A Secular Religion
LEFTISM IS BOTH A WAY of understanding the world and a value system. It is, in fact, a form of religion, albeit a secular one. Many of its adherents believe in it with the same passion as religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in their respective religions. They direct their lives by it, and more than a few have been willing to die—and many have killed—for various Leftist ideologies. In much of the world outside the Muslim world, Leftism is the dominant ideology. It influences the values and actions of nearly as many people as does Christianity or any other religion. It even influences many believing Christians and Jews. For these reasons Left, Leftist, and Leftism are capitalized in this book.
One example of the religious nature of Leftism was the term adopted by Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady of the United States—“the politics of meaning.” The term was highly meaningful to the Left, but meaningless to conservatives. The reason is that conservatives do not look to government and politics for meaning. They look to their own lives—their families, their work, their friends, their hobbies, and most of all, their God-based religions. But with the collapse of God-based religion on much of the Left, Leftist religion has filled the meaning void. For the Left since Marx, utopia is to be created here and now, on earth. Politics becomes the vehicle to achieving this and therefore politics provides much more meaning to Leftists than to those on the Right. For the Left, politics is the way to transform the world; for conservatives, politics is primarily the way to stop the Left from doing so. The former is much more fulfilling than the latter.
THIS IS NOT APPARENT—
EVEN TO MANY WHO HOLD LEFTIST BELIEFS
Unlike those who hold Christian beliefs and call themselves Christian, or those who hold Muslim beliefs and call themselves Muslim, many people who hold Leftist values do not call themselves “Leftist,” and do not even think of themselves as such.
This is also true of organizations. While virtually every Christian or Muslim or Jewish organization identifies itself in that way, virtually no Left-wing organization includes the word Leftist in its name. In America, a list of leading Leftist organizations would include groups as diverse as the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, the National Organization for Women, and the National Council of Churches. Not one of their names even hints at a Leftist orientation and if asked, many of their members would deny that these organizations are Leftist.
The great majority of the world’s labor unions are Leftist institutions.
The great majority of liberal arts colleges and universities in the Western world are Leftist. The social science departments of Western universities are essentially Left-wing seminaries. Just as the purpose of Christian seminaries is to produce committed Christians, the primary purpose of most Western universities is, consciously or not, to produce committed secular Leftists. The major difference between them is that Christian seminaries declare their purpose, and Western universities do not.
The great majority of the world’s news media are on the Left.
And, just as significant, there are so many Leftists in other institutions that those institutions become de facto Leftist even when they are ostensibly committed to other ideals. An example would be Western religious institutions that come to be dominated by Leftists. The Anglican Church in Britain and many mainstream Protestant churches in the United States have Leftist values that are indistinguishable from those of other Left-wing institutions. However, because no one calls the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) the “Leftist Presbyterian Church U.S.A.,” it is not immediately identified as a Left-wing institution.* Likewise, there is no mainstream Leftist position that the leadership and many rabbis of the Reform movement of Judaism do not hold, but the institution is called Reform Judaism, not Leftist Judaism, and most Left-wing rabbis in Reform Judaism would be insulted if they were described as having Leftism-rather Judaism-based values.*
If asked how they would identify themselves socially or politically (and usually only if asked), Leftists will call themselves “progressive,” “open-minded,” “liberal,” “feminist,” “environmentalist,” “enlightened,” or any combination of these, but relatively few will label themselves “Leftist.” Many people with primarily Left-wing views think of themselves as “centrists.” And that is understandable. Because almost none of these institutions, from the universities to the world’s mainstream news media, calls itself Leftist and because the views of the university and of the news media are the only views to which the average person with Left-wing views is ever seriously exposed, it makes perfect sense that many people on the Left would consider themselves—and Left-wing views—to be centrist.
No Official Creed or Scripture
Another obstacle to identifying Leftism is that, unlike traditional religions, Leftism has no official creed or scriptures. If you want to know what Judaism is, you can read the Torah, the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and rabbinic literature. If you ask a Christian what Christianity is, a Protestant will refer you to the Old and New Testaments and a Catholic will refer you to the Bible and to Church teachings. Muslims likewise will refer to their holy works beginning with the Koran and the Hadith.
But even though there are hundreds of thousands of Left-wing books and an innumerable number of essays and articles written from a Leftist perspective, there are no official Leftist scriptures. At one time, perhaps, one would have pointed to the works of Marx and Engels, but no longer.
Unlike the beliefs of traditional religions, Leftism’s beliefs must often be inferred. One knows that a Christian is one who affirms belief in the Christian Trinity. But it is not nearly as easy to label people Leftist as it is to label them Christian. The dogmas to which virtually all Christians assent are listed or easily identified by asking virtually any Christian clergyman. But the dogmas of Leftism are not listed and there is no official Leftist clergy.
Nevertheless it would be absurd to deny that there is such a thing as Leftism.
What the Left Believes
TWO IRRECONCILABLE VISIONS
Most Americans want to believe that liberal America and conservative America can be united. That was a major allure of the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. But the unhappy fact is that there are two Americas, and they are not a rich one and a poor one; economic status plays little role in this division. Rather, there is a conservative America and a liberal America.
The reason people in America believe (more so than in Europe, which is used to deep ideological divisions) in the possibility of unity between Left and Right is that they think the two have essentially the same vision for America—that Right and Left share the same ends—and therefore really differ only in their ways to achieve that vision. That is not the case. Right and Left differ in their visions of America, not just in having different roads.
1. MATERIALIST EXPLANATIONS FOR HUMAN BEHAVIOR
Whether or not an individual who espouses Left-wing ideas considers himself a Marxist—and few have since the fall of the Soviet Union—Left-wing ideas are predicated on Marx’s materialist understanding of life. In popular jargon, “materialism” means an excessive love of material things. But philosophically, “materialism” means that only matter is real; there is no reality beyond the material world.
This in turn means:
No Reality Other Than the Material
Nothing non-material is real. Love, for example, is ultimately chemistry, since the mind is nothing more than the physiological activities of the brain. So, too, free will does not exist—all our decisions are determined by our genes and our environment. And, therefore, God and religious beliefs are nonsense—frequently dangerous nonsense.
Religion Is Opposed Because It Prevents Revolution
From Marx on, the Left has fought against religion because it is non-materialist and because Leftists have understood that so long as people were religious, they would not engage in what the Left considers the necessary revolution to better their material lives. Religion teaches people how to accommodate to their material condition—precisely by relegating the material world to a lower rung than other spheres of life, such as the spiritual, the moral, and the intellectual.
Economics Explains Most Human Behavior
The Left does not view actions that Judeo-Christian society has labeled “good” and “evil” as the products of people’s moral values and self-control but as the products of material equality or inequality. Thus the Left ascribes most violent crime to poverty, not to the violent criminal’s defective character or defective value system.
2. MATERIAL INEQUALITY IS THE GREAT EVIL
The Left’s great fight is with material inequality, not with evil as normally understood. Thus, the Left has always been less interested in fighting tyranny than in fighting inequality. That is why Leftist dictators—from Lenin to Mao to Pol Pot to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez—have had so much support from Leftists around the world. Many of these dictators were mass murderers, but to much of the world’s Left it was more important that they opposed material inequality (and America).
