Posted on 10/17/2003 1:31:03 AM PDT by kattracks
Why are Jews still wedded to the Democratic party, years after it stopped making any economic or political sense for them to remain in the marriage? It`s a question one hears often from bewildered non-Jews and Republican Jews (Democratic Jews - i.e., the vast majority of American Jews - seem oblivious to the question, let alone any possible answer).The truth is, there is no single answer. The most commonly heard explanation, one routinely offered up in "analysis" pieces by lazy journalists and High Holiday sermons by liberal Reform rabbis, is that the liberalism espoused by the likes of a Teddy Kennedy or a Barbra Streisand comes straight from Jewish tradition - in other words, if Moses and King David and Maimonides were alive today, they`d all be dues-paying members of the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and the National Organization for Women.
Such nonsense is belied by the fact that the more Orthodox a particular Jewish neighborhood or community, the more likely it is to vote for Republican candidates. Conversely, areas with a heavy concentration of secular and assimilated Jews vote almost without exception for liberal Democrats. If the explanation cited above held any water, the opposite would be true.
Another line of reasoning one encounters is that Jews gravitated to the Democratic party because the party best served their interests. Since that answer is not nearly as off the wall as the first, let`s take a little swing down memory lane and see what we can find.
Bossism and Socialism
Surprising as it might seem from our vantage point, the Jews who came to the U.S. prior to the great waves of immigration from Eastern Europe tended to look askance at the Democratic party, which was identified in the popular mind with Tammany-style political bossism, support for slavery, and an agrarian populism that often seemed indistinguishable from the rawest anti-Semitism.
That attitude changed with the arrival of the Eastern European Jews who crowded into the big cities at the turn of the century and quickly learned that their very livelihoods were dependent on the good will of those Tammany-like political machines, which were invariably Democratic and invariably corrupt.
Jobs and basic amenities were used as barter to purchase party loyalty, and bribery was the order of the day - the late New York senator Jacob Javits told the story of how his father loved Election Day because the saloonkeepers would pay $2 (double a day`s wages at the time) to anyone who promised to vote Democratic.
Although the dominance of the big city bosses was an inescapable fact of life for the new Jewish immigrants, the pressure to vote the party line was felt most keenly in local elections. When it came to presidential politics, Jews were far less wary of voting their conscience.
In 1916, for example, Republican candidate Charles Evan Hughes received 45 percent of the Jewish vote, and four years later Republican Warren Harding actually won a plurality among Jews - 43 percent as opposed to 19 percent for Democrat James Cox and 38 percent for Socialist Eugene V. Debs.
That last figure - nearly 4 in 10 Jews voting for the Socialist candidate - tells a story in itself, a story not to be ignored when seeking to understand Jewish voting habits. Many of the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came to America with a passionate belief in one form or another of socialism, and those Jews tended to vote for third party left-wing candidates when offered the choice. Though their candidates were, with the exception of some local races in immigrant neighborhoods, roundly unsuccessful, Jewish socialists and communists left a seemingly indelible stamp on the collective political identity of American Jews.
Most Jews, however, whether out of political moderation or fear of wasting their vote on a long shot, cast their ballots for either Democrats or Republicans. And though the Republicans lost a significant number of votes in 1924 to the third party candidacy of Progressive Robert LaFollette, it was not until the election of 1928 that the relationship between Jews and the Democratic party became the inseparable bond that still exists nearly 75 years later.
The Affair Commences
It was in 1928 that Democratic presidential candidates first began polling landslide numbers among American Jews, as New York governor Al Smith, a Roman Catholic of immigrant stock (whose campaign manager happened to be Jewish) captured 72 percent of the Jewish vote. Despite his overwhelming Jewish support, and the equally strong backing of fellow Catholics, Smith carried only 8 states against Republican Herbert Hoover and failed to win his own home state of New York.
