So why is the left still angry? Glenn asks: “maybe it’s become a habit.”
“Become” a habit? It seems to me it’s an intrinsic feature of leftism, which is based on a permanent state of envy, class warfare and seeking “social justice” and “equality.” Which is why it is leftists (from Hitler to Stalin to Mao and Pol Pot) who have been responsible for hundreds of millions of violent deaths over the past century. You have to break the eggs to make the social-justice omelette through the collective will. It’s not individualists who do that kind of thing.
[Update late morning]
More evidence of lunacy on the left: hating Milton Friedman.
The Left regards its unilateral anger as an automatically self-validating virtue, and the angrier they are, why the more valid their anger is.
But of course, no one’s unilateral anger is a virtue – it’s at best a vice, and at worst, an incredibly destructive weapon.
I agree. Leftists are interested in either 100% or 0%. 100% have health insurance, 0% pollution. All or nothing, doesn’t leave much room for individuality. It is a state of perpetual childlike thinking, and dangerous in adult minds and hands.
Hitler was a leftist? Are you sure about that?
I find myself thinking of the Iranian revolution. In order to engender an actual revolt, you have to stir up a whole lot of anger. So what do you do when you’ve got a lot of raging folks — with guns! — after you win? Historically, this is actually the most dangerous time in the revolution business. The U.S. was deliberately cultivated as the Great Satan in earnest after the Iranian regime change — in order to direct still simmering rage outward at external entities instead.
Hitler was a leftist?
Absolutely.
Recall, the name of his party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — the National Socialist Worker’s Party. It, like the Mussolini regime (which many “progressives” admired in the twenties and thirties) was socialist, and collectivist. There is nothing at all “right wing” about it (if one defines right versus left as individualist versus collectivist). Hitler was a radical revolutionary who wanted to destroy western traditions, and a champion of a powerful state. What wasn’t leftist about that? The only difference between Nazism and Stalinist communism was that one was a national socialism and the other was international.
I hate to say it, but while I agree with much of this post, your carachterization of Hitler as a ‘leftist’ seems to my ignorant self as a bit of a stretch, and furthermore, it needlessly invokes Godwin’s law.
Hundreds of millions of eggs broken. Still holdin’ on that damned omelette.
your carachterization of Hitler as a ‘leftist’ seems to my ignorant self
You said it, not me.
as a bit of a stretch, and furthermore, it needlessly invokes Godwin’s law.
Apparently you’re as unfamiliar with Godwin’s Law as you are with the history of Nazism (and more generally fascism).
Godwin’s Law doesn’t mean that there’s a law against discussing Hitler. Nor does it mean that there’s a law against lumping him in with other monsters of the left.
Nor does it mean that I’ve somehow “lost the argument” by doing so. Certainly Mike Godwin never intended it that way.
Curious timing for this thread, given all the tax rage last week. I would look a bit further than Dana Milbank’s comment threads before drawing sweeping conclusions about how prone different ideologies are to irrational anger. There seems to be plenty of right-leaning anger on this forum, considering the name-calling responses I see to my comments.
The only difference between Nazism and Stalinist communism was that one was a national socialism and the other was international.
“Only” is way too strong. Nazism was racist to its core. Stalinists were ahead of their time in their support for full racial equality. In the 50s if the FBI observed a white person who was at ease dealing with blacks as social equals, they would suspect that person of membership in CPUSA, because communist groups were about the only place where that social equality was the norm.
More generally, Nazism and Stalinism had different ideals. Nazis idealized purity, hierarchy and order, along with the family and the nation. Stalinists idealized equality and the revolution as alternatives to family, religion, class, race and national affiliations. It’s true that neither idealized the individual, but that hardly negates all the other differences.
Fascism (of which Hitler’s racial-supremacist Nazism was a variant) is explicitly a Leftist doctrine. This is not news to anyone who has even a modicum of political science study behind them. Mussolini, probably the 20th Century’s best exemplar of a true Fascist, started out as a doctrinaire Socialist academic. In every instance, where Fascism – or some analogue of it – has arisen, it has come from the Left. Fascism is authoritarian, anti-rational and anti-individualist. These are all Leftist, not Rightist traits. The closest the US has got to a true Fascist administration was Woodrow Wilson’s, and I defy anyone to characterise that as a government of the Right.
The biggest lie the Left ever succeeded in foisting on the world is that Fascism is a right-wing doctrine. It is not, and never has been. For those who require further convincing, I suggest reading, inter alia, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, and a more recent publication, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.