This explains the Left’s relative disinterest in creating wealth. The enormous and unsustainable debts facing the individual American states and the United States as a country from 2009 on have disturbed the American Right far more than the American Left. The same has been true for nearly all the European countries saddled with unsustainable debt. The reason is that the Left is not nearly as interested in creating wealth as it is in erasing inequality.
3. THE STATE IS THE VEHICLE TO UTOPIA
End all these social and economic inequalities and you will have created a beautiful world, essentially a utopia. The further Left one goes, the greater the belief in creating a this-world paradise. Unfortunately, however, attempts at creating utopia in this world lead to dystopia in this world. The conservative view is that the best is the enemy of the better and attempts to create a utopia usually destroy much of what is good in a society. That is why conservatives marvel at how good America is while Leftists seek to “transform” it.
Beginning with the chancellor of the German empire, Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), known as the father of “state socialism,” the view steadily arose among Western progressives that the state should take care of its citizens. This was not the American view, which had always been that the state should be as small as possible and that the individual, the family, the community, and religious and other charitable institutions should take care of people.
There is an additional reason for the Leftist love of the state—it gives the Left power to achieve its goals. The Leftist combination of belief in its good intentions and its certitude that Leftist intellectuals are smarter inexorably leads to its commitment to enlarging the state.
Therefore the State Must Continually Tax and Spend
The Left argues that almost all social problems can be solved by the state taxing its citizens as much as possible in order to spend increasing amounts of money on social programs set up to solve those problems.
A prominent example is education. The Left is certain that a major reason for socioeconomic inequality in America is the inferior schools that poorer children—especially blacks and Latinos—attend. Therefore, America must continually spend more money on education.
But there are two empirical problems with this.
One is that increased spending has done nothing to improve American public school education, and has often harmed it. The United States spends enormous sums on education. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (2010), the United States spent $10,041 per pupil in its public elementary and secondary schools in 2006–2007. Compare this to 1960–61, when America spent $2,769 per pupil (in constant 2007–2008 dollars)—before the Great Society, the War on Poverty, and the establishment of the Department of Education. Nevertheless, American elementary school and high school graduates know less about everything important, and read and write more poorly, than they did when one-fifth the amount of money was spent on education.
An example of the irrelevance of massive increases in spending on education took place beginning in 1985, when a federal district judge took partial control over the Kansas City, Missouri, school district. The schools in that district were largely racially segregated, black students were performing poorly, and school buildings were often dilapidated. The judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next twelve years to build new schools, racially integrate classes, and raise student test scores up to national averages.
Over the next twelve years, the state and city spent these billions of dollars on fifteen new schools, with some of the best facilities and programs in America: an Olympic-size swimming pool, a state-of-the-art computer lab, television and animation studios, a model United Nations, student field trips to Mexico and Senegal (West Africa), higher teacher salaries, and a student-to-teacher ratio of just 13:1.
Fifteen years later, in 2000, Reuters reported that “Kansas City’s public school district has become the first in the nation to lose its accredited status by failing all Missouri’s performance standards, and could be abolished unless it improves.”1
The $2 billion were wasted. Test scores remained as low as they were before, and the black-white gap in academic achievement remained the same. But the failure of the Kansas City experiment in massive funding of public education—like the trillions of dollars wasted on other Left-wing government programs—had no impact on the Left.
The Left not only overstates the importance of spending on education in explaining socioeconomic inequality; it also overstates the role of education itself.
Princeton University professor of psychology Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics and considered by many in his field to be the greatest psychologist of his time, describes the effect of education on income. New York Times columnist David Brooks summarized Kahneman’s findings: “If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad of other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.”2
Why are there differences in income? Overwhelmingly because of the values and the hard work of those who make more money. As the Washington Post reported: “People who make less than $20,000 a year…told Kahneman and his colleagues that they spend more than a third of their time in passive leisure—watching television, for example. Those making more than $100,000 spent less than one-fifth of their time in this way—putting their legs up and relaxing. Rich people spent much more time commuting and engaging in activities that were required as opposed to optional.”3
No one denies that there are many hardworking lower-middle-class Americans. Indeed, when these people pass values such as hard work, self-discipline, and marriage on to their children, those children will earn more—often considerably more—money than their parents.
But when conservatives argue that an individual’s values and hard work are far more determinative of income than money spent on schools or the race of the individual, the Left’s response is that this is “blaming the victim.” No matter what evidence is brought, the Left wants more money spent on education. At a Democratic presidential debate in 2007, the candidates were asked to comment on issues pertaining to education. This was Connecticut senator Chris Dodd’s response: “I’ve been asked the question over the years, ‘What’s the single most important issue?’ I always say education because it is the answer to every other problem we confront as a people here.”
It would be difficult to find any individual or institution on the Left that would differ with Senator Dodd. Yet they are all wrong. “The answer to every other problem we confront” is dependent upon the individual’s values, character, moral education, wisdom, and common sense. It is not education per se, unless its purposes are character development, moral instruction, passing on the wisdom of the ages, and developing common sense. And since the Left took over education, these have not been taught.
Consequences of Ever-Expanding Government
The consequences of big government, of the welfare state, are as numerous as they are destructive.
Take the example of what had been the most economically dynamic and prosperous of American states: California.
For almost a generation California’s Democratic legislature has been more or less able to do whatever it wants. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal described the results: “The Golden State—which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world—has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, over-regulating and a hyperprogressive tax code…”5
One might argue that’s this is a politically biased assessment. So here are some facts, not assessments:
* California’s state expenditures grew from $104 billion in 2003 to $145 billion in 2008.
* In 2009, California’s credit rating was the lowest in the nation.
* As of 2011, California had the second-to-worst unemployment rate in the nation.
* As of 2011, California had the second-highest home foreclosure rate.
* California’s taxpaying middle class has begun leaving the state because of the high taxes, because of the ever-increasing number of regulations on small businesses (which make up 83 percent of the state’s businesses), and because so many businesses have been fleeing to more business-friendly states.
* From 2000 on, California’s job growth rate—which in the late 1970s was many times higher than the national average—lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent.
* Beginning in 2001, California lost 25 percent of its industrial workforce. A typical example: In 2010, Intel, the world’s largest maker of computer chips, announced that it would invest $7 billion to expand its facilities in Arizona, Oregon, and New Mexico—but not in California, the state in which Intel is headquartered.
In sum, the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.
Finally, the Left always seeks as much power as it can attain. One might respond that this is equally true of the Right. But it is not—by definition. The Left believes in ever-expanding government, while the Right believes in small government. Obviously those who want smaller government seek less power than those who want a big government and a powerful state, which, of course, they would lead or at least materially benefit from.
4. HIGH TAX RATES
Most people regard taxation as a necessary nuisance. The Left, however, regards taxes as the means to achieving two of its greatest goals: Taxation shifts power from the individual to the state, and it is regarded as the best way to decrease economic inequality.