The nascent trend of lopsided Jewish support for Democratic presidential candidates solidified four years later when another New York governor, Franklin Roosevelt, won the votes of better than 8 in 10 American Jews. Roosevelt, whom Jews idolized more than any other politician before or since, went on to win 85 percent of the Jewish vote in 1936 and 90 percent in both 1940 and 1944.
Harry Truman was the next Democrat to benefit from Jewish party loyalty, though his share of the Jewish vote in 1948 slipped from the Rooseveltian 90 percent to a "mere" 75 percent, thanks to the third-party candidacy of Henry Wallace, whose left-wing campaign attracted those 15 percent of Jewish voters for whom Truman apparently was not liberal enough.
Whether Roosevelt or Truman was deserving of such Jewish support is a question most Jews were reluctant even to ask until relatively recently. As the journalist Sidney Zion wrote several years ago, Roosevelt "refused to lift a finger to save [Jews] from Auschwitz.... Then, in 1948, the Jews helped elect Harry Truman, who recognized Israel but immediately embargoed arms to the Jewish state while knowing that the British had fully armed the Arabs."
The Republican share of the Jewish vote - an embarrassing 10 percent in 1940, 1944 and 1948 - improved significantly in the 1950`s as Dwight Eisenhower won the support of 36 percent of Jews in 1952 and 40 percent in 1956. Eisenhower`s opponent in both elections was Adlai Stevenson, a one-term governor of Illinois whose persona of urbane intellectualism set a new standard for the type of candidate favored by Jewish liberals.
Actually, Stevenson was not at all what he seemed: biographer John Barlow Martin revealed that Adlai hardly ever cracked open a book, and the historian Michael Beschloss, in a New York Times op-ed piece ("How Well-Read Should a President Be?" June 11, 2000), noted that when Stevenson died, there was just one book found on his bedside table - The Social Register.
Fortunately for politicians, perception is at least as important as reality, and John Kennedy followed in Stevenson`s footsteps as a non-intellectual who, with the help of compliant reporters and academic acolytes like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., managed to come across as a Big Thinker - in marked contrast to his well-earned reputation as an intellectual lightweight that dogged him throughout his years in Congress.
Despite the fact that his books were ghost-written (the journalist Arthur Krock was in large measure responsible for "Why England Slept," while Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was the primary author of "Profiles in Courage") and his choice of reading material ran mainly to spy novels, Kennedy, like Stevenson, benefited from the perception that he was made of sterner intellectual stuff. This was particularly true when it came to Jewish voters, who gave Kennedy 82 percent of their votes in 1960 and continued to support him in similarly high numbers for the duration of his presidency.
There never was much doubt that Jews would vote in large numbers for Democrat Lyndon Johnson over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 - a year when even many moderate members of his own party were high-tailing it away from the GOP`s outspokenly conservative standard bearer.
Johnson, the incumbent who assumed office upon the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, adroitly positioned himself as a man of the sensible center while Goldwater, disturbingly ambivalent about his own presidential ambitions and qualifications ("I`m not even sure I`ve got the brains to be president of the United States," he told the Chicago Tribune), seemed to delight in saying whatever he felt would most disturb the liberal reporters covering his campaign.
Goldwater`s supporters thrilled to what they perceived to be their man`s unusually blunt and honest oratory, but the rest of the country was decidedly unimpressed. Johnson was returned to office with 61.1 percent of the popular vote. Among Jews the results were even more one-sided as Johnson equaled Franklin Roosevelt in his heyday, pulling 90 percent of the Jewish vote to Goldwater`s 10 percent.
Republicans did somewhat better with Jews in 1968 when former vice president Richard Nixon, never a popular figure in the Jewish community, garnered 17 percent of the Jewish vote (actually a point down from the 18 percent he received from Jews when he ran against Kennedy in 1960).
This, too, was an easy election to predict in terms of Jewish preference, not simply because Nixon was Nixon, but more so because the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey - a classic cold war liberal whose type would become nearly extinct by the mid-1970`s - enjoyed an unusually close relationship with most of the leading organizational figures in American Jewish life.
