The Rage of the Plantation Owners(the left)

Editor's Note: The left's attempt to "deftly pin" the Tucson shooting on the Tea Parties has failed. The American people aren't buying it, and now that the trial balloon has been deflated, President Obama has rejected it.

So now the story has shifted to the question of why the left would attempt the libel in the first place, and stick to it so long in the face of contrary evidence. In short, as Daniel Henninger puts it, the question is "Why the Left Lost It." Henninger's answer, which has to do with the left's longstanding caricature of the right, is a big part of the puzzle, and should be paired with a revealing essay by leftist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who repeats the original version of this libel, blaming the assassination of JFK on Dallas's "seething cauldron of right-wing depravity"—while ignoring the fact that the actual assassin was a Communist.

Below, Jack Wakeland offers his own account of the reasons for the left's unhinged reaction to the Tucson shooting, which focuses more on the left's view of itself.—RWT

The left has a dysfunctional reaction to crazed gunmen. In the hopes that they can institute gun prohibition or suppress the free speech and free assembly of their political opponents, the left has repeatedly exploited barbaric criminal acts from 1963 to the present. They feed off of the cultural noise generated after a particularly evil killing (e.g., the assassinations of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, the Luby's massacre in Killeen Texas, the Oklahoma City bombing, etc.). They exploit the sense, among good people shocked by the blow, that the social order might break down. They attempt to use public passions that are momentarily excited by an unsettling event to quickly enact uncivilized political programs that they've been waiting decades to get a chance at. They attempt to kick the political culture whenever it is down.

Conservative political rhetoric has lately been on point and has deeply damaged the moral legitimacy of the left. That is why the left has manufactured claims that conservative political rhetoric has become so abusive that it is an incitement to political violence. The last time that a sitting congressman was shot was Leo Ryan, murdered at the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978, a non-partisan event. The only assassinations of national political leaders in my lifetime were those of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, the last of which occurred over 42 years ago. As part of the subtext for this week's anti-free-speech campaign, the left has always evaded the fact that JFK was murdered by a calculating and skillful Communist who was opposed to the president's conduct of the Cold War, and RFK was murdered by a dedicated and fanatical Palestinian nationalist who was opposed to American support for Israel. Neither of these killers were insane loners who were incited by "a right-wing climate of hatred."

The most successful of the left's attempts to impose their will on a shocked and momentarily disoriented people was what they did in the weeks following the Oklahoma City Bombing. They pinned the monomaniac world-view of Timothy McVeigh on the leadership of the Republican Party. And the leadership accepted the accusation, shut up, and the "Republican Revolution" of 1994 was stifled before it had a chance to reverse the aggregation of power by the Federal government. In the attempted murder of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the left sees a chance to trick their political opponents into silencing themselves as they did in 1995.

But this time there is absolutely no political meaning in the criminal's act. It was the act of a deranged and evil young man who thinks that his dreams are more real than the real world.

So over the past two days, I kept asking myself: What could the left possibly hope to accomplish by pressing on with such an obnoxious, intentionally counter-factual, and obviously dishonest line of argument? Do they really think that bald faced lies will move the centrists of the Republican Party to snuff out the Tea Party wing?

Rather than guess, I spent about an hour carefully listening to one of the left's more celebrated talk radio guys, Norman Goldman. Both he and his callers have convinced themselves that a popular, right-wing, and neo-Confederate campaign of threats is underway to silence the left by physical intimidation. They regard the non-political nature of the killer's motives to be irrelevant. He, they have convinced themselves, picked up his violent anti-Democrat-congresswoman behavior from the generally violent anti-Democrat cultural atmosphere by means of a process of cultural osmosis that, while being ineffable, is undeniably "true."

Goldman repeatedly complained about right-wing political slogans involving guns, bumper stickers like the ever-popular "hunting license" for Washington Democrats, and other statements of armed contempt for left-wing statism and authority.

This concern—which we might take to be a legitimate complaint in different circumstances—didn't contain anything new to me. I've been reading all this in the papers already. Hearing it spoken by voices convinced of their own delusions wasn't particularly instructive either.

But that was only the first 20 minutes of what I listened to. During the next 40 minutes Norman Goldman repeatedly incited violence. For example, he shouted that "SOME ONE SHOULD TAKE OUT SARAH PALIN..." followed by a pause, and then, quietly, "...during the primary process."

Over and over again for the next 40 minutes, Goldman made abusive and threatening statements about conservatives, all with a nod and a wink. He told his audience: if they can do it, why can't he? He's just "fighting fire with fire."

Whether it was Goldman's purpose or not, it finally became clear to me what was the overall purpose of the left's obnoxious Tucson shooting campaign. The left would like to introduce political violence back into our system. They'd like to incite lawlessness, riotous behavior, and the creation of left-wing terrorist groups to "counter" the actions they claim the right has been doing all along. (The sole purpose of the Southern Poverty Law Center is to create and keep alive the fiction that there is a massive "The South Will Rise Again" neo-Confederate campaign afoot in America.) They'd also like to incite right-wing lawlessness and riotousness and terrorist activities—in order to better rationalize the formation of their own militant groups. They'd like to replay the social upheaval of 1965–1972 and regain the unquestioned power and authority they used to have, including the re-establishment of the monopoly they used to have on the press.

