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

    Yes. Using facts and logic while debating a “liberal” has now been declared a hate crime.

  2. Prog/Libs/Dems have no interest persnal virtue, only in imposing their conception of it on others for profit,

  3. Whatever we call it now – liberalism, leftism, progressivism – it is easier to understand when we stop thinking of it as a competing ideology. It is not. Arguing with leftists is completely pointless.

    Leftism is a religion. Their policies and beliefs are matters of faith. They look at us with the same frustration we Christians look at atheists with, knowing they just don’t get it.

    This is why their policy prescriptions have never changed over the decades, despite their being proven not to work every single place they have been implemented. This is why they are incapable of seeing excessive debt or overreaching government as a problem at all.

    How many of you have had a discussion with a leftist? Mine always follow the same pattern: Leftist makes ridiculous assertion, I rebut with facts; leftist counters with something entirely unrelated, I rebut with facts; repeat these steps as needed with leftist becoming visibly agitated. At the point where their central arguments have been completely refuted, they withdraw with a dismissive wave of the hand (or similar body language) and some muttered complaint that I “just don’t understand.”

  6. We need our beliefs and convictions tested by people who don’t agree with us.

    It’s how we learn if our ideas can stand on their own. It’s how our ideas can be made better even if we didn’t see all the angles.

    And if someone can’t do that, then they shouldn’t be talking. The reason why conservatism didn’t die is because some conservatives and some libertarians got very very good at debate and defending their ideas.

  7. There’s no question that today’s liberalism is impelled by the same reactionary forces as its marxist, socialist, and communist ancestors.

  14. Don’t feed the bears! It’s bad for the bears because they will stop foraging for themselves. But people feed them anyway. Why you ask? Because it makes them feel good about themselves to have fed the poor bear. This is the nutshell analogy of the self-congratulating liberal.

    Then one day when you have no more to feed the bear he eats you. And that day is coming up fast.

  15. I used the terms “Left” and “Right.” I didn’t identify Cornyn or Cole as either, or conservative. Cole, back home in Oklahoma, is considered conservative only when compared to der Fuerhrer Drew Edmondson. JC Watts is missed, but not by the Establishmentarian GOP.

  19. Hear hear. The athletes of the Special Olympics overcome real obstacles every day. Leftists, even the ones who like to pretend they face insurmountable obstacles, have already had their way paved for them. They’re just too self-obsessed to notice.

  20. Thank you. The very Judeo-Christian reality that Leftists fashionably reject is the very reason all their pie-in-the-sky daydreams of a Workers’ Paradise are all doomed to fail, no matter how many Grievance Studies classes they take.

  22. Very good point. It’s a religion for people who pretend that they’re too “sophisticated” for religion.

    To wit, any “Grievance Studies” class. All of them rely on conspiracy theories that excuse the personal failures and personality flaws of the people who subscribe to it — essentially, these classes are merely pseudo-intellectual “buttpatting sessions”. Ask for evidence — as you are supposed to do as a scientist — and these pseudo-academics retreat into Conspiracy Theorist Nutjob-land. That isn’t science, it’s not intellectualism…it’s religious fanaticism.

  23. Actually, the bears get aggressive and dangerous even before the food runs out! I don’t know how that should be! It’s like they feel almost entitled or something like that…

  24. Stewart is a fantastic example of modern pseudo-intellectualism. To deliberately mangle the late Christopher Hitchens, “The Daily Show is what dumb people watch to make themselves feel smart”. (Hitchens was writing about Bush jokes, which is also relevant and true)

    There are some genuinely intelligent people who watch it, but by and large most of Stewart’s audience are made up of blithering idiots. It’s just a fact of life for any large group; not everyone can be the MIT graduate. But in spite of how the show bills itself, it doesn’t really take a whole lot of thought to “get”. So part of their enjoyment is merely the pleasure of having one’s ego stroked. They get the cache of being “smart and informed”, when, in reality, they’re just as dumb as all those “rubes” who “only watch Faux News”. The only difference is that the latter haven’t wrapped the entirety of their self-esteem in pretending to be “intellectuals”.

    But their hero isn’t exactly an intellectual powerhouse himself, as you correctly pointed out. Susan L.M. Goldberg has an amusing anecdote about that:

    I stopped idolizing celebrities and looking for pure truth in television about 10 years ago. Back then the newly proclaimed god of Hip was Jon Stewart. Attending a taping of The Daily Show with friends was the secular equivalent of going up to Jerusalem for the High Holidays. Before the show, we were encouraged to ask questions of the comic pundit. Wanting to impress my idol, I thought quickly, raised my hand, and was called on to ask what I considered to be a well-versed question about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The man who had morphed The Daily Show into a vehicle for smart yet funny news looked at me bug-eyed and feebly offered, “I make the jokes?”

    Yeah, that’s a real tower of intellect right there.

  25. Hah. I’ve got you beat. I voted for McGovern in 1972.

    I just KNEW he was going to make everything okay again.

    Then there was Carter.

  27. Don’t forget the complaint made to management about you are dangerous/racist/sexist/pro-rape/homophobic/anti-science/create an uncomfortable work place.
    But not to your face.

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