Neither goal is part of the American value system. Taxes are viewed quite differently by those who uphold those values. They oppose increased state power and believe that liberty demands that people be allowed to keep as much of their legally earned money as possible. Moreover, in terms of economics, the higher the tax rates, the less an economy grows. Or, to put it another way, those most interested in producing wealth favor low tax rates.
But the Left (unlike classical liberals) is far more interested in producing economic equality than in producing wealth.
As President John F. Kennedy, a pre–Vietnam War liberal, not a Leftist, said in 1962, “This administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes to be enacted and become effective in 1963…. The accumulated evidence of the last five years [is] that our present tax system, developed as it was in good part during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peace time; that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power; that it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment and risk-taking.”7
5. SECULARISM AND OPPOSITION TO RELIGION
Though there are religious individuals on the Left, a fundamental aspect of Leftism is secularism.
From its beginnings in the works of Karl Marx, Leftism has rejected God and opposed religion. It is, after all, rooted in a materialist worldview. Man has supplanted the biblical God. “God is man,” said Marx. And “man is God,” said Engels.*
There are Leftist religious individuals and movements—examples include Catholic Liberation Theology and Jewish and Protestant Left-wing denominations. But the dominant Left-wing attitude toward traditional Jewish and Christian denominations has always been hostility. Unfortunately, however, there is considerably more respect among religionists for Leftism than among Leftists for religion. The reason is simple: Leftism has influenced Judaism and Christianity considerably more than Judaism or Christianity has affected the Left.
Why has the Left been hostile to religion? Because religion teaches people how to be content no matter what their material condition, because it defers utopian dreams to an afterlife or an end of times, because it emphasizes moral self-improvement (rather than, for example, economic equality), because it affirms a judging God and moral absolutes, and because it inoculates its adherents against secularism.
The classic Marxist reason was Marx’s own: Human beings—specifically the poor—are supposed to make revolutions in order to better their material condition; and religion, by lulling them into accepting their low economic state, prevents them from doing so. Religion “is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”8
As it happens, there is truth to the Marxist analysis. All religions have taught their adherents how to achieve some contentment in this life despite their material poverty. For those who value human happiness, this is regarded as a great achievement. Indeed, religion increases the happiness of the rich as much as it does the poor. If anything, life is often more meaningless for the rich atheist than for the poor atheist. The poor always have some meaning and purpose in their lives—obtaining food and shelter. The rich, however, no longer derive meaning from obtaining food and shelter, both of which they take for granted. Therefore, the rich, and everybody else, need religious meaning at least as much as the poor do. It was the middle-and upper-class youth in America and Europe in the 1960s and ’70s, not the poor, who lamented their angst about life’s meaninglessness and their own “alienation.”
Leftism then comes to the rescue of the well-educated secular middle and upper classes. It serves as a secular religion, providing meaning, purpose, camaraderie, an all-encompassing explanation of life, a division of the world between enlightened and nonenlightened, and much else that traditional religions provide.
Another reason for Leftist antipathy to religion is that religion presents the greatest organized obstacle to more widespread acceptance of Leftism. The more religious people are, the less they are attracted to it. Traditional Christians and Jews are the groups least likely to adopt Leftism. In addition to not seeking utopia in this world, religious Jews and Christians take the last of the Ten Commandments seriously—it is wrong to covet what belongs to their neighbor (Leftism depends on people coveting what the wealthier have).
How then can we explain Jews and Christians who adopt Leftist values? They belong to one of two groups. The first consists of secular Jews and Christians who nevertheless retain some attachment to a Christian or Jewish identity; they are known as “cultural Christians” and “secular Jews.” The other group consists of Jews and Christians who do not consider themselves secular, who may strongly identify with their religion, and even attend synagogue or church. However, in the vast majority of cases they do not subscribe to many of the traditional beliefs of their faiths—especially divine scripture.
In the West, the great dividing line between Left and Right is not belief in God, since many on the Left—at least in the United States—believe in God (though often it is not the personal, morally judging, transcendent God of the Bible). Instead, the dividing line is belief in divine scripture. Those who believe that God is the ultimate author of their scripture (the Old and New Testaments for Christians, the Torah for Jews) are rarely Leftist. On the other hand, those Christians and Jews who believe that the Bible is entirely man-made are far more likely to adopt Leftist values.
Yet another reason for the Left’s hostility to religion, especially Judeo-Christian religions, is that the values are in conflict. Jews and Christians who believe in the Bible certainly believe in helping the poor. In fact, religious Americans donate more and volunteer more time to charitable institutions than do secular Americans.9 But they also believe in other biblical values that run counter to Leftism. They believe in the man-woman definition of marriage, that abortions not performed for health reasons are sinful (this is as true for Orthodox Jews as for traditional Christians), in a God who transcends nature, in objective good and evil, in reward and punishment in an afterlife, and much more that is contrary to Leftism.
In Western Europe, Leftism has largely succeeded in replacing Christianity as the dominant value system. For well over a century Christianity has been under attack morally and intellectually. Morally, it is considered useless at best, and harmful at worst. Virtually every Westerner who has attended university has been taught to reference the “Crusades” and “Inquisition” when discussing Christianity—as if those two events summarize the role of Christianity in history. And intellectually, traditional Christianity is dismissed as one would dismiss alchemy. The more Christianity shapes a person’s life, the more the Left considers the person a buffoon.
Since the 1960s, wherever possible the American Left has sought to remove Christianity, and religion generally, from the public square. Obvious examples include the almost universal substitution of “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas,” the removal of Christmas plays and Christmas trees from nearly all schools, the banning of any nondenominational voluntary prayer from public schools, and the ban on any mention of God at school graduations (even “God bless the graduating class” has been deemed illegal).
There are many more examples.
On July 14, 2003, Reuters reported from Phoenix, Arizona: “After more than three decades at the Grand Canyon, three bronze plaques inscribed with biblical passages have been removed by U.S. park officials…. Officials said they had no choice but to remove the plaques from three popular spots at the majestic canyon’s busy South Rim after an inquiry was made by the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. ‘They are religious plaques on federal buildings and that’s not allowed based on the law,’ said Maureen Oltrogge, a Grand Canyon National Park spokeswoman.”
To understand the determination of the Left’s campaign to remove God and religion from American life, one need only imagine how visually insignificant three plaques are in the immensity of the Grand Canyon. Yet even those plaques offended the secular Left.*
In 2004, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 3–2 to remove a cross, the smallest image on the Los Angeles County seal, from the seal. This followed an ACLU threat to sue the county if it did not remove the cross.
To understand how extreme the movement to remove any vestige of America’s religious origins is, it is necessary to know what the seal of Los Angeles County depicted.
There were six small panels, three going up and three going down each side. On the left side were panels depicting engineering instruments, a Spanish galleon, and a tuna representing the fishing industry. On the right side, the top panel contained oil derricks; the middle panel depicted the Hollywood Bowl, along with two stars representing the movie industry, and a small cross depicting, in the official words of the county, “the influence of the church and the missions of California.” The lowest right side panel showed a prize cow.
By far the largest image was Pomona, the Roman goddess of gardens and fruit trees, who was drawn from top to bottom in the center of the seal. The cross was so small that when I first viewed the seal, I didn’t see it.