In the past I’ve heard people say ‘don’t bottle up anger, let it out’. The problem I saw with that device is that letting anger out does not release the anger; instead the anger becomes a perpetuating thing, the anger released fuels more anger, which continues to build and build. The left has indulged in great anger agianst the right and Pres. Bush for over eight years. That has been encouraged by many in the media, academia, and entertainment.
They didn’t realize that they were building a monster (or they did and didn’t care). Now the beast is turning on them and they don’t know what to do with it.
The swarming Left, of sense bereft,
Sinks deep in ills to come.
Their leitmotif for certain grief—
Non Cogito Ergo Sum.
They think they are like The Hulk. the madder they get the stronger they get, when really the madder they get the sillier.
Unless they are dictators and can carry out their plans, which is why we get mass murder whenever a socialist gains power.
Jim…you’re kidding right? Stalin was way ahead of his time in racial equality?
Tell that to the Kulaks, the Jews, Baltic states, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Christians, and anyone else who got in the way of the state and watch their reactins.
No, wait, there aren’t any that can react because he killed most of them.
Curious timing for this thread, given all the tax rage last week.
I didn’t see any rage. What are you referring to? I saw peaceful protests, with people dancing and cheering to Ted Nugent. If you want to see rage, attend a WTO summit sometime, with people smashing windows with furniture.
I would look a bit further than Dana Milbank’s comment threads before drawing sweeping conclusions about how prone different ideologies are to irrational anger.
Dana Milbank was noting nothing new. The foul language, invective, death wishes and threats have always been much more prevalent in comments from leftists than those on the so-called right. Milbank was simply noting once again the disparity. Find me a widely read blog on the so-called right with the hate spewed at (for example) Pandagon.
Stalinists were ahead of their time in their support for full racial equality.
That must be why they shipped so many Jews off to the Gulag. And of course they cynically did so with respect to blacks only for the purpose of exploiting them to engage them in the revolution in the US.
Nazis idealized purity, hierarchy and order, along with the family and the nation.
Nation first, family a distant second.
It’s true that neither idealized the individual, but that hardly negates all the other differences.
It places them both on the left (in addition to the fact that both were admitted socialists). There was nothing “right wing” about Hitler.
Jim:
The Soviets worshipped purity too – they called it the “New Soviet Man.”
The anger of the Left is shaped by many things, I believe. In addition to your points, I would add:
1. Those on the Left for many years had no alternative media to confront. In addition, institutions of higher education mostly endorse their views. They are not practiced, therefore, in handling criticism.
2. The purity of heart that activists feel doesn’t deal well with the actual sausage-making of politics. This is especially pronounced in the case of Obama, who satisfies a deep emotional need of the Left.
What a hoot. The Soviet Union was completely racist, anti-Semitic, and pro-Russian. To the degree they supported civil rights here, it was only as a means to foment unrest. Blacks would never have been treated as equals in the Mother Country.
Until recently, I lived in the indigo blue area around Stanford University. I noticed a sea-change in my liberal friends in 1990 when the sequel to the Gods Must Be Crazy came out. Six or so years earlier, the original played to packed houses for weeks and was all the talk at parties or work. The sequel was greeted with near-empty theaters, and if anybody commented it was to condemn the post-colonial politics of the movie.
I have always surmised that it was late in the Reagan years that postmodernism permeated the liberal elite and they began to set themselves apart from the rest of us as something different and better, a mandarin class. Could easily be wrong, but I haven’t seen much that would otherwise explain a phenomenon I witnessed first hand.
BTW, liberals think of fascism and naziism as rightist because of the military component, forgetting that the police and military in both cases were turned first on internal dissent… a most leftist trait.
The bitter hatred of the left is infused into our children while in university, courtesy of their professors. Anyone who reads newspapers or watches mainstream news is drowning in the hatred that journalists hold toward their mutually agreed upon targets.
It is amusing how quickly the hatred can be stoked to a fever’s pitch. Once the groupthink machine agrees upon an official object of hate, the entire creaking mechanism can move surprisingly quickly. Witness Wasilla, August 2008.
Stalinists were ahead of their time in their support for full racial equality.
In rhetoric. In reality, they were more racist than your stereotypical Dixiecrat.
The Left regards its unilateral anger as an automatically self-validating virtue, and the angrier they are, why the more valid their anger is.
Bingo. It’s the New Anger.
