The Vision of the Left (Thomas Sowell)

Jewish World Review ^ | September 9, 2008 | Thomas Sowell

[jazusamo]

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left.

Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities.

Even fewer would prefer a world in which vast sums of money have to be devoted to military defense, when so much benefit could be produced if those resources were directed into medical research instead.

It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left. The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

Most of us learn that from experience — but experience is precisely what the young are lacking.

"Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

Those who are insulated from that pain — whether by being born into affluence or wealth, or shielded by the welfare state, or insulated by tenure in academia or in the federal judiciary — can remain in a state of perpetual immaturity.

Individuals can refuse to grow up, especially when surrounded in their work and in their social life by similarly situated and like-minded people.

[oldbrowser]

So indeed, the world the socialist left would create would be hellish, indeed. Not the hippie fantasy once promised, a world of peace, love and drugs; but a horrible place of dehumanization, poverty, slavery, murder, sickness and starvation. That is the “Hope” and “Change” the left promise.

Sounds like North Korea.

[MrB]

Sowell addresses those people, too.

They are the ones that have been isolated from the realities of the world all their lives such that they haven’t “experienced” a reality that would change their worldview.

[Reeses]

forcing all mankind to be equal

Yes, they say with a straight face that the ideal world is one in which no one feels envy for anyone else. It's lost on them that a) envy is a choice, and b) envy is a cardinal sin.

Leftists have figured out how to temporarily redistribute wealth, with the government taking a gluttonous commission on each transaction, but how are they going to redistribute age, beauty, talent, skill, intelligence, size, personality, family, friends, and lovers? Their goal of achieving an envy-free world is totally unattainable.

[jazusamo]

You’re so right about the old Soviet Union, I remember those exact things as they were reported over a period of time. There were those that tried to debunk the stories here in the US and there remains many more of those here now, of course now they are openly members of the Democrat Party.

[jazusamo]

Old Hippies are the WORST!

Absolutely, they will never change. They've had the mental disorder for so many years they've convinced themselves they're right, sad but true. :)

[ETL]

Useful idiots
by Thomas Sowell
May 20, 2003

The term "useful idiots" has been attributed to Lenin, as a description of those mindless people in the Western democracies who would always find ways to excuse whatever the Soviet Union did. Columnist Mona Charen's new book Useful Idiots shows that such people are still with us.

Long after the Soviet Union's horrors had become too widely known around the world for their sympathizers in the West to be able to get away with whitewashing the USSR, new Communist dictatorships arose to become the new objects of the affections of the Western intelligentsia and of like-minded people in the media and in politics.

As Mona Charen's book makes painfully clear, this usually happened in a pattern that was repeated again and again, with the same useful idiots saying the same kinds of things again and again. She spells this out and names names, quoting Peter Jennings, Jesse Jackson, Anthony Lewis, Ted Kennedy, Ted Turner and a long list of others.

The founding of the Castro dictatorship in Cuba set the pattern that was followed later in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Grenada. By initially concealing the fact that he was a Communist, and having some non-Communists around him as window dressing, Fidel Castro was able to play the role of a popular liberator, out to end oppression, hold free elections, and do all sorts of good things for "the people."

The useful idiots in the United States and other Western democracies ate it up. Many still do, to this very moment. ..."

more at:
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2003/05/20/useful_idiots

[ETL]

Yeah, but when a disciple of Saul Alinsky "community organizer" "uh uh uh and, I, uh, uh uh um, and uh uh" takes the national stage...

From the Boston Globe, August 31, 2008:

[Saul Alinsky's] Son sees father's handiwork in [2008 democrat] convention

ALL THE elements were present: the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people.

The Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness.

It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.

I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday.

L. DAVID ALINSKY
Medfield

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2008/08/31/son_sees_fathers_handiwork_in_convention/

________________________________________________________________________________

From Rules for Radicals, Alinsky outlines his strategy in organizing, writing:

"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution."[2]

[2] Saul Alinsky, The Latter Rain
http://latter-rain.com/ltrain/alinski.htm

________________________________________________________________________________

May 29, 2008
Inside Obama’s Acorn
By their fruits ye shall know them

What if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all along? Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. Acorn is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because Acorn works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. Acorn likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDZiMjkwMDczZWI5ODdjOWYxZTIzZGIyNzEyMjE0ODI

[headsonpikes]

Great post!

