes made. But they think its beneath them even now.

 

4.      The left spends so much of its energy coming up with academic terms for the state of the world and none on how to realize it.

The left has constantly felt itself above politics. So they spend an enormous amount of time and energy writing about how the political system has failed and how democracy doesn’t work. They will tell you that all of the freedoms we enjoy in America aren’t actual freedoms without telling you what real freedom is. They’ll tell you all the ways our democracy is broken but never even suggest that there’s a way to fix it or even if there’s a better system in America or anywhere on Earth. They argue that not only do we not have real values in America but that the values we claim to have aren’t actually ones because they’re born in a corrupt system (Garrison again). And they have become increasingly inflexible when it comes to even arguing that there are flaws in their position, even writing that to even consider pushing against the left is unacceptable.

And when you consider all of this the only conclusion I have been able to reach is practically inevitable: the left does not  care about any of the things it advocates for beyond the academic sense of the word.

That is, to be clear,  why I hate the right. When their position in America became untenable they started to work to find a way to rig the system. That meant coming up with all of the think tanks and institutions the left loves to rag on: The Heritage Foundation, the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, the Federalist Society, the Tea Party, all of those things that have led to them to take over the Republican Party.

But if I hate the right for what they have done, I hate the left for what they haven’t done. They have been laying this pattern out for us mere mortals for the last decade as to the corruption of our system. So the obvious question I have for progressives is: why didn’t you do the same thing? You clearly have no more regard for democracy then the right was and it did cut both ways. And as you love to tell us, you’re smarter than us.

So where’s your Cato Institute, where’s your Fox News, your society for establishing leftist judges and progressive candidates? You had the same amount of time to do as the right did, why didn’t you do it? And why are you only telling us now after it’s apparently too late to do anything to stem or even reverse the tide?

The answer is simple. For the last half-century, you were doing…nothing. Oh you wrote a lot of books, and you got a lot of academic jobs and you went to work for The Nation and Harper’s. But when it comes to rigging the political system the way the right did, you get a mark of absent. Indeed giving the voter turnout rates between 1972 and 2004 most of you weren’t even bothering to vote.  You love to remind us about Jesse Helms saying the fewer people vote, the more Republicans win. So why didn’t you get on your horse and vote for Democrats?

And it’s clear to me reading this site as to why: you really don’t care. Not just about all of the progressive issues you advocate for, but really whether the larger issues of our nation – including our democracy – survive. If you did, you would swallow your tongue and vote for Democrat official up and down the  ticket every day for the rest of your lives. But even now, you remain very adamant that both parties are essentially the same.

Honestly it’s that attitude that makes me wonder if all of your objections to the Trump administration were academic too. Oh I remember your outrage; how unhappy you all were and how upset many of you still are…or claim to be. But I figured having someone who was as close to the fascist dictator you’ve spent decades warning was coming would relieve you of the blindness that both parties are the same. I thought everything that happened in 2020 and after the election would relieve you of that.

But you apparently had a shorter memory than the GOP did about Trump given how quickly you went back to not only complaining about everything Biden was doing and your rant that there was no difference between the two parties. I don’t know how many articles I read in the lead up to the 2022 midterms about the apparent dissolution of the Union into not just two countries but eight when the red wave materialized.  Honestly some of you seemed to be looking forward to the end of our country. Hell, maybe some of you still are.

And that’s why I question your commitment to anything. I think for many of you, you’re just dilletantes who just write endless articles about how miserable the country is so you can bathe in the glow of your adoring sycophants. You don’t want to solve the problems of this country because that would involve getting involved in the political process. Which involve compromising (blech) pragmatism (horrors) and worse of all, voting (how dare you!)

And I know you have no commitment to this because you have no interest in hearing any dissent certainly not from me. Whenever I ask the question of how or what you should do, I am ignored or called a racist or a monster. This comes when I advocate for such apparent radical concepts as free speech and a free press, a working two party system and participation in the electoral process. You’ve made it very clear that none of these things are on your agenda and that the only opinions you want to hear are those in your own echo chamber.  Yes the conservatives squashed dissent but they have a political party to get their agenda across. You don’t have that – and it must really bug you to be the smartest people in the room and have only yourselves acknowledge your brilliance rather than those peons in the establishment.

This will no doubt come across as more of a polemic and be judged in certain circles as a rant. Perhaps it is. But it is borne out of the frustration of years of listening to people on this site angry at the world as it is but unwilling to do more than sit at their computers or use their phones to express their outrage – or worse, have convinced themselves that is change.

And that frustration is built on the biggest problem I have with the left: the almost academic detachment you seem to have from everything that’s happening. If we’ve learned anything from the last eight years (something I’m not convinced many of the writers on this site or other publications have) it’s that indifference is not something our society can afford. Not now and clearly not ever.  Engagement in the electoral process may seem insignificant compared to the massive problems we have but it is the only real power we have.  And minor as it may seem, it has more potential power than a thousand articles saying the system needs changing.  Activism and lecturing may be therapeutic for millions but alone they do nothing. Only through the slow, pragmatic process of democracy can America stand. Our problems won’t be solved by non-participation or leaving the country and by doing either, you do a disservice to all the people who will be afflicted when the tyranny you foresee coming occurs.

So the way I see it those of you on the left, you have two choices. You can swallow whatever doubts you have about Kamala Harris or the Democrats as a party, go to your local polling place and vote. Or you can do what you’ve done so often: do nothing and complain regardless of what happens on election day. I know what I’m going to that day and while I won’t pretend I’m a hundred percent sure of what will happen, I know that regardless my conscience will be clear because I did everything I could. I won’t tell you what to do even though I’m pretty sure you know by now. But I’ll be able to look myself the mirror the next day and for the next four years, come what may. I honestly don’t know how you could do the latter and do the same going forward but if I’ve learned one thing from spending so much time with you on this site, you prefer being told  you’ve done the right thing to ever doing anything to make it a reality.