HOW THE LEFT IS SELF-DESTRUCTING BY HAVING ONLY NEGATIVE IDEAS, NOT PLANS

by Brett Stevens

The Left began with a simple idea: overthrow the natural hierarchy of humans by ability and let the mob rule instead of having leaders.

This pleased a great number of people, but also guaranteed perpetual infighting as groups and individuals vie for power.

This presented them with a problem in that Leftism can only act as an opposition to what exists, and is thriving based on the notion of Utopia, or perfecting human beings through "progress," something that solely involves more "equality."

Leftists are essentially egalitarians; their method and goal are the same: striving for equality.

Currently, we are at fifty years past 1968, and we are finally seeing the results of what was adopted during that turbulent time of student revolt and political change. The WW2 propaganda finally matured and took over, and all good people went along with the Regime.

Decades on, however, the Regime stands revealed as having solved none of the problems it intended to solve, and in fact, has made new problems which make the old look trivial in comparison. Despite our wealth and power on the surface, inside our society has become neurotic, ugly, greedy, selfish, parasitic, and corrupt.

The age of the populist is upon us.

This coincides with the unfortunate truth that, when in power, Leftists have nothing to rebel against and so have no idea of what they stand for. By changing the script, "populists" shifted the dialogue from Leftist talking points to a critique of Leftist results, and the Left has no idea how to rebel against that, yet.

In the US and European Union, Leftists find themselves as rebels without a clue who lack any meaningful plan for altering the problems our society faces.

A local Democratic strategist summed up the state of things this way: “The Democratic Party …” He took a long pause before letting out a dispirited sigh. “If you ask people what the Democratic Party stands for, they can’t tell you,” he said. “As soon as you get beyond anti-Trump, nobody seems to know.”

One wonders if the Left has ever had any new ideas. Their modus operandi is to criticize, promise vast improvements, and then seize power as people flee from what has angered them toward something new and unproven. This works until their unproven ideas somewhat predictably fail, since if you refuse to even test something you have zero expectation that it will thrive.

Since the 1980s, the Left has had a predictable way to generate outrage at Republicans: call them racists. This get-out-of-jail-free card worked every time the Democrats failed in their usual gambit, which was to promise free stuff for the poor. Their audience voted for that mostly to punish the affluent, more than out of any expectation that it might work.

Leftist results

However, now these things have failed; we have seen that Leftists policies have yet again failed. The more we gave to the poor and civil rights, the worse everything got, until one day the voters "woke up" — they always seem to be stunned by life — and found out that actually, the country had been fundamentally transformed into something more Soviet than American.

When we look out there now, we see lots of people working in jobs created by government, acting on activities mandated by government, and a vast horde of people united by an ideology which is as blind and voracious as a swarm of locusts. They are here to take over, and they will consume everything good, then flit onto something else.

This means that conventional Leftist methods are not working anymore. Their audience has differentiated itself and stands revealed as the avaricious group that it is; those from the middle who supported them may not be opposed, but they are no longer supporting. The Left has trouble stimulating its base, which is why they have turned to radicals (Antifa) and impeachment has become the loyalty test for Democrats:

According to Quinnipiac, seventy-one per cent of Democrats already favor impeachment. To proponents, a nearly fifty-fifty split among the voting public at this early date, before Mueller has reported his findings, is significant. In primaries for the 2018 elections, some prominent Democrats, such as Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, who is running for governor, made support for impeachment a major part of their platforms. Tom Steyer, a San Francisco billionaire, has since last year been running television advertisements supporting impeachment, and has generated a mailing list of more than 5.2 million people. Steyer is now on a thirty-city speaking tour. For the moment, he and his followers are outcasts from the Washington consensus.

The gloves are off, but so is the disguise. The Left no longer wants you to think that they are not socialists or even Communists; they know that you know that they are at least very close fellow travelers of those. They want you to see them as they are, and to either be cowed into supporting them or run to the other side so that they can beat you with bike locks and false legal actions.

Leftist violence fills the void of ideas

At this point, they have been provoked into assuming their full ideological stance. They no longer pretend to be your friends and neighbors who just want to get along but are intensely concerned with social justice. No, now they have spread their wings and demonstrated that they are those who see one right way — the path to Utopia — and everyone else must be, just must be, the enemy in their eyes.