Those enamored of Equality ought to Google up “Procrustes”.

Procrustes was a stickler for equality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

[Tolik]

Thomas Sowell:

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the Left.

... The only reason for rejecting the Left’s vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the Left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

... Theirs is a world where there are attractive, win-win “solutions” in place of those ugly trade-offs in the world that the rest of us live in.

... Theirs is a world where we can just talk to opposing nations and work things out, instead of having to pour tons of money into military equipment to keep them at bay. The Left calls this “change” but in fact it is a set of notions that were tried out by the Western democracies in the 1930s — and which led to the most catastrophic war in history.

Nailed It!
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[Still Thinking]

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left.

I've always thought just the opposite. Since conservatives respect the right of the individual to believe in whatever they want, if conservatism reigns supreme, we can do what we want while liberals sit in some Starbucks and wax philosophical about the wonders of Marx, Mao, and Ingrid Newkirk. The supposed benefits Sowell mentions, aside from not all seeming like advantages, are of infinitely less importance to me than freedom. Period.

[CharacterCounts]

Sowell is correct about left wing leaders. However, I think there is not enough of them to win elections. To win, they need the support of another type - the loser who refuses to admit he is a loser.

Its just as adolescent. Blaming someone else for your own failure to succeed is a common staple of teenagers. They lose a baseball game and claim the umpire (who has absolutely no interest in the outcome) favored the other team. Many grow into adults harboring a resentment against these third party culprits who "took away" their success and handed it to other "less deserving" people.

Limousine liberals refuse to grow up because they don't have too. Their supporters refuse to grow up because they will not face the reality that their individual under performance is not the fault of "the Man."

[GOYAKLA]

When I was in high school (51-53)in Miami, we had 2 brothers that were card carrying Communists as classmates. They and their father on Saturdays & Sundays, would be in what is call now Overtown Community Organizing the under-privilleged black people. It was well documented in the Miami Herald and TV.
In school they would sometimes be in fights,the Korean War was on going then.

[jazusamo]

Well said, I’ve never ceased to be amazed that these snivelers don’t know how pathetic they look in the eyes of others.

[Choose Ye This Day]

For anyone that likes this essay, I highly recommend Sowell's book, The Vision of the Anointed.

[JZelle]

He says so much in so few words!

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

To try and answer several questions, with references:

While proto-socialism and socialism are inherently atheistic, the end result of several centuries of atheism arising in force from the Age of Reason, it always evolved with the idea of overthrowing religion.

Rene Descartes established man as the center of the universe, his “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), an effort to prove that man is capable, rejecting the complete dominance of God, which God asserted in telling Moses His name “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh” (I am, that I am). God is a singularity. There is nothing in reality that He can be compared to or organized with by man. And bloody wars were fought over whether God predestined the totality of events, or just foreordained outcomes. But until Descartes, God was fully in charge.

The parallel between the two expressions is obvious. Philosophy cannot exist unless man defines reality, which also means that philosophy is inherently atheistic. Yet at the same time Descartes himself was profoundly religious, so he kept a respect towards God that was soon discarded by other philosophers.

The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was instrumental in the creation of the theory of Natural Man and The State of Nature, in a rejection of society and its contrivances. His popular books were a large part of the Romantic Era, idealizing the complete freedom and lack of shame found in primitivism, supported by increasing contacts between the civilized world and primitive cultures at the time. This led to much adventurism in the search for such cultures, and was even seen in recent years in Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa”, a humiliating example of Mead’s naivete, and the developed Samoan sense of humor.

Rousseau’s fallacy rejected that life in primitivism was “nasty, brutish, and short”, according to Thomas Hobbes a generation before, but Rousseau did not reject Hobbes “Leviathan” principle, that the whole of mankind in total were like a virtual giant, he imagined as the demon Leviathan. Instead Rousseau saw this body of man in the State of Nature as being an ideal, godlike being. Something which civilized man should strive to achieve.

