I ASK AND RESPOND TO this question based on an important assumption—that many people who hold Left-wing views are well-intentioned. If one assumed that all those on the Left were mean-spirited people, there would be no purpose in explaining why people hold Left-wing beliefs. One would simply note that these are bad people (which is how the Left regularly explains the Right). But the question is far more complicated because many on the Left—and the many more who hold Left-wing beliefs but do not consider themselves Leftists—deeply believe that all they want is to do good. So, then, one needs to explain why people who want to do good do so much harm: Why do people who want to do good have Left-wing beliefs?
Man Cannot Live Without Religion
VERY FEW INDIVIDUALS can live a life without the meaning provided by religion. The religion may be noble or ignoble, rational or irrational, God-based or secular. But some guidelines for life, some camaraderie with like-minded souls, something that gives one hope for the future—these needs seem to be built into the human being.
With the collapse of Christianity in Europe, Leftism, fascism, and Nazism arose in its place. While the latter two seem to have been vanquished in Europe, Leftism—with its offshoots and related ideologies such as socialism, feminism, environmentalism, and egalitarianism—is as strong as ever.
The fact that it fills the hole left by the decline of Christianity is one reason so many people believe in Leftism.
Utopian Dreams
UTOPIAN DREAMS PLAY an enormous role in the emotional and political worlds of the Left. That is why, for example, those on the Left seek to “fundamentally transform” America, as candidate Barack Obama repeatedly promised to do if elected and attempted to achieve once in office.
Two famous statements encapsulate the operative liberal worldview.
The first was attributed to Robert F. Kennedy by his brother Senator Edward M. Kennedy: “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were, and ask, ‘Why not?’”
The other is one of the most popular songs of the last fifty years, John Lennon’s “Imagine,” in which we are asked to imagine that there is no heaven or hell and that everyone lives for today; that there are no countries, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion; that everyone is living in peace; that there are no possessions, therefore no greed or hunger.
Regarding the Kennedy quote, a conservative would respond something like this:
Conservatives look at America and ask, how did something so decent, so different from other societies, ever get created and last more than two hundred years? Of course, we always seek to improve America, but more than anything else, we seek to preserve it—by preserving its core values. Conservatives do not “dream of things that never were” nearly as much as liberals do. Rather, we usually dream the same dream as our American forefathers did—to maintain a society committed to the values of E Pluribus Unum, Liberty, and In God We Trust. As for utopian dreams, we believe they are more likely to result in nightmares.
An almost perfect example of this utopianism and the Left’s willingness to destroy what is good in the hope of creating utopia was expressed by Michael Moore, the Left-wing documentary maker, in an interview on CNN.
Moore told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that today’s “capitalism is an evil system set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many.”
To which Cooper responded: “So, what system do you want?”
Moore replied: “Well there’s no system right now that exists. We’re going to create that system.”1
For Moore, as for most Left-wing believers, those who lived before them are morally and intellectually defective. Nobody has come up with a good system of governance—Michael Moore will develop one. What did Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin—not to mention Moses or Jesus—know?
As for John Lennon’s song, a conservative would respond:
Lennon’s utopia is our dystopia. A world without God to give people faith that all their suffering is not meaningless is a nightmare. A world without religion means a world without any systematic way of ennobling people. A world without countries is a world without the United States of America, and it is a world governed by the amoral United Nations, where mass murderers sit on “human rights” councils. A world without heaven or hell is a world without any ultimate justice, where torturers and their victims have identical fates. A world without possessions is a world in which some enormous state possesses everything, and the individual is reduced to the status of a well-fed serf.
Liberals frequently criticize conservatives for fearing change. What we fear is transforming that which is already good. The moral record of humanity does not fill us with optimism about “fundamentally transforming” something as rare as America. Evil is normal. America is not.
Wishful Thinking
REALITY IS OFTEN WHAT THE LEFT WOULD LIKE IT TO BE
There are mature and immature people all across the political spectrum. But Leftist positions are usually childlike—because Left-wing positions are nearly all based on identifying one’s wishes with reality.
The Rejection of Sad Facts
ANOTHER REASON LEFTISTS BELIEVE what they believe is related to the childlike nature of the wishful thinking described above. Oftentimes they reject facts because they are sad or uncomfortable. Leftists are not alone in this regard. Most human beings want to reject uncomfortable truths. This includes social conservatives, who do this when, for example, they assert that pornography leads to rape. They so detest pornography that they reject the fact that a causal link between pornography and rape does not exist: Rape has been a terrible part of the human condition throughout history, even when there was no porn, and the vast majority of men who view pornography do not rape.