Once again, Jews hardly reflected the thinking of the country at large, as Nixon (43.4 percent) squeezed out a victory over Humphrey (42.7 percent). George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, won 13.5 percent of the vote as a third-party candidate. (Jews gave Wallace 2 percent of their votes.)
Nixon and Beyond
The 1972 presidential election proved to be one of the more interesting - and instructive - elections in terms of Jewish voting behavior. During his first four years in office, Nixon had compiled a generally solid record on Israel. U.S. policymakers began to take seriously Israel`s value as an American asset in the region, and military aid to Israel rose to unprecedented levels.
Israel`s prime minister at the time, Golda Meir, was an unabashed admirer of Nixon`s, and the Israeli ambassador in Washington, a former IDF chief of staff named Yitzhak Rabin, raised the hackles of liberal Jewish organizations when he all but endorsed Nixon for a second term.
None of that seemed to matter to the bulk of American Jewry. Certainly there were defections from Democratic ranks - an organization calling itself "Democrats for Nixon" was a predominantly Jewish affair, and several wealthy big-name Jewish contributors who normally gave to Democrats were this time around writing checks to the Nixon campaign - but most Jews still feared that pulling the Republican lever would cause their right hands to lose their cunning.
Running against Nixon in 1972 was the liberal South Dakota senator George McGovern, a leading "dove" on Vietnam and a man who had not exactly carved a name for himself as a defender of Israel. McGovern exemplified the type of guilt-driven, anti-defense liberalism that captured the Democratic Party that year and would lead it to electoral disaster in four of the next five presidential elections.
"Official" Jewry - that dizzying network of committees, councils, conferences and leagues staffed by liberal flunkies whose Holy Writ is the platform of the Democratic Party and whose daily spiritual sustenance comes from New York Times editorials - was represented in the McGovern campaign by Jewish liaison Richard Cohen, who after the election returned to his job as public relations director at the American Jewish Congress, and campaign director Frank Mankiewicz, a former employee of the Anti-Defamation League.
As was the case in prior elections, Jewish organizational flunkies such as Washington fixture Hyman Bookbinder made no secret of their Democratic sympathies. Jewish celebrities were highly visible McGovern supporters: Barbra Streisand, Peter Falk, Carol King, Simon and Garfunkel, and scores of other household names enthusiastically gave their time and money to the Democratic candidate.
Unfortunately when this noble concept is separated from the other responsibilities commanded by Judaism, it is hijacked to conform to every latest politically correct trend.
-There are Jewish Americans, and there are "people born into Jewish families"
-there are proud Jews and there are self-hating Jews
- There are American Jews who have vested interest in Israel and there are American Jews who have vested interest in creation of muslyme Palestine
-there are American Jews who did not lift a finger to help Jews from Europe, but eagerly lifted finger to sign up for holocaust reparations -there are American Jews who would never go to Israel, not even as tourists and there are American Jews who go or would like to go if finances allow them.
- There are American Jews who adore Hitlery, perhaps because she despise them
-There are American Jews who adore Clitoon even after he blamed Sharon for Intifada
-there are American Jews who supoported Muslim terrorists in Bosnia and Kosovo and did not lift a finger for Jews from Bosnia and Kosovo.
Briefly , American Jews are diverse lot, just like any other ethnic background. Simple 'one cap fits all' does not exist.
JFK
Also, don’t forget that JFK's ship was twice as fast as the ship that rammed him. It would be interesting to know how the ramming really happened.
Unwritten here, of course for anyone that read the entire article, is the Socialist antisemitism, betrayal and genocide of Jews perpetrated by Stalin and other Communists. It makes me wonder why there IS an affinity at all. The article offers, in the end, little explanation. Maybe it is like the situation of Jefferson who was Ambassador to France during the American Revolution. Jefferson drank deep of the heady brew of the European Enlightenment, and then returned to the U.S. BEFORE the French Revolution thus missing out on the sight of a people plunged into terror, chaos, murder, and prolonged nightmare. Maybe his comments like having, ".....a 'revolution' every 20 years (or so)...." would be quite different would have been filled with a little less bravado.