The cross represented the Christian founding of Los Angeles County. The very name of the county, Los Angeles—“the Angels,”—bears testimony to its Christian origins. The cross no more advocated Christianity than the goddess Pomona advocated Roman paganism or the cow promoted Hinduism. It was dishonest to argue that Los Angeles County was promoting Christianity. As for the argument put forth by the ACLU that the tiny cross made non-Christians feel “unwelcome,” as a Jew, I found the comment both absurd and paranoid. No Jews I spoke to, including Orthodox and other rabbis, felt “unwelcome.” By the same logic, vegetarians should have felt unwelcome in Los Angeles County given that two panels depicted animals as food.
What we had here were the ACLU and the three liberal county supervisors erasing the Christian history of Los Angeles County.
Such efforts at extinguishing the religious nature of American life are not confined to the liberal coasts. In 2010, ABC News reported, “One week before the most solemn day in the Christian year, the city of Davenport, Iowa, removed Good Friday from its municipal calendar…. Taking a recommendation by the Davenport Civil Rights Commission to change the holiday’s name to something more ecumenical, City Administrator Craig Malin sent a memo to municipal employees announcing Good Friday would officially be known as ‘Spring Holiday.’”10
Consequences of Secularism and Leftism
There are, of course, secular conservatives. But most conservatives who are personally secular recognize that God-based morality is one of the pillars of the American value system. The consequences of secularism—especially when combined with Leftism—have been highly destructive on both the personal and societal levels.
No God, Life Is Absurd
First and most obvious, if there is no God then life is objectively meaningless. The materialist view of life renders the human being nothing more than self-conscious matter, with ultimately no more meaning than—but the same fate as—all other matter. Perhaps the best-known scientist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Stephen Hawking, an atheist, goes even further. He essentially denies that there is any reality.11
No God, No Wisdom
There are intelligent and foolish people on both the Right and the Left. And there are both secular and religious fools. But the secular Left produces virtually no wisdom and almost all the foolish ideas believed by intelligent people have been produced by the secular Left intelligentsia. As George Orwell famously said, “Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.”
Conservative intellectuals are sometimes wrong, but the list of foolish and dangerous ideas on the Left dwarfs the list of such ideas among conservatives: Marxism; Communism; people are basically good; poverty causes crime; men and women are basically the same; women are as likely to seek and enjoy sex without the prospect of commitment as are men; more government money solves most social problems; America was as responsible for the Cold War as was the Soviet Union; a human fetus has no worth unless the mother says it does; all things being equal, it is not better for a child to have a mother and father; humans are just another animal (with a bigger brain)—the list is almost as long as the list of all Left-wing ideas.
The Left-wing celebration of youth contributes to its rejection of wisdom. There is a Peter Pan–like aspect to much of Leftism. The desire to remain young manifests itself in America and especially in Western Europe in many ways: reluctance to marry; not wanting children; the belief that there is little difference between youth and adults; the public use of curse words; dressing at sixty as one did when one was twenty; the lack of desire to become an adult (“Call me Ted, not mister”); and more.
A major part of the reason for the foolishness of Leftist ideas is the secular world from which they emanate. Its rejection of the basic book of wisdom of the Western world, the Bible, and its similar rejection of almost all pre–twentieth century wisdom literature (as exemplified by its preference for racial diversity rather than excellence in literature) along with its emphasis on the value of “change” have led people to rely on their hearts for insights into life. And the heart is the worst place to find wisdom.
The religious certainly come up with irrational ideas of their own. It appears that the human being has to hold some irrational views and beliefs for a full life. Some of the deepest aspects of human life belong to the nonrational—love and music being two prominent examples. But—and this is a big but—in the Judeo-Christian world, the irrational is overwhelmingly confined to theology and religious life. A non-Christian may well argue that the Trinity and the Virgin Birth are irrational beliefs. A non-Mormon will view as irrational the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith’s claims to have found and deciphered divinely placed golden plates. And non-Jews and non-Orthodox Jews can certainly find irrationality in Jewish law.
But unlike the irrational beliefs of the Left, these theological irrationalities rarely have an irrational, let alone harmful, impact on society. Unlike a committed Leftist, religious Mormons, Christians, and Jews rarely unleash their irrational beliefs onto society. Since the Reformation, religion in the West has generally confined its irrational beliefs to religion. Leftism, on the other hand, is all about affecting social policy and therefore its irrational beliefs have profound real-life consequences.
No God, No Free Will, No Punishment
If matter is the only reality, God, who is by definition a non-material being, does not exist. But neither does human free will. It is an illusion, since all of our behaviors are the product of either genes or environment. In order to believe that human beings have any free will, one has to posit that something non-material exists in the human being, such as a mind, a conscience, and/or a soul. This secular Leftist denial of human free will is one of the reasons the Left recoils from labeling evil as evil, and (correctly) ascribes talk about good and evil to the religious.
Aside from reducing human beings to sophisticated robots, the denial of free will has real-world consequences. It explains the Left’s antipathy to punishing criminals: On what grounds can society punish people for acts they did not freely choose to engage in? It therefore regards punishment (especially capital punishment) as no more than revenge (as if just revenge is inherently ignoble).
Clarence Darrow, the most celebrated criminal defense lawyer in American history, and one of the best-known critics of religion in his day—in the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” he defended John Scopes, the teacher who taught evolution—was opposed to all punishment of criminals. Darrow understood that in order to protect society, some criminals had to be placed in prisons, but beyond that, Darrow did not believe in punishing anyone because, as an atheist, he concluded what any atheist must conclude: Human beings have no free will.
“All people are products of two things,” he declared, “and two things only—their heredity and environment. And they act in exact accord with the heredity which they took from all the past, and for which they are in no wise responsible, and the environment…. We all act from the same way.”12
Thus, in Norway, one of the most Left-wing democracies, the maximum sentence allowed—no matter how heinous the crime—is twenty-one years in prison. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who murdered seventy-seven of his countrymen in 2011, will be released from prison by age fifty-three.
Another characteristic example was the well-known case in Germany of cardiologist Dr. Dieter Krombach, who in 1996 was convicted of drugging and then raping a sixteen-year-old girl in his medical office. His nonpunishment? A suspended two-year sentence.
In 1993, Gunter Parche, a German fan of German tennis star Steffi Graf, ran onto the tennis court and stabbed Graf’s opponent, Monica Seles, nineteen, the world’s top-ranked women’s tennis player, between her shoulder blades with a nine-inch-long knife. Parche never served a day in prison. Instead he was given two years of free psychological treatment. Meanwhile Monica Seles could not play tennis for two years, and never fully regained her previous championship form. In her revulsion with the German justice system, she refused to ever play tennis again in Germany: “The justice system, in my case, really messed up.”13
As reported in the New York Times, “Judge Gertraut Goring said a harsher sentence was not justified in view of the assailant’s full confession, lack of former arrests and ‘abnormal personality structure…. Our law does not function on the principle an eye for an eye,’ Goring said.”14
In the United States, especially in more conservative states, these outcomes would be inconceivable. Breivik would have been sentenced to death, and the rapist doctor and the fan who stabbed Seles would have served time in prison. The United States, the most religious of Western industrialized democracies, believes in free will and therefore in punishment.