New Anger is about flaunting one’s anger as a kind of credential. It is a way of asserting one’s authenticity and, according to its own cultural logic, moving from authenticity to authority. Its essential message is, “I am to be believed and reckoned with because I am angry.”
As Peter Wood put it, “…a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted.” It is, essentially, the bellowing of the herd as a sanctioned group identifier.
Maybe these people are nasty because they are losers-failures in life.They want to mind other people’s business because they don’t have a life of their own.
Maybe they could get a life if they stopped blaming others for their own failures.
Leftist anger is older and more ingrained than people realize. The phenomenon can be described in one word: guillotine.
R: The point of the “New Soviet Man” was that his transformation was ideological, and made his race, religion and nationality irrelevant. Soviet support for oppressed ethnic minorities had its practical advantages, but it was also a natural outgrowth of Communist ideology.
That must be why they shipped so many Jews off to the Gulag.
The Soviets fell far short of their ideals, but their racial practices came closer to those ideals than ours did for most of U.S. history. And they don’t bear any comparison to the practices of the Nazis.
And they don’t bear any comparison to the practices of the Nazis.
Of course they do. Both regimes slaughtered millions, and worked many to death. Are you saying that it’s all right to kill millions of innocents as long as you don’t do it because of racism? Are you saying that it’s worse to kill someone for their race or ethnicity than because they have impure thoughts? What is your point?
Soviet apologists always crack me up. It’s the typical Lefty belief that words mean more than actions. For instance, the Constitution of the USSR ‘gave’ the Soviet peoples a great many ‘freedoms’. In practice, of course, it was a police state.
Much like my Marxist friend who still idolizes both Castro and Ortega but doesn’t really want to live in either Cuba or Nicaragua (even though he’d be among the privileged elite in all likelihood). He swans through each on periodic visits. He prefers to ignore the barely concealed problems.
In addition, one really should check out the writings of many ordinary black Africans who attended Patrice Lumumba University and see how they perceived the lack of racism in the USSR.
Not that I’ve ever found any defender of the Glorious Peoples’ State to be susceptible to reason, logic, fact or data, mind you.
> It seems to me [anger is] an intrinsic feature of leftism, which is based on a permanent state of envy, class warfare and seeking “social justice” and “equality.”
> Its essential message is, “I am to be believed and reckoned with because I am angry.”
There’s another possiblity. They like being angry and like smashing things. Where else can they get approval for that?
I have to applaud Rand for mentioning that Hitler was left-wing. This is not mentioned often enough, and leftists get tremendous mileage out of their ‘Bush is Hitler’ slur, despite the fact that Hitler was left-wing, and that ALL genocidal monsters were left-wing.
Genocide simply isn’t compatible with right-wing goals. Right-wing dictators like Mussolini, Franco, and Pinochet were bad dudes, but have killed orders of magnitude fewer people than the left-wing array of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Li-Sung, Saddam, Milosevic, etc.
For millenia, psychologically damaged folks have been within society. Now the information revolution has given them the ability to find each other and band together.
This, too, helps them to keep their emotions on an unstabilized roil.
Jim, your naive belief in the benevolence of Communist ideology betrays someone who has never spent time either in the former Soviet Union or with Russians. You realize, of course, that internal Soviet passports clearly indicated ethnicity and nationality – needless to say, having “Jewish” on your passport wasn’t a career-enhancer, much less having a Kazakh or Tatar or Chuvashi face. Beating up students from Lumumba University was done for fun long after the KKK became a tasteless joke in the US. “Fell far short of their ideals”? Yeah, about like they fell short of following the Soviet Constitution – it was never anything more than a total sham. And the Soviets don’t bear any comparison to the Nazis? Better look up what Stalin did to the Poles, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and other folks. Geez, does being a lefty have to mean utter ignorance?
That too, Andy Freeman. They’re not even remotely mutually exclusive.
Wood’s point was that the New Anger is completely self-validating, that to the angry they are right because they are angry, so no logic or proofs or reasoning are required. Challenging any irrationality involved just makes them more angry, which in their eyes provides even stronger validation.
The Right is not immune to this, but for the Left it’s now a core principle that overrides any other considerations. Or as Andrew Klavan put it, if you disagree with anything on the Left you’re supposed to “Shut up!“
“Geez, does being a lefty have to mean utter ignorance?”
It took you this long to figure that out?
To answer your question : YES. Leftism = stupidity, racism, and fantasies about sending right-wing people to the gas chambers.
Only somewhat off topic, but perhaps you sci-fi-space-geek types could respond.
