The modern left as a self-expanding machine

It is a truism that the Democratic party in the post 1960s period has functioned primarily as a collection of interest and “identity” groups. Building on that idea, Jeff W. analyzes the modern left—meaning the Democratic party and its supporting institutions, such as the media and academia—as a project comprehensively designed to keep increasing by a variety of means the numbers of its many constituent groups, and so gain unchallengeable power over society.

What we are up against
by Jeff W.

Within living memory, the leftist agenda was to unite the workers of the world in a struggle to overthrow capitalism. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the American left began to transform itself into a tribal coalition where nonwhite racial and other ethnic tribes, together with what I call “pseudo-tribes,” would unite to overthrow the traditional white leadership of all institutions. The transformation from class conflict to race conflict has been a successful move for the left. It has made the American left much more powerful and dangerous.

In the U.S., Democrats now base their support on the votes of blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and America’s small Muslim population. The fact that Jews and Muslims both support Democrats testifies eloquently to the efficacy of the leftist agenda. Add some other smaller minorities, other Asians such as Chaldean Christians, and Native Americans, and these tribes add up to about 35 percent of the voting age population. Of this number, Democrats can depend upon about 30 percent of the votes. Japanese and Chinese vote in substantial numbers for Republicans so I shall not include them in this list of leftist minorities. [LA replies: without looking it up, my guess is that Chinese-Americans vote mainly Democratic.]

Add then what I call the pseudo-tribes, which are mainly subsets of the white population. The prototype for these pseudo-tribes in the U.S. was the Communists, a group of people who abandoned traditional family and ethnic and political loyalties to identify with a tight-knit band of revolutionaries. Using that model, the left began to manufacture new pseudo-tribes in the 1960s, and today their work has come to fruition. Feminists, homosexuals, environmentalists, militant atheists, as well as socialists and Communists, can all be classed as leftist pseudo-tribes. Together these add another 15 percent to the total.

The left has always sought support from the poor. Its redistributionist message is designed to obtain that support. Whites who identify as poor and who are not included in the above categories may account for another six percent. With these groups, the left has a majority.

Add then to these what I will call “mercenaries.” These are people whose support is bought with taxpayers’ money. Mercenaries include government employees, public school teachers, trial lawyers who need a legal system that will favor them, bankers who profit from the Fed’s easy money policies, Social Security recipients, etc. Adding all these in, together with their families, may add another 15 percent. With mercenaries added, leftist political support in the U.S., in my back-of-the-envelope calculation, approximates 66 percent.

The left expands and consolidates its support by encouraging the growth of all of its groups. They want open borders so as to expand their minority groups of nonwhites. They use the universities to proselytize to the young, encouraging them to join the ranks of feminists, homosexuals, radical environmentalists, atheists, socialists and Communists. They seize more and more tax dollars so as to add to the ranks of the mercenaries, as well as to give tangible encouragement to their tribes and pseudo-tribes. Most ominously they seek to add to the ranks of the poor. When a middle-class white family becomes poor, it is a win for the left. It subtracts a Republican vote and adds a Democratic vote when a middle-class person becomes a poor person seeking government aid. This is perhaps why the Democrats have appeared so nonchalant about rising fuel prices.

What else do they do? To discourage anyone from identifying with the white, heterosexual, middle-class people, who are their juicy targets, they mount a continuing campaign of vilification. Such people are alleged to be racists, bigoted homophobes, who harm the environment. Their religious beliefs are alleged to be false and superstitious, repressive and politically harmful. The left’s propaganda message is that one should never join with such bad people, nor should one show any sympathy with them as they are justly stripped of their resources for the greater good.

Meanwhile, the Republican party supports and cooperates with the leftist advance. It does this mainly by “cooling out the mark,” meaning that it plays the role of the con man’s partner who damps down the victim’s suspicion and anger and channels them away from the criminal. For example, Republican politicians direct conservatives’ anti-left anger into efforts to elect Republicans. But these Republicans, when elected, beyond throwing a few bones to conservatives, do nothing to stem the leftist tide.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are up against. I believe that no power on earth can impede the leftist advance. However, as a believer, I also believe that God will soon provide all the opposition that is needed—and not in a kindly way. He will impose his justice on the American left just as he did on the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese, and the Soviet Communists. Our role now should be to continue to behave as good people, to ask for God’s help in preparing to deal with the chaos that leftist rule must inevitably bring, and to ask for God’s mercy and protection during the coming days of judgment.

—end of initial entry—

LA writes:

I thank Jeff W. for this thought provoking essay.

One point. In the cases of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Communism, the United States and its allies did something to defeat or weaken those powers. Our side may have praised God, but it also passed the ammunition. In the case of liberalism, Jeff W. seems to be suggesting that liberalism will be defeated solely by God, without anything being done against it on the human level.

However, now that I think about it, isn’t that my own position? Am I not always saying that liberalism is too deeply imbued in the souls of Western people to be directly defeated, and therefore the only way that liberal rule can come to end is by so damaging or even destroying its host society that the liberals themselves finally turn against it?

- end of initial entry -

Phillip M. writes:

“I also believe that God will soon provide all the opposition that is needed—and not in a kindly way.”

I thought Jeff’s essay was interesting, but to leave all the hard work to God is not good enough. Most of the Middle-East and modern day Turkey was once Christian. God did not save them. My family are Christians and have the same attitude to Islam in the UK: God will sort it out. Sorry folks, He won’t.