No God, No Good and Evil
With the breakdown of Judeo-Christian belief in Europe and the West, the notion of objective good and evil has been relativized. There is no real good and evil; there are only subjective opinions about such matters. As British historian Paul Johnson notes in his magisterial Modern Times, the secular West wrongly applied Einstein’s theories of relativity to morality: Not only were time and motion relative, so were good and evil. The moral confusion that has resulted in the secular Left world has been devastating to hundreds of millions of people. Secular Left intellectuals in the West come up with ideas, and peasants in China, Ukraine, Cambodia, Africa, and elsewhere are killed in the tens of millions.
The failure of the secular Left intellectual world to recognize and confront evil was acknowledged by Sam Harris, a leading atheist intellectual activist. Harris received a BA in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. In his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Harris argued that religion is the cause of the world’s evils, and reason is the solution.
I conducted a dialogue/debate with him on my radio show. What follows is a part of that dialogue (italics added):15
Dennis Prager: If I took a thousand Evangelical ministers—the folks that you have a certain fear of—and a thousand professors in the liberal arts, I would bet that the moral acuity of the thousand Evangelical ministers would dwarf the moral acuity of a thousand liberal arts professors. For which reason Lawrence Summers, for example, the president of Harvard, announced two years ago that the seat of anti-Semitism in America had shifted to the university. The university had also been the seat of support for Stalin. The university in Germany was the place to get Nazi philosophers. That you have such faith in secular reason is to me unbelievable, given the record of the secular rationalists.
Sam Harris: Well, first, let me agree with you that liberal, ivory-tower discourse right now is certainly in many sectors bereft of real moral acuity, and the kind of discourse you have about Israel in particular vis-à-vis the conflict with the Palestinians—all of that is deplorable. But your first question, really, it all turns on what you mean by morality.
Prager: Good and evil.
Why is it that religious folks whom you fear turn out to be more morally accurate today than the secular folks at the university?
Harris: I think that when you’re talking about something as fundamental as recoiling from cruelty you would find that healthy people are going to be more or less the same across the board. But I agree with you that about any number of things right now, academia has really become unhitched from morality as you and I know it.
Prager: I admire the fact that you, who are in academia, would say that. But don’t you ask what the root cause might be? To me it is clear: secularism.
Harris: Well, actually, no, I think the root cause in academia, certainly liberal academia now, is what we call “political correctness.” I think that the problem we have to face now is that people are flying planes into our buildings because they believe their book was written by God.
Prager: Yet ironically, it is really only very strongly religious Christians, by and large—and I’m not a Christian, I’m a Jew—who have been at the forefront of criticizing Islam today. And they are called, by your whole secular liberal world, racists and bigots for doing so.
Harris: Right. I agree with you totally. I think it’s profoundly ironic that the most sensible statements about Islam to appear in our culture have come from our own religious dogmatists.
Prager: It’s not ironic. That’s where you and I differ. It is their faith that gives them [their values and] the strength to say it. I think the university is a moral failure because it is radically secular. You think it’s a failure because they’re just weak-willed and politically correct.
If I lived in Europe two hundred years ago, I would have been tempted by the argument that reason alone, without God, religion, and sacred texts, can lead us to goodness. But after the depredations of the French Revolution; the horrors of two secular doctrines, Nazism and Communism; the low moral state of American and European universities; and the moral cowardice and appeasement of evil in contemporary secular Europe, one has to be—ironically—a true believer to believe that reason alone will lead us to a more moral world. Of course, we need reason. But we also need God and moral religion.
No God, No Beauty
It cannot be proved, but a strong argument can be made that the decline of religion in the West is correlated with the decline of beauty and excellence in music and art. Most of the great Western art was created with the goal of elevating man. But since there is no longer anything to elevate man to—no God, no holiness—Western art has sunk to the point where the deliberately ugly and even the scatological are celebrated in major art galleries in the Western world.
6. PACIFISM AND ANTIPATHY TO THE MILITARY
Beginning with the end of World War I, reaching its apex during the Vietnam War, and continuing until today, the Left has generally been hostile to anything to do with war, and has developed a great respect for pacifism, when not actually embracing it.
The bumper sticker “War Is Not the Answer” expresses a nearly universal Left-wing view. The Left believes that just about every conflict can be settled through negotiation, that war solves nothing, and that American expenditures on defense are a function of American militarism, imperialism, and the insatiable appetite of a “military-industrial complex.” American use of military force, therefore, usually represents something nefarious.
The basic moral proposition that there is moral violence and immoral violence offends most Leftists, who regard the term “moral violence” as an oxymoron. Violence is deemed immoral, period. Many Leftists even oppose children viewing cartoons—like Bugs Bunny—that depict violence, not to mention playing with toy guns, water guns, or toy soldiers.
There are departments and institutes of “peace studies” at many American universities. Each can be assumed to hold Left-wing—specifically antiwar and pacifist—views. On the other hand, there are few “war studies” departments or institutes outside of military academies, even though war is frequently the only way to rid the world of some evil—and actually achieve some peace. The Nazi death camps were not liberated by “peace activists,” but by people taught how to kill; that is, by soldiers.
Europe began its flirtation with pacifism at the end of World War I, a conflict that extinguished virtually an entire generation of Europe’s best young men for no apparent reason. Everything associated with going to battle came into disrepute—nationalism, a strong military, honoring the military, fighting, and the labeling of anything as “evil.” Europe has never recovered from these effects of World War I.
It took nearly half a century for European antiwar sentiments to plant themselves on American soil. Antiwar (as well as anti-American) fervor reached its zenith during the American war in Vietnam. The world and gradually the American news media depicted the South Vietnamese regime and the American support of it as the immoral side in the Vietnam War. They did so despite the fact that the North Vietnamese Communist Party and the Viet Cong were as tyrannical, as squelching of all individual freedom, and as engaged in mass killing and torture as other Communist parties and regimes.
The American fight against Vietnamese Communism was therefore as moral as was its fight against the North Korean and Chinese Communists in the Korean War. But by that time, the Left dominated the news media, and had influenced a generation of young people—for the first time in American history, vast numbers of young Americans attended college.
The liberal media successfully depicted the American military victory in Vietnam that led to the North Vietnamese signing the Paris Peace Accords as a defeat. Then the Left ensured defeat once the Democratic Party took control of Congress in 1974, and ceased supplying the South Vietnamese government with arms, overturning what America had agreed to do in the Peace Accords.16
Shortly after South Vietnam fell in 1975, the Khmer Rouge (“Red Cambodians”) murdered about one in every four of their fellow Cambodians. The Left had organized massive antiwar demonstrations when America was in Vietnam, but the Communist genocide in Cambodia was greeted with virtual silence. The antiwar demonstrations and riots were not about the Vietnamese, let alone opposition to tyranny; they were about opposition to possibly being drafted, and opposition to America at war. Left-wing antipathy to anything connected with the American military was so great that when Vietnam War veterans returned home they were frequently greeted with derision. The general Left-wing—and therefore media—view of them was that of men who were often losers who didn’t or couldn’t avoid getting drafted, and “baby killers.”