I grew up in a town that was 50% Jewish and therefore most of my closest friends were secular American Jews. Now that I'm much older I've found that our political views and weltenschaung have not only diverged, but are separated by a huge chasm. Our conversations are sometimes strained when topics veer into politics. In recent years we avoid political comments nearly altogether; they know how I feel and I know their views as well. Their hate for all things Republican deeply saddens me.
Ironically Hitler was a socialist.
Although some are, I don't really see even most "secular" Jews as antagonistic to "the things of God." And it can be noted that Reform Judaism also is consciously leftist.
I think what may seem to be a Jewish resistance to "things of God," is more a championing of Jefferson's separation of church and state, in hopes that anti semitism can be avoided if the religious factor in society is reduced. However, it's true that the ironic result is that a religious group has helped diminish the status of religion.
I like a lot of your post, but can't agree with the above, necessarily. I know plenty of people who have not "submitted to God," who aren't religious, but who also have not abandoned themselves to "every perversion," etc. And there are some pretty evil folks around who have "submitted."
You rightly challange my assertion that that unsurrendered folk necessarilly abandon themselves to "every" perversion. First, of course I did not mean to say that every individual would be invested with every sin but only that some part of of their life will become perverse. Generally I meant this in the christian sense which is a theological point, that one either observes the first two commandments or one is in thrall to the force of evil. But since we are having a political discussion, I must defend the assertion on secular grounds. Do we see this in real life? Are unsurrendered people the victims of some perversity somewhere in the corners of their lives which affects them. I would say that there are obvious examples, such as those who suffer from the basic compulsions: Drink, drugs, food, sex, gambling, etc. But there are others: I had a aunt who could not stop talking, and a friend who could not stop coughing.
Second, all perversions are not easilly spotted in outwardly sucessful people. (Example: Bill Clinton -or Rush Limbaugh, for that matter.) The contrary is the rule.
I am going to rehearse a few of my previous posts, a presumption which I realize opens me to charges of egoism and with some justice. If you can make your way through them, I think they go a long way to expressing my point of view. They are excruciatingly long but if you have the fortitude they do actually address the point of view that those who will not submit to some force other than themselves are condemmed to be liberals. Here goes:
GOD AND MAN IN THE SKINNER BOX
Attending college in the 60's, I was exposed to the writings of BF Skinner in a mandatory Psychology 101 class. At the time I was struck by the time and energy the department devoted to this man and his theories. Essentially, he put a chicken in a box and taught it to play baseball by rewarding it with feed. When the chicken pressed a lever on cue, or ran a base, it got a pellet. Skinner was able to train animals to a remarkable degree with this method of positive reinforcement. He also demonstrated that negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks, was not as effective as positive reinforcement in controlling animal behavior.
So far, Skinner has not done the world much harm and perhaps he has even contributed something useful if you are Siegfried and Roy. But it soon became clear that Skinner and my psych professors had ambitions grander than dog and pony shows when they required a reading of Skinner's Walden Two. Here Skinner extrapolates his findings from chickens to people and causes real mischief. Essentially, he postulates that the human animal is a TABULA RASA, neither good nor evil, which can be conditioned into good behavior. There are no evil people just poorly conditioned behavior. All that is required to have generations of well behaved human chickens is a grand enough Skinner box to positively reinforce positive behavior.
Of course, it does not take a socialist to see that it would take more than a village, indeed it would take a federal burocracy, to build and maintain a big enough box. The mischief comes in when this thinking invades the penal (whoops, I mean corrections)system or the educational establishment and so on. Praeger, in his wonderful essay, has alluded to the effects on education of this baleful presumption about the nature of man. He is absolutely right when he says:
"No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not."