This represents the end of Leftist outreach to the middle. They have formed their cadre, and are now embarking on a course that is designed to exclude those who are not fanatical Leftists:

The incessant spotlight on the lawyers, on their clients and subjects and targets, not only occupies the attention of Democrats and the anti-Trump Resistance to the exclusion of other topics. It also relieves them of any responsibility to come up with a substantive message. The voters, by contrast, read the headlines with a cursory or prurient interest as they go about their lives in the real world of work, family, community, and faith. One voter told me the other day that legal terminology makes her eyes glaze over; she'd much rather browse Instagram. But such terminology is all anyone speaks in Washington nowadays—even if most pundits are not lawyers, probably couldn't get into law school, and make up for their lack of expertise and inside knowledge with hyperbole and speculation.

They do not need a substantive message. For them, the message is always the same: Utopia through equality. This disguises what motivates individual Leftists, which is the ability to remove any sense that someone might know better or be better than them, and to reduce society to a uniform mass of an angry herd by eliminating those who do know better, or at least erasing their power.

If we looked at this with cynical Machiavellian eyes — and it always makes sense to do this, in politics — then we might see that this revolution is not so much a "we the people versus the elites" but a desire to take over by a new elite, which surprisingly represents those industries which profit from having a large mass of people addicted to what is on the telescreen tonight.

Looking back to 1968, we can see how it was a hodge-podge of misfits (lower classes, minorities, women, homosexuals, atheists) who opposed the dominant European heterosexual and Christian culture, not because they thought it was bad, but because they wanted to rule in its place. In the 1990s, they finally got this rule when the hippies aged enough to self-promote each other in order to take over academia, government, media, and industry.

Gen X

Now, the original hippies are on their way out, having aged to the point where a nursing home is more on the agenda than a protest march, and in their stead they are trotting out the clay upon which they pushed their 1968-era mold, through the educational system: the millennials. Their hope is to leapfrog Generation X, which is too cynical for ideology, and install devout comrades through the generation just hitting its 30s.

This generation tends to view itself as above the rest of us simply because it has the correct ideology. These are hard cadre revolutionaries, with a baked-in binary view of the world, who are so polarized in their cause that they view any extremities or damage done in its name to be the ultimate moral good.

Interestingly, they fit most closely with the new elites created by the 1968 revolution who now hold positions of power in the big coastal cities:

The Midwest is different from the coasts and not because of race or money, though the economic transformations experienced in much of the region have been sudden, varied and usually difficult. “Different” never used to mean “divided,” however — but now increasingly it does.

The key theme is status — a fundamental conviction that elites of the big four metropolitan powers of Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Manhattan and Washington wore a collective, fixed sneer toward their lessers between the coasts.

These metropolitan megaplexes have one thing in common: people there make their money by influencing other people, and they are not concerned with any of those more earthy people out there who focus on results-oriented behavior. In the city, what matters is appearing proper to others so that they will hire you and befriend you. This is the environment that millennials were raised to adore.

Millennials

Think about the dreams of your average millennial: a small apartment or micro-house, few worldly possessions, no servants but lots of services, and most of all, an impressive public persona in which they have all the correct opinions and know all the hip and new ideas. They are the target of this new elite because regimented ideological extremism is about the only way to stand out in conversation at your local afterhours brewpub.

With this, the separation of America becomes complete. One group wants the city life with a status constructed out of opinions, and the other wants a contemplative and normal life where achievement is more important than emotion. The two realize they are not just opposites, but that they cannot occupy the same nation and have each group get what it wants.

At that moment of realization, the Left begins self-destructing. They are not the rebels; they are the Regime. They are not here to bring us Utopia, but to deliver us into a failed state. They are not sympathetic voices, but vicious manipulators who will stop at nothing to achieve total dominance. And now they admit that they do not believe we can coexist with them.

This makes the breakup of America and Europe inevitable.

The Left took over, and produced part of a population that is submissive to the regime, and the rest increasingly resist it. Now that this fragmentation has occurred, there is no path forward except for it to intensify until these bloated, aging, inept, and oblivious nation-states crack-up and a new tribal future fills the void.

Originally published at Amerika-in-Exile (The back up site of Amerika.org, which is currently under DDoS attack)