June 2000 - David Horowitz: "Hillary Clinton and the Third Way" Progressive Narcissism
"...........It is Primary Colors’ insight into the minds of these missionaries that is striking. They see Clinton quite clearly as a flawed and often repellent human being. They see him as a lecher, a liar and a man who would destroy an innocent human being in order to advance his own career (this is, in fact, the climactic drama of the text). Yet through all the sordidness and lying, the personal ruthlessness and disorder, the idealistic missionaries faithfully follow and serve their leader.
They do it not because they are themselves corrupted and bought off through material rewards. The prospect of material return or fame is not what drives them. Think only of Ickes, personally betrayed and brutally cast aside by Clinton, who nonetheless refused to turn on him, even after the betrayal. Instead, Ickes kept his own counsel and protected Clinton, biding his time and waiting for Hillary to make her move, then joined her staff to manage her Senate campaign.
The idealistic missionaries in this true tale bite their tongues and betray their principles, rather than betray him. They do so because in Bill Clinton they see a necessary vehicle of their noble ambition and their chiliastic dreams. He, too, cares about social justice, about poor people and blacks (or so he makes them believe). They will serve him and lie for him and destroy for him, because he is the vessel of their salvationist hopes. Because Bill Clinton can gain the keys to the state, he is in their eyes the only prospect for advancing the progressive cause. Therefore, they will sacrifice anything and everything to make him succeed.
But Bill Clinton is not like those who worship him, corrupting himself and others for a higher cause. Unlike them, he betrays principles because he has none. He will even betray his country, but without the slightest need to betray it for something else – for an idea, a party, a cause. He is a narcissist who sacrifices principle for power because his vision is so filled up with himself that he cannot tell the difference.
But the idealists who serve him -- the Stephanopoulos’s, the Ickes’s, the feminists, the progressives and Hillary -- can tell the difference. Their cyncism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it for noble ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they see themselves as gods, as having the power -- through correct politics -- to redeem the world. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels their spiritual arrogance and justifies their means.
And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. You are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your “reactionary” commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and stocking political war chests, but as both means and end.
Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will always be blind-sided by the sheer malice of the left -- by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on their principles; by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity; by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal; and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the poor on the part of those who preen themselves as their champions.
Conservatives are surprised because they see progressives as merely misguided, when they are, in fact, morally – and ontologically -- misdirected. They are the messianists of a false religious faith. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them."
Malice...and deviousness. All's fair, in their minds, because their cause is so righteous.
From Stalin and Mao to the local Dem party worker, every one of them has always viewed their every horrible action through this defective moral prism.