This is why liberals loathe believing christians. This is why liberals are collectivists and conservatives are individualists. This is why the Democrat party slices and dices the electorate into groups. This is why Patty Murray said what she said. The old adage that liberals love mankind in the abstract and as a group (read African-Americans) but despise them on an individual level finds its origins here. This is why believing Christians and believing Jews are finding that they hold much in common and have a common philosophical enemy in secular Jews and goyische pagans. The application of this insight is almost endless.
13 posted on 12/31/2002 8:53 AM EST by nathanbedford
Posted by nathanbedford to TLBSHOW On News/Activism 06/11/2003 3:16 AM EDT #10 of 51
"Most likely, homosexual behavior results from complicated reasons obfuscated in complex human beings. Tendencies may be inherited by some but choices are made by all. Sexual behavior is learned. Is pedophilia a choice? Incest? Adultery? Bestiality? Aren't all sexual behaviors, ultimately, choices of free will"
Yes they are and it is because they pivot on the exercise of choice that they can and should be judged and regulated by society in its own interest. The halucinations of a schizphrenic are not the product of his free will and so they draw compassion not sanctions from the law.
" Liberals advocate a pagan world view"
Yes, this is true and its truth explains the animus, indeed the malevolence, which animates libdrals' view of Christianity. Now the author reverses the concept and says something really profound, He says, in effect, that liberals are liberals because they are pagans: Furthermore, understanding how political thought grows from religious understanding makes the connections clear. " All individuals develop political thoughts based on a religious worldview. One set of Christian beliefs leads many individuals to social conservative ideas. A different Christian understanding has a direct line to liberalism. The situational ethics of pagan thought takes people to Liberalism. The selfish focus of other pagan ideas makes folks Libertarians."
I would add that the author does not reintroduce here his original point which is that one's cosmic views about moral choice, or the power of the individual to exercise free will in the moral sense determine whether you are a conservative or a liberal, whether you condemn or condone homosexuality, whether you oppose abortion or define it away with euphemisms. The very idea that abortion is allowed to legally flourish and flourish at a profit demonstrates the awesome power of relativism. The killing of the most innocent and helpless among us can only be justified if there is no fixed external value system; if the keeper and the arranger of the order of values is the individual who can shuffle them at will.
There is a name for this: Playing God. In this context the author again says something profound: "Abortion denies the sovereignty of God and the sanctity of life for the weakest humans. Euthanasia denies the sovereignty of God and sanctity at the end of life for the second frailest. Homosexuality denies God's sovereign rules for sexual behavior and promotes disobedience throughout the life in between."
The denial "of the sovergeinity of God" is, bottom line a flat out violation of the First Commandment. The arrogation of the "sovereignity of God," relativism in modern jargon, is the root of liberalism and explains why liberals must literally hate those who call them on it because the First Commandment is literally the first step in the fork in the road. One cannot thereafter change lanes. All things flow from this choice. That is why it is the "First" Commandment.
The pagan liberal foolishly believes that he is retaining the power of chice by denying the sovereignity of God. In realilty he sells that choice every day to another diety. It must be that somehow in the dark of night the liberal pagan realizes that his power of choice is illusory (ie Bill Clinton cannot control his sexual predations no matter how hard he tries). So he says that man is not responsible for exercising wrong choices because he was the prisoner of his enviroment. So the solution is to rectify the enviroment by trying harder to make criminals sing Kumbaya or define away the sin (eg sexual predation, abortion) with euphemism.
The Christian has learned the mystical lesson of Christ's promise of real power: That he gains real power of choice in his life (control of his behavior) if he makes the correct first choice.
I think this is one of the most insightful articles I have seen posted on this wonderful forum.
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Once again Praeger presents us with another excellent piece in a developing series of thoughtful essays on how the way man sees God determines the way he sees himself and his fellows and, ultimately, how he orders his political world.