I was watching the local Fox TV station after the 6:30 PM news, and this kind of dystopic-future sci-fi thing came on of which my wife and I could only stand about 5 minutes.
The opening scene is that this odd-looking skeleton was on a crucifix as a prop for some kind of cult with heavy metal rock musicians on stage and their be-studded and punked-up fans in the audience. A group of jack-booted paramilitaries crash the proceedings and point guns at the attendees so this woman in uniform, presumably their expert, can get a closer look at the skeleton. She and the leader of the paramilitaries converse in some kind of Germanic language (I grew up around German speakers and would know proper German I think unless it was dialect) — was it Dutch perhaps? — and in the subtitles the expert declares “Human, definitely human. But look at the teeth. Must be American.”
My sci-fi expert sister thinks this was one of the new Dr Who episodes, and that Dr Who is famous for such dry humor, as in having a full set of teeth identify human remains as American.
Anyway, I found that snippet of television deeply offensive. The heavy metal people were waving running chain saws around and drawing sparks by touching steel posts with them. Every time you do that you ruin a $20 saw chain.
“Dystopic-future sci-fi?”
Nope, just another unrealistic ho-hu, forensics show.
Right-wing dictators like Mussolini, Franco, and Pinochet were bad dudes,
Of those three, the only one arguably “right wing” (because he allowed free-market economics) was Pinochet. Mussolini was certainly a man of the left all his life, despite later claims to split with them.
Hey, Jim,
I’ve had many friends from Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet countries. One Jew from Azerbaijan put me off-balance with the comment that his synagogue here had been fire-bombed, something, he added, that would never have happened in the USSR.
I thought he was going to deplore his circumstances here, but he went on that the citizens back home were too cowered to commit such an act. Instead, menacing looks followed you everywhere you went and you, the Jew, were treated as the deviant. He was delighted that here, the police and everyone else considered the perpetrators, whoever they were, to be the deviants and that he had yet to have a single dark look directed at him.
The Soviets fell far short of their ideals
Jim, you are exactly right. They lied to themselves the same way you lie to yourself. You are a true believer.
Unable to concede the truth, you will always be able to pick apart any argument.
This is the essence of evil and the root cause of all others. Mass murder is just the end result, justified in twisted minds that believe in their own virtue.
The limbic system controls emotion.
The cerebrum processes rational thought.
My belief is that people who live in anger are addicted to the emotional thrill and the righteous certainty the limbic system provides.
So basically, they are a bunch of addicts.
“Nazis idealized purity, hierarchy and order, along with the family and the nation. Stalinists idealized equality and the revolution as alternatives to family, religion, class, race and national affiliations.”
Purity (I’m assuming racial), hierarchy and order aren’t specifically right-wing ideals. The racism, nationalism and authoritarianism associated with fascism weren’t what made it leftist – it was socialist economic policies and collectivist social policies that identified the Nazis as leftist.
I don’t know about this fashionable right-wing conclusion that fascists were socialists…definitions of facism vary.
“The problem with this approach is that it puts too much weight on what is almost certainly a matter of historical accident. There’s no question that early twentieth-century fascist movements rose to power with the collusion of wealthy conservative factions who feared the influence of communists. German conservatives made Hitler Chancellor in 1933 and helped pass the Enabling Act; Italian conservatives responded to the March on Rome by handing Mussolini the reins of power.”
And also, “Finally, there’s Passmore’s definition, which draws on some of the above. He identifies fascism as being essentially about ultranationalism, and the core goal as creating a “mobilized national community”. He identifies it as reactionary – anti-socialist and anti-feminist – because those “isms” put class or gender above the nation, and as being of the extreme right, chiefly because of its extreme hostility to the traditional left. He also stresses fascism’s radicalism, as it seeks to overthrow and replace existing elites who are perceived as having betrayed the nation, and because it will override traditional conservative and right-wing interests (such as private property) in pursuit of this goal. Finally, it is characterised by paramilitarism and a willingness to use violence, thuggery, and intimidation in pursuit of its goals.”
What this is really about is the knee-jerk reaction to the DHS report that all of you idiots tried to say was a Left Wing Conspiracy until you found out you couldn’t blame Obama and Napalitano because Bush commissioned the report. So now all of the water carriers from blogs and AM radio are scrambling to cover the fact that the Right, so desperate to score votes from anyone or anywhere are dredging the bay to find right-wing loonies, dirt road militiamen, racists, White-supremists, and gun freaks with McVeigh hard-ons. Hell you’re scandalous enough to jack the Paultards language and behavior. I don’t recall any Leftist, liberal, or Progressive shooting, threatening or blowing up anything when Bush was in office. You know that we know that you knowthis. But we can start with the people that freak out and buy more guns. Openly threaten a sitting president.
