The Stagnant Left

The left hates change. The whole purpose of leftism, whatever its disciples may say, is raw power. That fact explains the behavior of leftists. Their organizations do not have honest names but rather misleading names. The ACLU does not mean Anti-Christian League of the Ungodly because American Civil Liberties Union sounds much nicer.

The left supports “civil rights” groups whose obvious intention is to manacle young black men into poverty and hopelessness worse than Jim Crow. Decades after even the docile publications acknowledged that men and women are inherently different the left still panders to the scowling faces of angry feminism and blames the unhappiness of women on a nonexistent patriarchy. Wherever the left sees the seeds of resentment, it cultivates rage and makes sure that nothing changes that rage.

In the realm of “science,” fifty years after the calamitous fabrications of Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, which spelled a death sentence for millions of young children in tropical nations left unprotected by DDT, her fraud is still solemnly taught in schools and colleges. The gaping holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection are blithely ignored despite the increasing difficulty of his theory in explaining the proliferation of life, and the reality that a Creator now is the best science is ignored because changing from the hoary, creaking land of Darwin threatens leftist pseudo-science.

Leftist economic theory remains locked in the arcane silliness of Marx or in the failed nostrums of Keynes, which have never worked in practice. Leftists today, just like members of the Politburo since about 1927, do not really believe in any of the nonsense they spout. How could any sane person in Soviet Russia or Maoist China believe that the horrific poverty and vast seas of innocent blood shed for the “Party” were shed for any purpose greater than the cozy perches of the aging bosses of that “Party”?

Look at North Korea, where the third generation of a Marxist dynasty is acceding to the throne, or to Cuba, where the “Brothers Castro” continue their five decades of inflicted misery on an island nation which before them was once more affluent than Denmark or Hong Kong. Every incarnation of Marxism in the world today is a blending of bad patent medicine, surreal proclamations and, most of all, mind-numbing monotony.

That is why in this election season we should expect the shrill warnings of the left to warn of the danger of change. Should we reform entitlements by, say, having the Social Security retirement age indexed to mortality tables? Should we allow energy corporations using new techniques which extract resources with no real threat to the environment (and also bring dollars, through royalties and not taxes, into the treasury)? Should we abolish some federal agencies which time has shown do not work? No!

Not only would these sorts of changes upset the pyramids of power created by the left, but it would also allow an uncomfortable (to leftists) flowering of individual genius, courage, initiative and nobility. Have you ever wondered just why the oil industry is so universally loathed by the left? Tough and resilient individuals, not old moneyed corporations, can find oil or gas and become, without any help from the institutions dominated by leftists and intent upon conformity, rich people. Why does the left mock the memory of decent men like Sam Walton? He built a retail empire with his own grit.

Individual lives, unlike the all-engulfing orthodoxy of leftism, require growth and change and reflection. Businesses nimbly move through new products and prices. Romance and family are processes of glorious adaption. Writers, musicians, architects and artists use generally established rules but make new things from the discipline of those rules. Faith, too, is a journey which rightly taken does not leave us the same.

The greatness of America, which seems to be swirling down the drain today, was constructed by people who did not genuflect to secular power. The left hisses at such men like other varieties of vampires would recoil from a crucifix at noontime in a garlic garden. We, those who reject the iron and dull catechism of leftist power, love freedom because it brings true change and tests what changes in the fresh air of markets and consciences. What we want – and we want little more than this – is the opening of the dungeon cells guarded by the stagnant left.