LA replies:

I agree. But Jeff W.’s subject was liberalism, not Islam. I agreed with Jeff to this extent, that I think liberalism cannot simply be defeated from without (i.e., by conservatives) because it has become identical to the very being of modern Westerners. Therefore the belief in liberalism can only be “melted down” by repeated disasters and suffering brought on by liberalism itself. At the same time, we on the right must with ever greater efficacy make the case against liberalism, so as to draw the weakening liberals in our direction.

When it comes to Islam, we cannot depend on any internal renunciation on the part of the Muslims (though, as I said the other day, I think some conversion of Muslims is possible and should be pursued). Only forceful and decisive action on our part can save us from Islam.

To sum up, the Western societies must cease being liberal from within, by whatever process makes that happen, whether inner breakdown, or traditionalist anti-liberal apologetics—or, perhaps. As the West becomes sufficiently non-liberal for it to have non-liberal political and cultural leadership, renewed assertion of the West and the driving back of Islam become possible.

Bill Carpenter writes:

The basic assumption of the left as described in Jeff’s essay is that mere numbers are a sufficient basis for securing political power. That assumption is subject to conditions. The process of making decisions based on majority or plurality rule, like many political processes underlying our ” fundamental rights,” is the result of a compromise between groups that are sufficiently like-minded and well-disposed to each other to be willing to trust to the results of rational argument followed by balloting, whether in the population, the legislature, or courts of review. A group or coalition of groups that essentially wants to destroy rival groups or fundamentally alter the nature and culture of a people should no longer be able to count on that mechanism, because it has forfeited the trust of the other groups in the fundamental assumption that all parties essentially want to preserve each other in existence. In other words, leftists who want to destroy American culture should not be able to count on majority determinations because they ultimately want to annihilate their opponents rather than simply compromise on the details of ordering our common life. All Americans of good will therefore need to reject the submission of society-destroying measures to majority vote. (That is one aspect of David Yerushalmi’s NuVo campaign.) The left should not be allowed to advance its destructive program by pretending to engage in good-faith compromise. (See also George Handlery’s discussion of compromise in today’s Brussels Journal.) In sum, the condition attached to winning by majority vote is that no group is trying to destroy the others but really wants them to thrive. Because that condition is no longer satisfied, non-leftists should challenge in every conceivable forum the legitimacy of leftist policies aimed at fundamentally altering American culture.

On another point of Jeff’s, the immigration reform issue is the perfect illustration of Jeff’s points. The people at large overwhelmingly support closing the Mexican border. The left overwhelmingly opposes closing the border, even though closing the border is desired by and advantageous to their supposed core constituencies of low income people of all races and union labor. Leftist leadership only cares about more members, more votes, more power, regardless of the “progressive” impoverishment of their constituents. On the right side of the aisle, opinion is divided between those who want to serve the will and interest of the people by closing the border, and those who want to increase cheap labor, win acceptance from the Left, or simply see themselves as good. Too bad Senator Sessions is not running for president instead of Senator McCain!

LA replies:

Just to clarify, is Mr. Carpenter saying that if the duly elected Congress passes, say, comprehensive immigration reform including legalization of all illegals and a tripling of legal immigration, we should say, “Though this law was passed by a majority vote under our Constitution, the aim of the bill is to destroy us as a society. Therefore the fact that it is technically legal and constitutional does not make it legitimate. It is an attack on our existence as a country and a people, and we will treat it as such.”

Mr. Carpenter replies:

Yes. People need to remember that laws and rights and governments are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

Rick Darby writes:

You wrote, attempting to characterize Bill Carpenter’s position:

“Though this law was passed by a majority vote under our Constitution, the aim of the bill is to destroy us as a society. Therefore the fact that it is technically legal and constitutional does not make it legitimate. It is an attack on our existence as a country and a people, and we will treat it as such.”

The majority of American citizens are today living under a political and economic tyranny greater than that faced by the generation of colonists under British rule. We should be so lucky as to have only the kind of oppression they had. The monarchy and Parliament were somewhat exploitative toward the American colonies, but as I recall from my long-ago American history classes, one or two foreign secretaries and several members of Parliament were sympathetic to the American cause.

No one in London was trying to flood the colonies with non-American, non-English-speaking settlers—in fact, Britain fought a war against France precisely to prevent French expansion and try to roll it back. States had their own legislatures and there was no mega-powerful centralized government, and certainly no imperial judiciary, to nullify regulations that it was generally accepted the individual states were entitled to settle for themselves.

British rule was heavy-handed and not always empathetic with the colonists’ situation, but Americans were by and large looked on by the mother country as fellow British subjects (mostly English in those days). At the time of the Revolution, a substantial portion of the colonists remained loyal to British rule and in some cases lost a great deal for their loyalty.

Can the average indigenous American say as much of his current rulers? And yes, I use the word rulers, because our Congress, federal judiciary and federal bureaucracy represent the interests of today’s Americans less than the Parliament represented the interests of their 18th century predecessors.

“When in the course of human events … “

LA writes:

In another thread, I disagree with the use of the word “indigenous” to describe historic Western peoples.

Bill Carpenter writes:

With regard to the legitimacy of people-destroying majority decisions, there are analogies in law of unconscionable and meretricious contracts, which are unenforceable, and legislative enactments contrary to the written constitution. Beside or above our U.S. Constitution, there is an unwritten constitution which liberals aim to overturn. For approaches to taking back the nation from liberal tyranny, see neopopulism.org.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 02, 2008 11:59 AM | Send