Posted on 09/25/2018 2:58:28 PM PDT by DeweyCA
RUSH: First, Jim Geraghty. Folks, this is so right on the money. “The more time I spend covering politics,” Mr. Geraghty writes, “the more I’m convinced that a significant chunk of grassroots political activists aren’t really arguing about politics at all. These folks are actually grappling with personal psychological issues and projecting it onto the world of politics. Every problem they had with a parent is projected onto authority figures.
“Every religious person who ever scolded them or made them feel guilty becomes the embodiment of organized religion and demonstrates its menace. Because they’ve had a bad experience with a member of a minority group, that experience reveals something sinister about every member of that minority group. The cop who wrote them a ticket instead of giving them a warning demonstrates the danger and corruption of law enforcement,” and can lead to Black Lives Matter.
“[T]he boss who fired them for shoddy work exemplifies the inherent cruelty of the capitalist system, and every frustrating experience they had with an ex-girlfriend demonstrates some defect in all women,” and that could be the opposite. Every frustrating experience they had with an ex-boyfriend demonstrates some defect in all men. (summarized) “I think a lot of the issues they are grappling with system from the fact that most of these people have never done anything big with their lives.
“So everything has to be imbued with drama of an approaching Armageddon in order for them to feel as though their meaningless lives have meaning.” Now, I have said this over and over again a different way. Everybody wants their life to have meaning. Everybody wants to matter. And a lot of people feel overwhelmed, powerless, and like they don’t matter — and one of the faster ways to make yourself feel like you matter is to become a victim, member of an organized victim group.
And when you do that, a number of sea changes occur to you. When you become a member of a victim group, you are admitting that you are a failure. But you are admitting it isn’t your fault! It’s society’s at large or the cops or capitalism or religion or something. When you become a victim, you are then signaling that you are owed. People need to give you something for all of the mistreatment that you have suffered. I think this is so right on the money, and I could give you some classic examples. Like transgenderism.
I know that there are many transgenders in this audience, so I have to be careful here. I just want to tell you that there is a former — I guess he’s retired — director of the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical Center and university who wrote many years ago that sexual identity is a psychological issue and it needs to be treated as such, not with gender-change surgery and this kind of thing.
He said that it’s a sad thing, it’s very unfortunate, but it needs to be dealt with therapeutically and so forth. Of course, he has been ignored or destroyed depending on when his name comes up. But that’s not the only example of this. I think this is so right on the money, and there’s so many elements of this that ring true. The feeling of powerlessness, the comforting thought that it’s not your fault, that you’re a victim of some powerful entity or person or system. And then you become a member of the victim group, and you have instant rage and anger that is justified and encouraged.
And then you enter the political system under the aegis of your psychological problems being legitimate political issues. These people all naturally will gravitate to the left because that’s where psychological disorders primarily reside. The Democrat Party has made it well known that they will use whatever they can in order to win power. So they have built a coalition of very disparate groups, minorities, including women and union workers over the years, African-Americans, Hispanics, Latinos, you name it. But in each instance, they’re not…
In terms of the rank-and-file, they’re not successful. As Geraghty writes, they’ve really not had something big happen in their lives. They’ve not had something reinforcing that they’re worth liking themselves, worth loving themselves. Have you noticed the leftists are constantly angry? They’re always agitated. They’re never happy! Even when they get what they want, even when they get more than they want, they’re never happy. What kind of disorder…?
Like last night Ted Cruz and his wife were hounded of how a restaurant in Washington. Ari Fleischer is writing about it. He says (paraphrased), “You know, I’ve been in Washington a long time. This is a sick town. This is a sick town! Simply because you disagree with somebody, you go into a restaurant and you start hounding them to the point that they have to leave?” That isn’t normal. But the Democrat Party normalizes it and promotes it. Validates it. Empowers it.
So all of these various disorders of one kind or another become empowered and fundamentally important to the electability and future of the Democrat Party. The sad thing is the Democrats don’t do one thing to really help these people. Their policies don’t help them. Their direct attempts to help them don’t help them because Democrat constituents are constantly enraged. They are constantly angry. They are mad, unhappy, blaming everybody — somebody else — for whatever they think their plight is. They invest in the Democrat Party to fix it, and “fix it” means get even with whoever it is that’s responsible for these people feeling the way they feel.
Get even with the church, get even with the cops, get even with the Koch brothers, get even with whoever it is that epitomizes capitalism. It becomes understandable when you see these people desiring tax increases on the rich. They don’t care whether it helps or hurts them. Doesn’t matter, as long as somebody gets punished. The Democrat Party has become the party where most of its constituents want the leadership of the party to punish!
