The root of leftist hate is the longing for an all-providing father

A few minutes after writing an earlier blog entry about the destructive left, I came upon, as if in illustration of my point, this comment that had been copied at the conservative website “Little Green Footballs,” in which a person has such hatred for Bush he refuses to help a stuck motorist who has a Bush sticker on her car:

I had no idea how deeply my hate for that man ran. My lack of an interaction, with a * supporter is still haunting me a couple of hours later.

I was on my home and was on the ramp getting off the highway. I saw a mini-van on the side of the road. There was a lady standing next to the van and in her arms she held her child. I can only assume her mini-van had broken down. I don’t know, perhaps with so many gad stations being out of gas, she had also run out. I slowed down and started to pull over to offer her a ride. At the very last second I noticed a “W” sticker on the back of her vehicle and I sped up and drove off.

I feel really bad as a human being. That child is not responsible for their parent’s belief system. They are innocent and do not deserve to be out in the heat. (It is warm but not so bad that they would even break a sweat) I try not to punish people for what they believe.

On the other hand, so many hateful thoughts went through my head. I wondered how a person could see what was going on in NO and still have one of those awful stickers on their car. How could they support an awful excuse for a human being that has let our country down and is letting Americans die after they have made it through the storm? How can someone be so blind and so stupid?

I thought that if she loves * so much, maybe he would come along and help her the same way he is rescuing all of those poor people in the weather stricken part of our country. Let’s see what her hero can do for her.

I never did go back. I was so upset with that sticker and with the fact that someone would support an idiot who is so clearly running our country into the ground.

So why am I writing this? It is not to boast, I really feel bad about passing this child and not picking up their mother. Perhaps it is for a catharsis of sorts? That would be an educated guess. I suppose it is because I feel conflicted and I am writing this to try and sort through what I am feeling. There are two emotional sides, for me, on this incident and neither seems completely right or wrong to me. Even writing this, I am still not able to work through what happened. I feel like I am floating between right and wrong and am unable to grab either side.

Thanks for listening.

One of the readers commenting on the above understands very well a key aspect of the left psychology:

12 bianchi_roadie 9/2/2005 11:51AM PDT

Holy Toledo. I swear some folks imagine Bush has some sort of super powers and they think he is the source from which all evil flows.

They don’t want a president. They want a god-king that will fix all their everyday problems and whom they can blame for poor harvests.

At first this seems like a contradiction. Since the left wants Bush to be a god-king who will fix all their problems, why do they also see him as the source of all evil? In fact, the two feelings go together. Bush, or America, is the provider of all goods, or, rather, he could be the provider of all goods if he had a good will. Instead, he has an evil, perverse will, and refuses to grant the goods that are in his ready power to give. I’ve previously discussed this psychology in relation to blacks’ “magical” expectations about whites, and their fury when their expectations are not met. But it describes the white left as well, in its hatred of our civilization and of the “conservative” figures who are the stand-ins for whatever remains of that civilization. Thus Oliver Stone loathes America because it is a father figure that has let him down; but he loves Fidel Castro because he’s a satisfactory father figure.

Since respect for father figures is a good thing from a traditionalist point of view, how and why is the left going wrong here? It’s going wrong because the left doesn’t want a father figure in the traditional, Western sense of truth or law or government or nation or God or one’s own father, that is, in the sense of the structuring principle of one’s own existence, the provider of guidance and standards. No, what the left wants is a god-king, a cosmic father who will not just provide us with leadership, but with all our needs. And if he doesn’t meet all our needs, it is because he is cruelly holding himself back from us, and so he is a cold-hearted sonofabitch and we hate him forever.

A further, troubling thought: As white liberals increasingly take on the psychology of blacks, believing in a voodoo-type god who is literally the source of all the goods and all the evils that happen to us in life, with human morality and choice no longer a part of the picture, the West will increasingly become like an African culture.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 04, 2005 02:55 PM | Send