Then, after succeeding in having America abandon Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to Communism, the international and American Left sought to undermine America’s Cold War fight against the Soviet Union.
Since World War II, the Left has opposed fighting almost any evil. Even when Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait in 1990 and sought to destroy that country and incorporate it into Iraq, the Left again opposed military intervention. One could hardly imagine a more morally acceptable use of military force than liberating Kuwait. It was even supported by the United Nations. Yet two-thirds of House Democrats and forty-six of fifty-six Democratic senators voted against that war; and they paid no political price for that opposition. For example, in 1998 the state of New York voted overwhelmingly to send Representative Charles Schumer, an outspoken opponent of the Gulf War, to the United States Senate. For the Left, “war is not the answer” even when the war’s purpose is to save a country (Kuwait) from its would-be destroyer (Iraq).
7. CHANGE AS A SUPREME VALUE
Few words excite the Left as does change. The very name that the Left gives itself, progressive, implies, and necessitates, change. Therefore, the greater the Left’s influence, the more widespread and radical the changes will be.
Every thinking person understands that there are times when changes are needed. But for the Left change is a value in and of itself.
Take the art world, for example. The Left dominates the worlds of music, ballet, art, architecture, theater, film, and literature. Artists, producers, musicians, actors, museums, galleries, choreographers, performers, critics, and academics are nearly all on the Left. What excites them most is not greatness (which, in any event, many would deny exists in any meaningful way), but change. Since the mid-twentieth century, the art world has esteemed what is new, what “pushes the envelope,” and breaks with tradition—especially if it also offends conservative and middle-class tastes. That is one reason Norman Rockwell, probably the most beloved American painter of the twentieth century, is held in low esteem by the art world. He did everything wrong: He celebrated America, his paintings were completely intelligible, and the middle class loved him.
On the other hand, museums of modern or contemporary art feature works such as rotting fruit, fecal matter, menstrual blood, humans relieving themselves, nearly blank canvases, and other meaningless works.
This veneration of change rather than of greatness has also permeated classical music for about a hundred years. The music world, especially its music critics and university music departments, has been dominated by people who believe that change is great and incomprehensibility is deep. Typical was a famous 1952 piece for which John Cage, arguably the most influential American avant-garde composer, was best known. Titled 4’33”, the “work” consists entirely of a performer sitting at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing any notes. This is deep stuff on the cultural Left.
Further poisoning musical judgment is the Left-wing value of diversity. In 2011, Anthony Tommasini, music critic of the New York Times, published his list of the ten greatest composers who ever lived. Absent from the list was Haydn, who Tommasini acknowledged was the father of the symphony, father of the string quartet, and father of the piano sonata. Indeed, one of the avant-garde’s most celebrated modern composers (and a justly celebrated conductor), Pierre Boulez, “thinks Haydn a greater composer than Mozart,”17 and one of the greatest pianists who ever lived, Glenn Gould, thought Haydn’s piano sonatas were superior to Mozart’s. So, why did the New York Times music critic omit Haydn? Because, he wrote, “If such a list is to be at all diverse and comprehensive, how could 4 of the 10 slots go to composers—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert—who worked in Vienna during, say, the 75 years from 1750 to 1825?” Diversity, not greatness, helped determine the New York Times list of the greatest ten composers. That is why Bartok, Debussy, and Stravinsky made the list but Haydn (and Handel) didn’t.18
The Left-wing love of change has likewise devastated university courses in literature. According to Leftist professors, students were reading far too many DWEM, Dead White European Males. Their works, the literature upon which Western civilization had been built, were dropped in favor of inferior authors who were living and who were not white and European. Again, greatness doesn’t matter. Change and diversity do.
In politics, change is equally revered. It is not characteristic of the Left to ask whether a policy change—no matter how radical—will work or what its costs are. If the change feels right, or if the change serves to expand the state’s power—usually the same thing (except regarding national defense and security, where the Left prefers contracting the state’s powers)—the Left advocates that particular change.
Obvious examples are the entitlement and social policies of the welfare state. They are called progressive because they represent changes—more and more government and state intervention in citizens’ lives. What ailed American education that America needed a department of education and massive new outlays of money for public education? Virtually all the liberal changes in education—such as bilingual education for the children of immigrants, “whole language” instead of phonics to teach reading, an end to memorization, “new math,” no more teaching of grammar or diagramming sentences, and ending core curricula in colleges—have seriously harmed American education. But they were changes.
It disturbs Leftists that there are unchangeable facts about human nature. People need to work hard is one of these unchangeable facts. Since Marx, the Left has desired to change this law of life and to create a society in which people work few hours, retire decades before they die, travel a great deal (the European Union declared international travel a fundamental human right),19 and all the while be taken care of.
Faith in change has been a major reason the Left always supports the overthrow of non-Left-wing dictators. That this change may lead to far more evil does not concern the Left. So the Left was thrilled by the Russian Revolution even though the overthrown Russian czar was a boy scout in comparison to those who overthrew him. Decades later, the Left welcomed an Islamist tyrant from the Middle Ages, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, because he overthrew the pro-American (and therefore Right-wing) shah of Iran. Liberals the world over welcomed the overthrow of Egypt’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak. The dean of foreign policy commentators, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, filed ecstatic reports from Cairo’s Tahrir Square about the “Arab Spring.” The liberal combination of change especially revolutionary change, and youth was irresistible.*
Meanwhile, in the summer of 2011, “mobs of ordinary Egyptians joined with soldiers to drive pro-democracy protesters from their encampment in Tahrir Square” in Cairo.20 And in the Egyptian elections later in 2011, Islamist parties received about 75 percent of the votes.
The 2008 Barack Obama campaign for the American presidency was based on two words, one of which was change. (The other word was hope, which reflected the Left’s exaggeration of how bad things are in America.) It was used multiple times in nearly every campaign speech, and it was often the one word that appeared on the banners that supporters waved at Obama rallies. A frequently expressed sentiment, as widespread as it was meaningless, was “We are the change we have been waiting for.” The content of the change was never delineated. What mattered to Obama supporters was that there would be change.
Why does the Left venerate change?
One reason is that the Left has utopian dreams. No matter how good life is, for the Leftist it is pretty awful compared with what it could be if only there were enough…change. America provides the best example. No place has been as good for as many people from as many backgrounds as has America; no country has done nearly as much good for other countries. Yet large numbers of Americans have been seduced by the Leftist depiction of America as sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, bigoted, imperialist, lacking in compassion for its poor, and afflicted with other moral flaws. Clearly, then, major changes are called for.
Non-Leftists, on the other hand, look at all the good that America has achieved and fear major changes. Conservatives recognize that the normal human condition is awful, that America is an aberration, and that therefore changes, especially radical ones, are much more likely to make society worse, not better.
Another reason for the Left-wing adoration of change may be that, according to just about every poll on happiness, people on the Left are generally less happy than conservatives. One consequence of this is that they will therefore look to change to bring them the happiness that has eluded them.