In a piece entitled, "If you believe that people are basically good?", he postulates that the core decision about the soverneity God which all of us are destined to make, determines one’s politics. Deny the idea of God as supreme and you are destined to become a liberal. As part of that denial, man sees himself as good. I added in comments that it is the concept of submission to the supremacy of God which ultimately distinguishes those who become believers and conservative from those who become antagonistic to the concept of God and therefore hostile to religion, and ultimately, liberty. It is my belief that the modern Devil might be more accurately described not with horns and tail but in the modern metaphor of the ego, like unto a parasite which will do anything to protect its free lunch even as it destroys the host upon which it feeds.
Indulge a digression which should illustrate in microcosm the God and Man part of the equasion before before returning to Praeger’s macro analysis of the political implications of these concepts.
Since Christianity calls for the ultimate sacrifice, the suicide of the EGO, the parasite resists with all the cunning the Devil can muster. The drug addict, the alcoholic, the compulsive gambler, the neurotic, the sexual deviant all have one thing in common: They are all at war against God. The concept of surrender to God is anathema to them. The parasite is the compulsion for that very behavior which ultimately will destroy the host. The liberals’ solution is to enlighten man about the self-destructive dangers of his compulsive behavior and to manage it by passing out condoms or clean needles. Educate the compulsive, they obdurately believe in the face of a mountain of human misery to the contrary, and he will utilize his intellect to make the right choice and avoid his self-destructive, anti-social behavior.
The failure rate of this approach exceeds even that of the Great Society.
Success against this parasite, the modern Devil, has however been achieved by 12 step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, upon which the others have been predicated. These programs do not abjure the compulsive to invoke his intellect or will power to abstain from the compulsion. But they do urge him to surrender his ego to God who will in turn empower him to avoid the destructive compulsion so long as they remain submitted. In classical Christian terms the sinner is asked to die so that he can be born again. The addict is not weakened by his surrender, but empowered. The repentant sinner does not lose his freedom as the atheist believes, but gains it on the cross. The parasite and the Devil are slain and the host survives and flourishes.
The success rate of this approach has been demonstrated literally millions of times. Why then the Liberals visceral opposition to faith based programs?
Well, obviously, I intend the reader to see that the answer is contained in the hypothesis. The Liberal is in bondage to the self but perversely believes himself to be free. Worse, he sees himself as God – although he doesn’t know it and would indignantly deny the charge. He might self- righteously insist that he is in not in need of a self-help program because his life is in order. But bondage to the self inevitably exacts a terrible forfeit from those in thrall. The Devil will have his due; the parasite will feed. In Praeger’s Torah this means that this individual rejects the first two commandments: He denies God and at the same time he would be God.
Any thing, repeat, anything which potentially threatens his would – be – god-ness must be killed.
Let us get back to Praeger and his insights on the macro level by digressing further with Ann Coulter, always a delightful prospect. In the last two paragraphs of her book TREASON, Coulter demonstrates that she gets it:
"The fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is: Conservatives believe man was created in God’s image; liberals believe they are God. All their other behavioral tics proceed from this one irreducible minimum. Liberals believe they can murder the unborn because they are gods. They try to forcibly create “equality” through affirmative action and wealth redistribution because the are gods. They can lie, with no higher power to constrain them, because thy are gods. They adore pornography and the mechanization of sex because man is just an animal, and they are gods. They revere the U.N. and not the U.S. because they aren’t Americans – they are gods."
Now Coulter makes the macro application:
" Americans cannot comprehend how their fellow countrymen could not love their country. But the left’s anti-Americanism is intrinsic to their entire worldview. Liberals promote the rights of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and Communists. They instinctively root for anarchy against civilization. The inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for treason."
It is a pity that Ann Coulter chose to end her book with these words rather than further exegete the proposition. But now, at last, we can return to Praeger:
"But in the modern West, hundreds of millions of people have no such faith in anything. They do not passionately believe in their country or in religion. Their highest values are tolerance, health, pleasure, and not judging good and evil. They are deeply afraid of fervent believers in anything. And they especially fear American believers -- i.e., believers in the Bible and in America. That is why they commonly equate fundamentalist Christians with fundamentalist Muslims and that is why they so hate George W. Bush, the believer in the biblical God and in an American mission."
