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They are, by a good definition, “liberal reactionaries”.

They have long had rigid theories about what they believe to be true. But these theories have been tried over and over again, and have *always* failed. This results is a bizarre frame of mind.

1) False nostalgia that somewhere, sometime in the past they were tried, somewhere, and worked. They do not examine this in any depth, because it collapses, unless they are so ideologically fanatical that they see an entirely different reality from other people. And some of them actually do.

Even at the bitter end of the Soviet Union, when everything was decayed and falling apart, the Soviet Intourist travel agency was still taking American communists on tours, of horribly polluted and decrepit communist projects, and all the tourists could *see* were “unicorns and rainbows”. They were *that* deluded. And they all spewed a constant stream of ideologically pure dialectic at their travel agents, many of whom would play along, even though they could at least see the truth.

2) An almost psychotic view of present reality. If you hook someone like Chris Matthews up to a lie detector, and peppered him with outrageous questions about the way things are today, he would likely register “true”, in believing things that are patently false. He truly believes that Republicans are fascist, neo-Nazis with a sense of deep racist hatred of black people. And likely that Obama is Jesus come again. They are *that* deluded.

Trying to argue with a person like that is like the frustrating experience of talking to someone who is genuinely insane. “The lights are on but nobody is home.” There *is* no rationality there.

When you point out that what is being done is failing, they will say either, “That is because it is under-funded”, “Because it is being sabotaged by those opposed to it”, or “It will only work when it is universal, and no other system is allowed to compete with it.”

3) Bizarre ideas about the future. And this is the weirdest part of all. They lack any sort of pattern recognition. They can hit themselves on the hand, hard, with a claw hammer a dozen times; but will not recognize their increasing injury. They can grasp that other people are horrified by what they are doing, so they will blatantly lie to try and fool them.

“No, I have never hit myself on the hand with a claw hammer. But if I did, it wouldn’t hurt. It would be good for me. So everybody must hit themselves on the hand with a claw hammer. The government must make them.”

So the bottom line is that, with a senile philosophy, liberals are reduced to being reactionaries. Psychopaths about the harm they will cause, feeling no empathy to others. But convinced beyond doubt that if people just do what they say, *everything* will be “good”.