People on the Left respond that the rich are the ones who fear change lest it adversely affect their fortunate status. But the rich are as likely to be politically Left as the non-rich. To cite two examples: In 2008, the New York Times reported, “exit polls showed that 52 percent of voters who make $250,000 a year or more voted for Barack Obama.”21 And in 2011, the seven wealthiest U.S. senators were all Democrats.
8. THE CELEBRATION OF YOUTH
If you love change, you will venerate youth—young people embody change and young people love change. That is one reason the Left seeks to equate young people with adults. In the Leftist heydays of the 1960s and ’70s, this was particularly evident. The voting age in America was lowered to eighteen. Whereas generations of Americans had assumed that few people under the age of twenty-one had sufficient wisdom to vote, in the youth-celebrating Leftist ’60s, it was determined that eighteen-year-olds—seniors in high school—should be allowed to vote.
Likewise many young people demanded (and “demanded” is the appropriate term, since they often called what they wanted “non-negotiable demands”) that colleges give them a say in determining their academic curriculum. And the liberal faculties relented. As a college student at the time, I was amazed that professional educators twice, three times my age did not believe that they knew better than I did what my core curriculum should be. But obviously they did not: After all, why would an adult know better than a young person what he or she should study? The very notion implies that adults are wiser than young people. That violated the Left-wing baby boomer 1960s motto: “Never trust anyone over thirty.”
The 2004 Democratic National Convention provided an excellent example of Left-wing veneration of youth. One of the convention’s featured speakers was a twelve-year-old girl. This was not some celebration of young people loving America. Her talk was reminiscent of the adult words put into the mouths of children in Hollywood films: The face is the face of a child, but the words are the words of an adult. (This, too, is a post-’60s phenomenon; in previous decades children in films spoke like children actually do.)
As the media reported, the highlight of the twelve-year-old’s speech, and what brought the house down, was when she ridiculed vice president Dick Cheney.
This is not something conservatives would do. Using a child to publicly mock the vice president of the United States—at a national political convention, no less—is not a conservative value. I was there and wrote at the time that a twelve-year-old has not earned the right to publicly mock a vice president of the United States: “This girl has accomplished nothing compared to Dick Cheney. She has no wisdom, no humility, and no knowledge beyond the Leftist platitudes spoon-fed by her parents and schools. She is a mere child, more foolish than most, in that she actually thinks she has earned the right to publicly ridicule the vice president of the United States.”22
The reactions from Left-wing readers were among the most intense I have ever received. In my next column, I wrote that “[n]o column has elicited so much anger, use of expletives and foolish thinking.”23
9. ANTI-AMERICANISM
Anti-Americanism has been central to Leftism. The reason is that America embodies the opposite values of the Left—and yet has been the most successful country in history. American success is a refutation of Leftism. America is God-based (the most religious, indeed the one religious, major industrialized democracy);24 is committed to the free market, individual liberty, small government, and nationalism; and executes murderers.25
The World Doesn’t Hate America, the Left Does
One of the most widely held beliefs in the contemporary world is that, with a few exceptions, the world hates America—especially when its president is a conservative Republican. One of the Democrats’ major accusations against the George W. Bush administration was that it increased hatred of America to unprecedentedly high levels. In many polls, the United States was held to be among the two or three greatest obstacles to world peace.
But it is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s Left that hates America. However, because the Left dominates the world’s news media and because nearly everyone, understandably, relies on the news media for their understanding of what happens in the world, many people, including Americans, believe that “the world” hates America. And, of course, the Left-dominated media help to create much of the hatred for America that does exist. If I relied exclusively on the New York Times or Le Monde or the Guardian or CNN International or virtually any of the world’s major television and radio news stations and newspapers for all I knew about America, I would probably hold it in contempt as well.
Western Europeans who are not on the Left tend to hold America in high esteem. The prime minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004, Jose Maria Aznar, is a conservative who esteems America. He was elected twice, and polls in Spain up to the week before the 2004 election all predicted a third term for Aznar’s party (Aznar had promised not to run for a third term as prime minister). Only the Madrid train bombings, perpetrated by Muslim terrorists three days before the elections, but which the Aznar government blamed on Basque separatists, turned the election against Aznar and his conservative party. The socialists won, and the usual negative views of America returned—along with Spain withdrawing its troops from Iraq.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world would rather live in America than in any other country, including those of Western Europe and including their own. Why would people want to come to a country they loathe? And why don’t people want to live in Sweden or France as much as they wish to live in America? They, too, are rich and democratic countries—and according to the media, much more loved.
One answer is that most people know there is no country in the world more accepting of strangers than is America. After three generations, people who have emigrated to Germany or France or Sweden do not feel—and are not regarded as—fully German, French, or Swedish. Yet anyone of any background from any country is regarded as fully American the moment he or she becomes one. The country that the Left routinely calls “xenophobic” and “racist” is, in fact, the least racist and xenophobic in the world.
Two questions remain: Why does the Left hate America, and does the American Left hate America?
The answer to the first question is, as already noted, that America and especially the most hated parts of America—the conservative and religious—are the greatest obstacles to Leftist dominance.
To cite a few major examples:
And what about the American Left? Is anti-Americanism a characteristic of the American Left as well as the international Left?
One answer is that the American Left has contempt for the America that believes in American exceptionalism, that is prepared to use force to fight what it deems as dangerous evil, that affirms traditional Judeo-Christian values and religions, that believes in the death penalty, that supports the male-female definition of marriage, and that rejects big government, wants lower taxes, and prefers free market to governmental solutions.
All this notwithstanding, it would be untrue to say that all or even most American Leftists hate America. Many on the Left feel great love for the United States. But there is often a problem with this love.
For one thing, true Leftists have antipathy to the American value system. They prefer secularism to “In God We Trust,” egalitarianism to Liberty, and multiculturalism to “E Pluribus Unum.” They also prefer the big European-type welfare state, and they reject American exceptionalism.
Additionally, while not denying the love that many Americans on the Left feel toward America, this love is often an odd one. If one really does believe, as the American Left continuously claims, that America is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, and bigoted, how lovable can such a place be? If a married individual thought as negatively about his or her spouse as the American Left does about America, we would find that individual’s proclamations of deep love for the spouse difficult to believe. And we would certainly understand if the spouse constantly berated for such major moral deficiencies did not feel loved.
Perhaps it is an image of America’s possibilities, rather than America as it is, that the American Left most loves. This seems quite plausible given American Leftists’ belief that their country was founded by racists and remains essentially racist, that it is an imperialist nation, that tens of millions of Americans go hungry, that it invades countries for corporate profits, and that it is largely xenophobic.
Whatever the answer, the fact is that the further Left one goes, the greater the level of anti-Americanism, whether in America or abroad.
Here are a few examples:
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn, an icon of the American Left, was professor of political science at Boston University, and author of A People’s History of the United States, praised by the New York Times as “required reading” for all American students. A radical’s depiction of American history, it became the single most widely read history text in American schools.
I dialogued with Howard Zinn on my radio show in 2006. Here is part of that dialogue:
Dennis Prager: I think a good part of your view is summarized when you say, “If people knew history, they would scoff at that, they would laugh at that”—that the United
States is a force for the betterment of humanity. I believe that we are the country that has done more good for humanity than any other in history. What would you say…we have done more bad than good, we’re in the middle, or what?
