Tuesday, June 14, 2011

A Converted Liberal's Confession

Really more of an observation.

I cracked open my copy of David Mamet's "The Secret Knowledge", just arrived in the mail today.   Here is a prolific writer and life-long Liberal (by which I mean progressive, in this case, agreeing with the modern colloquial sense)  who at age 60 had a revelation.
This really stuck out:saw that I had been living in a state of ignorance, accepting an unexamined illusion and calling it "compassion", but that there were those brave enough to work their way through the prevailing slogans of their time, and reason toward a consistent, practicable understanding of human relations.  To these, politics was not the manipulation of the ignorant and undecided, but the dedication to the defense and implementation of just, first principles, for example, those of the United States Constitution.
Really sums it up rather well, doesn't it?

 the manipulation of the ignorant and undecided   -- Is that not a great description of what traditional (leftist) "Community Organizing" is all about?

Footnote on that same page:
The right and the left, I saw, differ not about programs, but about goals -- the goal of the Left is a government-run country and that of the right is the freedom of the individual from government.  These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions.

2 comments:

Severian said...

the Left cannot be brought to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions.

And that's the rub, isn't it?

If ever you're in the mood for something fascinating yet horribly depressing, read up on the original communists and socialists. Lenin, Mao... those guys stated their intentions quite clearly. The left has since gotten better at PR -- they'd never use a phrase like "expropriation of the expropriators" -- but the stated goals and methods are pretty much exactly the same.

Which is why the left can't admit their intentions. We've been there, done that, and millions of wrecked lives later, we know it simply doesn't work. It takes an amazing amount of effort to be so ignorant of basic history, but... somehow they manage.

Cylarz said...

The right and the left, I saw, differ not about programs, but about goals...

Well, that's an interesting statement. Because all this time I thought it was other way around - agree on goals, disagree on methods.

The goal, for instance, of getting poor people out of poverty. The Left thinks subsidizing their lifestyle will do the trick, the Right thinks the answer lies in creating economic opportunity for them by way of getting government's boot off their necks.

I may have been giving the Left way too much credit and this author might be correct after all. We call their policies foolish and misguided; while they say we're trying to starve people and throw them out in the street.

You tell me which accusation is more conducive to productive discourse.

Verification word: "extlycen." I don't know what it means but I like the way it sounds.