This romanticism of primitivism and nature has become part and parcel of socialism today, and is seen in its gross form with groups like Earth First! and the horrific murderous Khmer Rouge, the Hungarian tyrant Bela Kun’s Caravan of Death, the Maoist Cultural Revolution, etc. All of whom want to destroy civilization, and kill people for crimes like education, speaking more than their native language, using money or machines, etc., all of which they see as evil corruptions of nature.

Yet the same mindset is found in Al Gore, the scientists in Texas who cheered the prospect of death of billions of people, etc. They utterly romanticize nature, but reject the idea that the bourgeoisie are even capable of appreciating it. They mentally divide the world into good and evil, and bear terrible hatred of the non-socialistic evil. Whereas good can involve genocide and cultural destruction.

Another major contribution to the philosophy of returning man to the State of Nature can be found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and to a much lesser extent in a pale imitation by his friend Henry David Thoreau, for whom the State of Nature was only for daytime hours, in summer, when it was nice out.

Emerson’s ideal world was much the same as that of David Foreman, of Earth First! Mankind reduced to small, primitive villages widely separated, with the first appearance of the socialist Master, which Emerson called “The Orphic Poet”, who would travel from village to village, lying and distorting the truth to keep people from invention that would restore civilization.

Emerson even gave as example the Biblical tale of Nebuchadnezzar, but telling the story as a complete corruption of the tale, twisting it so that it would serve his purposes of the moment. That is, that God, by writing on the wall, gave the king higher knowledge for bragging of his achievements and ignoring Daniel.

We see this outgrowth of the philosophy, that lying for “the cause” serves a higher good, and is even preferable to telling the truth, in just about every Democrat politician out there today. Bill Clinton was its master. You see it also in the book, “Nineteen Eighty Four”, by George Orwell. These are its philosophical origins.

The next stage in their philosophical evolution came with the writings of the slavery apologist George Fitzhugh, in his book ‘Cannibals All!: or, Slaves Without Masters’. With high praise from Abraham Lincoln, who condemned it “the most dangerous book ever written”. It was the last of the proto-socialism works before socialism was formalized into the pseudo-religion we know today.

Fitzhugh did not just praise slavery for blacks, but that it was such a good institution, that it should be provided for most of the people of the world. Here is where the ratio of 1:10 was first mentioned, the reader of the book assumed to be one of the “masters” who would rule over the rest of mankind in slavery.

Fitzhugh proposed that the life of a slave was an ideal. That for merely working for the master, the rest of their day was spent in idleness and luxury, unblemished by civilization and modernity. The slaves were living nearly in the State of Nature. Instead, Fitzhugh explained that the life of a master is much harder, having to order slaves around all day. So, like Emerson’s Orphic Poet, the slaves should be very grateful to their master for all his hard work.

Today we see this in the elitist snobbery of the left. The insistence that they are brilliant, and that their political enemies are either morons or senile.

Now granted, this is just the barest skeleton of an outline of the evolution of socialism through history. Volumes could be written of many of the additions and deletions to the socialist mythology. But it boils down to a recreation of Biblical myth, but without God.

[scan59]

Actually, I reject the world of the left because I know that any halcyon ideas about the left’s perfect world are false, and the real world underlying the lie is a horrible, evil place indeed....

Great commentary. I've printed this off to show some people I know.

[Sloth]

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left.

As much as I respect Dr. Sowell, he seems here to be buying into the warm-fuzzy notion that liberals and conservatives have the same ultimate goals, just different ideas on how to get there. I reject this. I would not be happy in the leftist's paradise; it is built on the complete suppression of individual rights. I do not want my rights abolished, nor do I want to deny them to anyone else.

[NRA1995]

We spend hundreds of billions in defense spending each year

Would you be surprised to know that almost $19.5 trillion of the federal budget (roughly $26 trillion total) is spent on entitlement programs? Contrast that with our defense outlay of $550-$600 billion.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

I overheard this exchange at work the other day:

Old Hippie Lady One: “Wasn’t that something, Sarah Palin SHOWING OFF her baby like that at the Convention last week?”

Old Hippie Lady Two: “Yeah! I HATE her “holier than though’ attitude she has about keeping a Down Syndrome Baby.”

Lord help us!