Virtue by Proxy, and Thoughts About Books That Liberals Have Never Read

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Republicans “can’t stand the fact that a black man is in the White House!”

That’s what a studid liberal shouted at Joel Pollak, and I could name, off the top of my head, two dozen books that liberal has never read.

Ronald Reagan once said that the problem with liberals is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t true. They are prejudiced, and they have never had their prejudices challenged.

Most liberals, “progressives,” or whatever else they may choose to call themselves, are really just partisan Democrats who hate Republicans.

It’s that simple.

The pretensions of liberalism to being a coherent, rational political philosophy are absurd. The core of the Democrat Party is a collection of interest groups, organized with the aim of assembling a majority coalition by two means (a) promising the sun, the moon and the stars to these interest groups, and (b) demonizing Republicans.

Having been born and raised a Democrat — I never even met a Republican until I went to college — I once shared that mentality.

Dude, I voted for Walter Mondale in 1984.

The same year I voted for Mondale, David Horowitz, a Marxist radical who had been a “red diaper baby” raised by Communist parents, joined his longtime friend Peter Collier in voting for Reagan:

When we tell our old radical friends that we voted for Ronald Reagan last November, the response is usually one of annoyed incredulity. After making sure that we are not putting them on, our old friends make nervous jokes about Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly, about gods that have failed, about aging yuppies ascending to consumer heaven in their BMWs. We remind them of an old adage: “Anyone under 40 who isn’t a socialist has no heart; anyone over 40 who is a socialist has no brain.”
Inevitably the talk becomes bitter. One old comrade, after a tirade in which she had denounced us as reactionaries and crypto-fascists, finally sputtered, “And the worst thing is that you’ve turned your back on the Sixties!” That was exactly right: casting our ballots for Ronald Reagan was indeed a way of finally saying goodbye to all that — to the self-aggrandizing romance with corrupt Third Worldism; to the casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism; to the hypocritical and self-dramatizing anti-Americanism which is the New Left’s bequest to mainstream politics. . . .

You should read the whole thing. My point is that if a guy as far left as David Horowitz could change his mind, no one else has an excuse. Collier and Horowitz, who had been editors of the radical journal Ramparts, subsequently published a book no liberal has ever read, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties.

When I say no liberal has read that book, I mean it is powerful enough that, if you were a liberal when you started reading it, you wouldn’t be when you were finished with it. And I think the same could be said of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

A Ph.D. economist, Sowell describes the moral narcissism at the root of the liberal worldview — they support bad policies because doing so makes them feel good about themselves. Do these policies actually help the people they’re supposed to help? It doesn’t matter, Sowell explains in Chapter 4, “The Irrelevance of Evidence.”

What matters to liberals is the sense of virtue by proxy they derive by espousing the cause of helpless victims allegedly oppressed by evil greedy Republicans. What matters to liberals is their feeling that they’re “doing something” to advance their own good intentions.

Of course, there is really nothing good about their good intentions.

That is to say, if the only reason you want to help people — those poor downtrodden “masses” — is to flatter your sense of yourself as a generous, tolerant bien-pensant, your motives aren’t truly philanthropic. And this is especially true when, (a) your allegedly charitable activity involves spending other people’s money; (b) you don’t bother to examine whether anyone is actually helped; and/or (c) the only effort required of you is to spew liberal platitudes and vote for Democrats.

Wrecking the country and ruining people’s lives just so you can think of yourself as enlightened? No, those are not “good intentions.”

Once you wake up to the reality of what wretched messes liberals create through their supposedly “progressive” policies, you will be far less indulgent of their pretenses of enlightened tolerance. Perhaps no book I’ve ever read makes this point more clearly than Fred Seigel’s The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities. Where else have Democrat politicians and liberal policies been given more opportunity to succeed than in our nation’s major cities? And yet where else have liberal Democrats created more poverty, misery, crime and corruption?

If liberalism worked, Detroit would be a booming hub of prosperity and Texas would be mired in hopeless poverty.

Instead, Detroit is bankrupt and Texas is booming.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Is Latin racist? Are facts “hate”? Is basic logic unfair?

Should we permit liberal Democrats to wallow in their own ignorance while they impose policies that are harmful to the country? Or should we inform them that their ignorance could be remedied and their errors corrected by these books they’ve never read?

As I said, I could name two dozen such books, but have here named only three, and I can guarantee that the stupid liberal who shouted at Joel Pollak hasn’t read any of them. If Joel Pollak were to send that liberal this 900-word column, he wouldn’t read it, either.

Because liberals refuse to spend the time, energy or effort necessary to remediate their own ignorance, it is usually best to be brief in your replies to them. In fact, you can summarize it in three words.

“Fuck you. #War.”

 

 

97 comments

  1. The problem with the useful idiot faction of the liberal/progressive wing, is that they have no concept of true heroism or achievement. They have never confronted a challenge that required them to step out without a net and succeed or fail on their own merits. Whether it’s storming Omaha Beach or something as prosaic as having a good marriage and successful family, such things are foreign to them.

    And they know that. That’s why they celebrate specious “achievements” of people who’ve done nothing; who’ve taken no risk whatsoever. That’s why they turn even the most pedestrian concerns of ordinary people into “wars,” into which they can conscript everyone else to “fight.”

    It’s only be elevating the mundane, that they can feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, even though they still subconsciously realize they’re full of crap, they wind up dragging the rest of us over the cliff in their desire to be heroes.

  2. Regressives are depraved idiots. They have nothing worth having or emulating. All they do is drag down the productive and diss anyone that points out their stupidity.
    Few people realize that the student riots of the 60s were more often than not incited by profs. One Prof was seen at a meeting that started going south after he made his input and as things went to pieces he slipped out before the “pigs” came and put an end to it. They never went after the Profs, but they arrested the pawns who were too naïve and stupid to get while the getting was good.
    Regressives intend to take us all down with them and the rank and file Dim is just a pawn being used to destroy us all.

  5. […] Her premise, that Obama will definitely get super-serious on this health-care thing now, seems reasonable, because one can argue an actual political need for it. But there isn’t. Fixing ObamaCare might have some political dividends, but it’s far from  the expedient thing to do. The expedient thing to do is what the White House is currently doing, through its surrogates in the palace-guard media: blaming Republicans. An IT project may succeed or fail: getting compliant journalists to bleat denunciations of the wreckers and saboteurs who failed to support the New Order pays out pretty regularly. Government programs don’t need success to survive; they only need a scapegoat: […]

  6. “Virtue by Proxy” is another name for Pride. Pride is a problem for Left and Right. The difference between justified/justifiable pride and that self-idol-worship that characterizes the Left is, as Professor Sowell puts it, the existence of evidence.
    Again, not strictly a problem of the Left. The same thinking powered Cornyn’s NRSC and Cole’s NRCC, and gave us Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney as candidates.

  8. For some reason, this article reminded of Jon Stewart. He’s all over the conservative blogosphere because he skewed Kathleen Sebelius on his show. But he’s just a sanctimonious hypocrite. He loves to criticize Democrats
    when their lies and stupidity become too much to ignore and he can get a laugh from it, but then he hyperventilates when conservatives point out the same lies and stupidity. He really is nothing more than a partisan Democrat hack who hates Republicans.

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