Key to this approach is to re-create the image of the oppressed black man who was (in fact) at the center of all of that upheaval. They're convinced that the Tea Party movement's cultural rebellion against the Federal leviathan is happening now only because a black man is president. It apparently has nothing to do with a sudden 25% increase in federal spending, efforts to take over medicine and the energy industry, a sudden 300% increase in the federal deficit, or a 300% increase in the monetary base.

They can't understand how the right ascended to power in the 1980s, resurged in the mid-90s, and are resurging again, in the 2010s. They assume—by an act of projection—that the right must have done it by the same means the left did it in the 1950s and 60s: by silencing their opponents with a campaign of public shaming (anti-McCarthyism), followed by a cultural revolution in the arts and morals, and then by nationwide riots, death threats, terrorist attacks, and headline political assassinations. They project the history and nature of their side onto the right and see the resulting distorted re-write of reality as history and as present-day fact.

But the idea of bringing back the "good old days" of the New Left's rise to power in the 1960s is absurd. The left will not be able to find enlistees for their militant groups. There will be no nation-wide riots, no social upheaval.

The left is losing on all fronts: in getting operatives elected to the state legislatures, elected to the governor's mansions, elected to the House and the Senate, and—soon—to the Oval Office. Most disconcerting and disorienting to the left is the fact that they have lost their monopoly on the press. All of the establishment press outfits that they dominate are losing readers and viewers and will be going out of business. They see a future in which there is a right-wing monopoly over the press and none of their lies will ever get played again. Soon, they see (by means of psychological projection) only right-wing lies getting air time.

The Southerners of the 1830s, 40s, and 50s watched in horror as the North was transformed by an industrial revolution fostered by the liberty of "free labor," with rapidly spreading prosperity and a population that was swelling from falling death rates and massive influxes of immigrants, while everywhere in the South society languished in medieval poverty. They realized their system was doomed. In one more generation, the North would out-vote them on every national question, and—if the votes weren't counted—would outnumber them and outshoot them on the battlefield. Their response was aggression. To balance the votes they were sure to lose in the House and for the presidency, Southerners belligerently demanded that slavery be extended to all of the territories (from California to Minnesota), and they threatened to beat or murder anyone who spoke out against their cause. Finally, seeing that their social system was inexorably losing in lawful political competition, they bet everything and rolled the dice on secession and war.

Today's left is taking on the same mindset as the pre-Civil War Southerner. They see the entire cultural-political system tilting against them, and they know there is no way to tilt it back. At some level, they sense that it is not the system that is tilting against them. They sense that they're actually up against the reality of their anti-liberty, anti-individual, anti-achievement ideas. Because their ideas produce nothing but failure at life, they sense that their ideas have nothing to recommend them.

The left has always had a philosophical kinship with grifters and thieves. Political fraud and mass theft are the central institutions of their welfare state. Now that they're losing their grip on the host, their mindset is shifting. They're starting to feel a kind ship with murderers.

They have gone into defense mode. The left are the plantation owners of the welfare state, and they're starting to realize this could be 1858.

That was the year that the Republican Party was organized and the South knew that their attempts to scupper the rising political dominance of the North would fail when systematically opposed by this political alliance.

Ttoday, the left is threatened by the possible takeover of the Republican Party by Tea Party activism. If the Tea Partiers gain control of the core ideological levers of the GOP, they will systematically strip the welfare state and the left of all of its pretended political legitimacy. And the left will lose everything.

I pretty much agree with your premise. However, while the States Rights issue was foremost in the South, I think the North while being for a slightly stronger federal government, the foremost issue was the immorality of slavery. Unfortunately, the South never could untie their connection of states rights and slavery. Had the South been able to do that and eliminate slavery on their own the Civil War might never have been fought. At the conclusion of the war and during the period of Reconstruction the government grabbed huge amounts of power at the expense of the states both north and south. Most of this power grab was done constitutionally though I concede the argument that requiring the states in rebellion to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments as a condition for re-entry into the Union could be described as coercive or under duress. “To the victors go the spoils.”

As for today’s left, their overreach began with Wilson and WW1. Slowed with Harding and Coolidge, picked up pace with Hoover and began in earnest with FDR continuing to today. Modern day conservatism began with William F. Buckley and a purge of the extreme right of the day.(Birchers mostly) Yet in most ways remained very small until LBJ and the “Great Society” along with the “War on Poverty” social programs Medicare/Medicaid, expansion of welfare programs, Ted Kennedy’s immigration reform of 1965, etc. Most of dubious constitutionality. Nixon and Ford continued government expansion and today would be considered RINOs. But that’s because the Scoop Jackson wing of the democrats ceased to exist for all practical purposes with the rise of the anti-war, anti military, militant feminism, pro abortion, nuclear disarmament, and political environmentalism, gun control, wing of the party. Carter’s draft amnesty and subsequent pacifism in the face of rising threats to our security in the Middle East and Central America and Eastern Europe led to the ascendancy and domination of conservative philosophy at least at the Executive branch level with the election of the greatest 20th century president Ronald Reagan.

I could go on but this comment is long enough already. In short, I agree with the proposition that “The Left Is Desperate That It Is About To Lose Everything.”

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