So Kavanaugh, as the latest example, is being punished simply because he is normal, simply because he has achieved, simply because he’s done something that most leftists and Democrats can’t and haven’t. That isn’t fair. It’s unequal. So he’s gotta be taken out just on that basis alone because Kavanaugh represents grand inequality. Kavanaugh represents what’s wrong with America in any way. So regardless whether he’s guilty or not, he’s gotta be destroyed!
Once they set their targets, once they put you in the crosshairs, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done. You’ve gotta go. Because rage and demanding punishment is the elixir in their minds. That’s what’s gonna make them feel better. The thing is, it never does. Even when they succeed in having their enemies punished, it never makes them satisfied. And it can’t because, as victims, they have built a wall, a block to discovering what actually needs to be fixed in their lives to change them.
By becoming a victim, you say, “I’ve done the best I can. I can’t do any more because the world’s stacked against me, and I’m gonna have my buddies in the Democrat Party protect me and get even with the people who’ve made my life miserable.” I think Geraghty is exactly right about this. Again he writes, “The more time I spend covering politics, the more I’m convinced that a significant chunk of grassroots political activists aren’t really arguing about politics at all.
“These folks are actually grappling with personal psychological issues and projecting it onto the world of politics.” In other words, politics is to blame — and, of course, when we’re talking about who’s to blame, well, you blame the normal. You blame the happy, you blame the satisfied. Who’s that? Well, in the modern-day, it’s become conservatives or it’s become Republicans. That’s the battle that we’re in the middle of, and most people on our side don’t have any idea!
They don’t recognize it. We think, “Well, this is the left. This is American politics, the Democrat Party,” and it is in the sense that these people are Democrats and vote Democrat precisely because they think the Democrats are gonna punish whoever it is that ruined their lives, made them miserable, made them unhappy, and it runs the gamut. You can explain this with every different Democrat constituency. You could illustrate the point with every group. Pick women, and you could make the point.
Speaking of which, somebody sent me a note last night and said, “You know what, Rush? This #MeToo movement started out as a bipartisan movement. I don’t know what’s happened. The left has hijacked it.” What? The #MeToo movement was never bipartisan. Who thinks that? Raise your hand in there. (interruption) Do you think the #MeToo movement was bipartisan? You know why people think that? Because it went after a Democrat first, Harvey Weinstein.
“Well, it must have been bipartisan.” No, it was never. Let me ask you this. Do you know of a conservative group that would ever start something like the #MeToo movement? You don’t. Do you know any? It would never happen. The #MeToo movement was a left-wing movement from the get-go. It was the Democrat Party, George Soros bought-and-paid-for structured movement from the get-go. “Well, Rush if that’s true… If that’s true, then why did they go for a Democrat first, Weinstein?”
Easy! After Hillary lost the election, there were powers that be in the media (which runs the Democrat Party, don’t forget, in my humble estimation) that wants to wipe the Clintons off of the slate. The Democrat Party, there are some in there that want to get rid of the Clintons as bad as some Republicans do. They’ve known for decades what Weinstein was doing and who he was! It wasn’t a shock! The shock was the New York Times ran the story.
Here comes Ronan Farrow, and adding to it, NBC blockades that because they’ve got their own Army of sexual harassers being protected in the news division. But the reason they went after Weinstein is because he’s a big Clintonista, he’s a Clinton donor, he’s a Clinton fundraiser. That’s what that was about. That’s why they went after him first, and as it kept going, guess who it kept outing? The #MeToo movement kept outing liberal Democrats in Hollywood.
“We can’t have that!”
The #MeToo movement was taking out its own people. The #MeToo movement was taking out its own captains. So the #MeToo movement had to make a drastic change in direction. It was never bipartisan. Now, people think it was because women across the political spectrum united against a single foe — sexual harassment and abusers — and it didn’t matter if they were Republicans or Democrats.
But it does. Keith Ellison will not even be investigated for a legitimate allegation. The Democrats are ignoring it. Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, been through all that. But here’s a Republican didn’t do anything he’s being accused of doing, and look. He’s now gotta prove he didn’t do it. The rule of law is being stood upside down, on its head.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. My second piece that buttresses the explanation of what we’re up against and who it really is comes from is Shelby Steele, who is simply brilliant. He’s a scholar of long-standing at the Hoover Institution, a conservative tank of thinkers out there at the Stanford campus in Palo Alto. His piece called, “Why the Left Is Consumed With Hate — Lacking worthy menaces to fight, it is driven to find a replacement for racism. Failing this, what is left?”