People are not stupid and know what you all are whipping up. Almost all of the killers and assasins and crazies come from the right. That’s not a mystery…you know Glenn Reynolds is the idot professor that would perfer that his students have the right to carry guns into their classes…so this kind of equating is par for the course for his sad soul.
So…in one breath Liberals/The Left are weenies that can not be trusted with the military or national security. And in the next we are this monster that can not be trusted to weild the power of the military becasue we will seize power and use the military to “nationalize everything”?
You guys do understand that clear thinkers can see through the bait and switch arguments…rarely now do republicrats make sense. I find it funny, the republicrats are coming dangerously close to mimicing John McCains “spray and pray” tactics of the closing days of the Presidential race. And yes you guys are looking that desperate for a gotcha moment instead of doing the right thing…the unglamorous and arduous task of…real work. Yet you all flail about like a drowning 400 lb man. Are hand shakes scandels and stupid cow farts comments all you want associated with the “Party of Lincoln”?
And another thing…name dropping Jonah Goldberg, to prove a point…hint…not a good thing. Outside of Astroturf foundations and wingnut welfare queen circles…HE IS CONSIDERED AN IDIOT!
Sorry to be that guy…
Recall, the name of his party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — the National Socialist Worker’s Party.
Actually, it was the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. A not insignificant omission there, Rand, inasmuch as one of the other ways that right and left have traditionally been distinguished is that the former is nationalist, the latter transnationalist.
As for anger being somehow uniquely inculcated in the left, why don’t we see how the American right comes across after 8 years of Obaminance? If the first 80 days are any indication…
No offense, Jim, but the responses to your comments are typically reactions to you personally. that’s not “right wing” anger, it’s just that you often come off as a jerk, and an uninformed jerk at that. I’m sure that, by this response, I’m just feeding your paranoia, but since this was one of your more lucid attempts, I thought it deserved a serious response (instead of no response, which is more typical of me personally).
Granted, but…
Tell it to the Jews, the Ukrainians (especially the Kulaks), and so forth.
Both had the same ideal; they just phrased it differently. The NAZIs were unapologetically statist, and saw themselves as the vanguard of a movement to restore Germany to its rightful place as the head of a world-spanning empire, under their control. The Soviets saw themselves as the vanguard of a movement to restore Russia to its rightful place as the head of a world-spanning empire, under their control. This is why the NAZIs and the Soviets couldn’t coexist.
Words are important, but actions are more telling.
Actually, it was the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.
Sorry, didn’t mean to leave that out.
A not insignificant omission there, Rand, inasmuch as one of the other ways that right and left have traditionally been distinguished is that the former is nationalist, the latter transnationalist.
It is an insignificant distinction. The notion that “nationalist” is “right” and “internationalist” is left is a myth promulgated by the left after the falling out between Hitler and Stalin.
“Right-wing dictators like Mussolini, Franco, and Pinochet were bad dudes,
Of those three, the only one arguably “right wing” (because he allowed free-market economics) was Pinochet. Mussolini was certainly a man of the left all his life, despite later claims to split with them.”
Rand…
Very clever, you agressively try to label those 2 of 3 as left leaning. And at the same time you neglect to clearly state the forms of government that drove those leaders INTO power, they were all conservative. You slyly try and jump between economic and political polemics for facism to support your point which is which is amateurish and pedestrian at best. Look for the best answer, instead of wasting your education to support inferior positions. We can all progress without kicking and fighting to the exit…it all just ends up looking embarrassing from your end.
And it’s sad that you pray on many Americans ignorance of all things foreign…of course any conservative would just swallow whole your protrayal. They just assume everyone other than us is Socialistic anyway.
Outside of Astroturf foundations and wingnut welfare queen circles…HE IS CONSIDERED AN IDIOT!
No, he’s only “considered an idiot” BY IDIOTS! Most of whom haven’t even bothered to read the book.
Very clever, you agressively try to label those 2 of 3 as left leaning. And at the same time you neglect to clearly state the forms of government that drove those leaders INTO power, they were all conservative.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Mussolini was always a man of the left.
He is only considerded an idiot by morons.
It is quite the compliment to be called a fool by a fool.