I would, of course, amend that statement to read, “ Their highest values are the survival of the self.”
Patriotism, even the patriotism of the agnostic, carries implicit within it the concept that the preservation of the nation state might at times be more worthy than the preservation of the self. Praeger says:
"That is why this battle is a battle of civilizations. One civilization believes in liberty and one does not. The problem is that the civilization that has liberty has not produced anywhere the depth of belief in liberty that the opponents of liberty have produced. That is why most Europeans (and their supporters in America on the Left) see dying or killing for almost anything as pointless. When you don't believe in anything except not dying, you don't really believe in anything. For this reason, European civilization is in peril."
The one and only thing that animates the parasite, apart from feeding, is survival.
"No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not."
I view humans as intinsically containing potential for both good and evil, with moral responsibility to choose between them. The instincts for both are necessary for survival. IMO, this is not incompatible with a Christian view. Or a secular one.
RE the Skinner Box, I am with you all the way on viewing this as the "liberal" idea of how government should handle people. I guess the conservative version of a "Skinner's Box" is that parents ought to raise their kids up right.
"The selfish focus of other pagan ideas makes folks Libertarians."
I know here I am straying from the points you are making, but as someone who has sympathy for at least libertarian philosophy, I can't help myself from addressing the above. The atheist Ayn Rand, who was certainly emphatically opposed to all leftist doctrine, believed that selfishness could be a great force for good. I think her point is that when individuals pursue their own selfish interests, they by default end up doing good for others. Actually, this is kind of self evident. If one goes about the process of building a fortune for oneself, and then spends it, jobs, and, consequently more wealth, are created for others. The other choice is to give it to charity, where most of it is burned up in the charity's bureaucracy, and what is doled to the "poor" gives only temporary relief, or worse, creates dependency and destroys initiative.
I wish someone would point this out to the brilliant investor, Warren Buffet, who believes in coercive charity in the form of redistribution of wealth through federal taxes. Spending the money on yourself, in actuality, pays the salaries of people providing the goods or services you are "selfishly" purchasing, thus providing them with jobs and independence. Quite an improvement over giving them government charity, which effectively keeps them under the official thumb.
"As part of that denial (of God), man sees himself as good."
I'm not to convinced that this necessarily follows, though it can, for sure.
"The Liberal is in bondage to the self but perversely believes himself to be free."
Here I disagree. Yes, a pious Christian or Jew (or Muslim) surrenders to God. I believe, however, that the liberal has a parallel surrender, to the "community," the "common good," the state, village, group, or whatever term he may choose.
I think it would be more accurate to say the libertarian, not the "liberal," is in bondage to the self, although I disagree with the term bondage, since libertarianism implies individual freedom. I happen to think, probably in agreement with you, that individual freedom is not workable without individual responsibility.
"Conservatives believe man was created in God’s image; liberals believe they are God."
Agreed that there must absolutely be universal ethics. Religion is the traditional provider of such. Yes, arbitrary decision making, such as liberals playing God, is the antithesis of liberty and the basis of totalitarianism.
"That is why most Europeans (and their supporters in America on the Left) see dying or killing for almost anything as pointless."
I'm either misunderstanding this point, or it is fundamentally wrong. The last century alone demonstrates that leftists will kill in the millions for the state (common good, motherland, country). IMO, the politics of personal destruction displayed so often by the Democrats (esp. the Clintons) are also a logical manifestation of the necessity of a philosophy based on the "common good" to willingly "eliminate" those individuals deemed to be obstacles to that common good.
And, beyond that, leftists do die in service of the state. When one submits to the "group" (state), then the group most certainly does require the individuals that comprise it to die on command. Again, history demonstrates it.
I think Prager is confusing the refusal of Europeans to die in causes championed by America for refusal of leftists to die for the state, two very different things.
I do find much common ground with what you have so kindly posted, although I have argued with some of it. And I too am an admirer of Dennis Praeger. And I agree that the Left is a parasite.
Thanks much.
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