That’s the subhead. Now, here’s the conclusion. I’m gonna go backwards forward. Conclusion: “Yet the left is still stalked by obsolescence. There is simply not enough [real] menace to service its demands for power.” Meaning there isn’t real mean-spirited racism, sexism, bigotry out there. They have to make it up, have to manufacture it, have to lie about it such as Kavanaugh. He’s not a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, any of these things. But look what they’re saying about him.
His point is they’ve run out of real menaces. “The voices that speak for the left have never been less convincing,” Shelby Steele says. “It is hard for people to see the menace that drives millionaire football players to kneel before the flag. And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused — welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on. For the American left today, the indulgence in hate is a death rattle.”
They have run out of legitimate enemies and opposition. America is not this dastardly place they make it out to be, and they keep swooping to the bottom of the gutter and lower coming up with new menaces that they have to manufacture — and “hate” is the latest one. “How did the American left — conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world” in their minds…? And believe me, in their minds, that’s what liberalism is:
“More compassion, more tolerance, more justice. It’s absurd, but that’s what they think. “How did the American left … become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. “That acceptance,” the admittance, the admission that America had a really rotten element in its past, when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings.
“That acceptance changed America forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy,” and as far as the American left is concerned, that redemption can never happen, by design. America can never redeem itself. America can never recover. “The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it,” and that has carried forward even to today.
Related Links
National Review: Another Day, Another Unidentified Source - Jim Geraghty
Wall Street Journal: Why the Left Is Consumed With Hate - Shelby Steele
Shelby Steele adds that the latter group of Dems is purposefully being encouraged by top Dems to think of themselves as victims. The Dems, like Saul Alinsky taught, must continually deride America. Alinsky, a communist, knew that if people were satisfied, then they would not want to overthrow the current political situation, so he taught that community organizers had to "rub the sore raw" to keep their constituents angry and desiring social change. They are using the Social Marxism idea of "Critical theory" and deconstruction to make people, especially minorities, think that America is horrible and that they are being oppressed (victimized) by oppressive white male Republicans. This is the origin of the constant promoting of the ideas of "white privilege" and "institutional racism." The Dems' strategy of identity politics and victimization, by design, is supposed to inflame race relations and divide America, so that the Dems can gain more power.
The young people have lots of debt for a degree that will not result in gainful employment. No wonder they are attracted to socialism.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. It’s all there.
CliffsNotes version: They’re hateful sociopaths.
Politics is very simple.
It is High School: The Sequel.
I thought Ayn Rand was oversimplified, and to some extent it is. Still, the vast majority of those on the left can be described in her words as: (1) Looters in power who want productive people to be enslaved as a source of resources and those who refuse slavery to be dead, and (2) Moochers who are hoping to live well off the resources their leaders are able to steal.
Here’s the Cliff Notes version from ‘Tombstone’ on why liberals are like they are.
What makes a man like Ringo, Doc?
What makes him do the things he does?
A man like Ringo...got a great empty hole right through the middle of him.
He can never kill enough or steal enough....or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.
What does he need?
Revenge.
For what?
Bein’ born.
They are consumed with the sin of bitterness and unforgiveness, and won’t let go of it, rather they are wallowing in it. Unrepentant sin leads to bondage to that sin (and to the mental instability that follows).
bkmk
Keep it simple ...
There are basically 2 kinds of people ...
1. You do your thing and I'll do mine ...
2. We all gotta do it together ... or else ...
Exactly. That helps explain their intense feelings about subjects they know almost nothing about and deliberately avoid learning about. Any excuse for leftist virtue signaling will serve their psychological needs.
Projection, projection, these days it's always projection.
“Everybody wants their life to have meaning. Everybody wants to matter. And a lot of people feel overwhelmed, powerless, and like they don’t matter”
Something religion used to solve for in most people, and which is now notably absent on the political left.
Yes. Stodgily written by a brilliant ESL. But there.
Thanks for posting this. One of the greatest Rush segments - I heard it but miss some details; again, thanks for posting
Bump for later.
"Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes" - P.J. O'Rourke. Truer words were never spoken.
He also identifies liberals as essentially spoiled brats - the screaming, raging kid who always demands candy in the check out line, and who does it every time because Mom and Dad always give in, after pretending that this time they're not going to.
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