Howard Zinn: Probably more bad than good.
Prager: There is evil in the way we treated the Indians, there is no question about it. But there’s also no question that the great majority died of disease and not deliberately inflicted disease.
Zinn: That’s true that the great majority of Indians died of disease in the seventeenth century when the Europeans first came here. But after the American Revolution, when the colonists expanded westward, at that point we began to annihilate the Indian tribes. We committed massacres all over the country….
Prager: What percentage of the Indians do you believe we massacred, as opposed to diseases ravaged?
Zinn: Oh, well it might have been ten percent.
Prager: Ten percent is very different from the generalization of “we annihilated the Indians.”
Zinn: Well, ten percent is a huge number of Indians. So it’s pointless I think to argue about whether disease…or deliberate attacks killed more Indians.
Prager: Ten percent is very different from what the general statement of “annihilate” tends to indicate. That’s all I am saying.
Zinn: Okay.
Prager: If Europeans never came to North America and [the continent] was left in the hands of the American indigenous Indians, do you think the world would be a better place?
Zinn: I’d have no way of knowing.
Prager: So you’re agnostic on that.
Zinn: Absolutely. We have no way of knowing what would have happened.
Prager: Well, we do have a way of knowing. If the Indians had never been intervened with, they would have continued in the life and the values of the societies that the American Indians made.
Zinn: Well, I suppose we could presume that. And many of their societies were very peaceful and benign, and some of their societies were ferocious and warlike. But the point is that we very often sort of justify barging into other peoples’ territories by the fact that we are sort of bringing civilization. But if in the course of bringing civilization we kill large numbers of people—which we did in that case and which we have done in other cases—then you’re led to question whether what we did deserves to be praised or condemned.
Prager: You can do both. You can condemn the massacres and you can praise the civilization that we made here…. Are you prepared to say that war is ever the best moral choice?
Zinn: No.
Prager: Never. Not even against Hitler?
Zinn: Well, I’m not sure about World War II.
Prager: Wow…. Do you feel that, by and large, the Zarqawi-world and the Bush-world are moral equivalents? [Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was head of Al Qaeda in Iraq and responsible for terrorist attacks in Iraq that killed thousands.]
Zinn: I do. I would put Bush on trial along with Saddam Hussein….
Howard Zinn made five characteristic Left-wing points here about America: America has done more bad than good; Americans “annihilated the Indians” (even though, when challenged, he acknowledged that Americans killed about 10 percent of the native American population); maybe the world would have been better had there never been a United States; no war is moral; and President George W. Bush and the Islamic terrorists were moral equivalents.
Once again: This man’s history of the United States is the most widely used in American schools.
Amiri Baraka: New Jersey’s Official Poet
In 2002, Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, a self-described “Marxist-Leninist,” was named by Democratic New Jersey governor James E. McGreevey as that state’s official poet. Baraka came to public notice in that role when Jewish groups pointed out that in his post–9/11 poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” the Left-wing poet wrote:
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day…?
However, the poem turned out to be far more than a few anti-Semitic lines. It was a 1,169-word tirade against whites and America. The following is typical:
Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa….
Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philippines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese….
Aside from the anti-Americanism, there is another characteristic Left-wing feature present here: Why would a Democratic governor appoint a man with such views as his state’s poet? The answer is, in order to help keep the black vote Democratic and because an America-loving black poet would not be deemed an authentically black poet. For the Left, rage against America means you are an authentic black.
Michael Moore and American Self-Hatred
As I witnessed—and the press reported—the most popular figure at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was not the presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, but the Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore.
As reported by David Brooks in the New York Times, here is what this popular American Leftist said about America during an international speaking tour in 2004:
“Before a delighted Cambridge [England] crowd: ‘You’re stuck with being connected to this country of mine, which is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe.’
“In Liverpool, he paused to contemplate the epicenters of evil in the modern world: ‘It’s all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton.’”
As Brooks noted, Moore told the London Daily Mirror that Americans “are possibly the dumbest people on the planet…in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks.”
“In an interview with a Japanese newspaper,” Brooks wrote, “Moore helped citizens of that country understand why the United States went to war in Iraq: ‘The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich.’”26
Michael Moore and his Left-wing supporters may love America, but with lovers such as these, America doesn’t need haters.
American Media and American Military
American media have provided a sort of Moore-like view of America. The American military, in particular, has been repeatedly depicted in the most negative ways, often dishonestly.
In 2004, for more than a month, the New York Times ran stories about sexual humiliation inflicted by nine American soldiers on Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.
In 2005, Newsweek magazine published a “scoop.” Based on an unnamed source, Newsweek informed the world that American interrogators of suspected Islamic terrorists at the Guantánamo Bay prison had flushed pages of the Koran down a toilet. If this were true, the interrogators would be both morally wrong and stupid, given that the words of the Koran and the pages on which they are written are considered intrinsically holy to Muslims. As it happens, however, the Newsweek story was not true. But it served the Left-wing goals of defaming George W. Bush and the American military.
In 2007, the New Republic published a series of articles by a pseudonymous American soldier about alleged American troop atrocities in Iraq. After being challenged, the New Republic stood by the stories for months. Finally, in December 2007, the magazine announced that it could no longer “stand by these stories.”
America the Violent
Here is another typical Left-wing attack on America, made by a Canadian feminist professor in the presence of a member of the Canadian government in Ottawa:
A [British Columbia] feminist told a cheering audience here that the United States government is more threatening to the world than international terrorism.
Sunera Thobani received several standing ovations from about 500 delegates attending the Women’s Resistance Conference on Monday.
Her comments caused a political uproar, with opposition MPs condemning Secretary of State Hedy Fry for sitting silently as Thobani spoke. MPs called on the government to fire Fry, charging that she should have immediately condemned Thobani’s statements.
“Today in the world the United States is the most dangerous and the most powerful global force unleashing horrific levels of violence,” said Thobani, a women’s studies professor at the University of British Columbia and former head of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.
“From Chile to El Salvador to Nicaragua to Iraq, the path of U.S. foreign policy is soaked in blood…”27
Note that the Left-wing member of the Canadian government sat quiet during the America-bashing, while conservative members of Canada’s parliament condemned that silence.
Gore Vidal on America the Corrupt
To much of the world’s Left, America is simply the world’s worst country. To the Left-wing novelist, essayist, and playwright Gore Vidal, described by Newsweek as “the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson,” it may be worse than the Roman Empire at its most corrupt: “How we dare even prate about democracy is beyond me. Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale. It’s far worse than anything that occurred in the Roman Empire, until the Praetorian Guard started to sell the principate. We’re not a democracy, and we have absolutely nothing to give the world in the way of political ideas or political arrangements.”28
George Soros on the United States as Nazi-like
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2007, George Soros, the billionaire who bankrolls many Leftist projects, said about America: “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process,” just as Germany did after World War II. The comment was hailed by the popular Left-wing website the Daily Kos: “Leave it to Mr. Soros to tell the unvarnished truth at a staid international forum like Davos.”
The Left rejects American values. And American values reject the Left.