But the rejection of facts because they are sad is a distinguishing feature of Leftism. For example, the belief that people are basically good is an erroneous Leftist belief that is held, in large part, because it denies the sad fact that people are not basically good. I learned this after I devoted one of my columns in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles to analyzing why most Jews believe that people are basically good despite the fact that this belief is neither rational nor Jewish and despite the fact that Jews, of all people, know how cruel humans frequently are. In a lifetime of teaching and writing on Judaism, I noted, I have never encountered a single normative statement in three thousand years of Jewish writing that asserts that man is basically good.2
The reaction from liberal Jewish readers was so negative that nearly an entire page of the newspaper was devoted to letters attacking me.3
How is this to be explained? Why would liberals react so strongly against someone who wrote that people are not basically good? In my original article, I offered one explanation: Since the Enlightenment, the secular world has had to believe in man (or “humanity”) because if you don’t believe in God and you don’t believe in humanity, you will despair.
But one critic opened my eyes to a deeper psychological reason. This is what he wrote:
“What a sad world it would be if we all believed as Dennis Prager that mankind is inherently evil.”
My response:
“I did not write that man is inherently evil. I wrote that he is not basically good. And, yes, that does make the world sad. So do disease, earthquakes, death and all the unjust suffering in the world. But sad facts remain facts…. A distinguishing characteristic of liberals and leftists,” I concluded, “is their aversion to acknowledging sad facts.”
No one likes pain, but people on the Left are more prone to avoiding painful realizations and denying painful behavior. That’s why they prefer to deny real evil (for example, Communism in its heyday, and Islamism today) and therefore avoid confronting evil (hence the flirtation with pacifism and proclivity to appease evil); why they believe that evil can be negotiated with; why they think people are basically good; and why they maintain that men and women have similar natures and want the same things. The list of Leftist wishful thinking is extensive. Avoidance of pain is probably a major reason the Left dislikes capitalism and free markets. Free markets create winners and losers, and the Left does not like the painful fact that some people lose and some win.
This reluctance to accept anyone losing expresses itself on the micro-level as well. Many liberal educators and parents oppose children playing in competitive sports because they can lose, sometimes by a big score. Many schools now emphasize “cooperation instead of competition” since they do not want children to experience the pain of losing. That is also why liberals introduced the foolish and destructive idea of giving sports trophies to all children who play, win or lose: If only the winners receive trophies, the players who didn’t win may experience pain.
Human nature not being basically good is only one of many facts of life denied by Leftism because of the pain they cause. Another such fact is that men and women are inherently different. Many on the Left have rejected this idea because some of the differences are too emotionally upsetting to accept. For example, the fact that men are generally more driven to variety in sexual partners is emotionally upsetting (especially, and understandably, to women). It is also feared that this excuses married men who have affairs. Therefore, it is widely denied.
The fact that black males disproportionately commit violent crime in America is usually ignored by the Left. When it is noted, the Leftist reaction to this painful fact is to label those who do note it racist and/or to argue that there are too many black males in prison because of American racism, thereby shifting the blame from the black criminals onto American society.
It is generally believed that as people grow older, they reject much of the liberalism they believed in when they were young. This is true, and one reason is relevant here: As we get older, we tend to make peace with painful facts of life.
Good Intentions Are What Matter Most
FOR THE LEFT, intentions are all-important. Leftists are certain they mean well—that it is they who care for the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed, and minorities, and they are the ones who want a peaceful world. This certitude regarding intentions is enough to legitimize Leftists’ policies in their eyes—and, at least as important, to delegitimize their opponents’ motives.
Since conservatives also believe they mean well, what distinguishes Leftists is that for the Left intentions trump results. As this book demonstrates, nearly everywhere that distinctive Leftist policies have prevailed, the results have been destructive. If people on the Left judged their beliefs by their results, few people would remain on the Left.
That is a major reason far more people leave the Left than the Right as they get older; they have had the time to look at life and see the results of their ideas. Conversely, it also helps explain why far more young people are on the Left; when one is young and more naive, intentions are what matter most.
The worst aspect of intentions-based assessments is that if one assesses intentions more than results, one’s opponents must be judged as having bad intentions. As we shall see, that is what the Left does—it is as certain of the bad intentions of conservatives as it is of its own good intentions.
WHEN GOOD PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS
In 1981, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People, a perennial bestselling book that propelled the author to international renown. Today we need another book that uses the words of Rabbi Kushner’s classic title, but addresses a different issue: When Good People Do Bad Things.
We need such a book because of the disheartening fact that much, perhaps even most, evil does not emanate from particularly evil people or even from the bad or self-centered parts of human nature, but from the good and idealistic parts. Most evil is not committed as a result of unbridled lust or greed; and the sadistic monster who revels in inflicting pain on other people is rare.
The Left has a history of many decent people supporting many bad people doing great harm. Good intentions cause most of the world’s great evils.
Take Communism, for example. The greatest mass-murdering ideology in history, the greatest destroyer of elementary human rights, was an ideology supported by millions of people who cared deeply about progress and human equality. It took Stalin’s peace pact with Hitler to awaken many Western Leftists to how evil Communism was. And still, vast numbers of Westerners went on to support Stalin, Mao, Ho, Castro, and other Communist murderers and tyrants. Were all these Westerners bad people? If a bad person is defined as one who revels in the suffering of others, of course not.
Were all the Koreans who supported the North Korean monster Kim Il Sung bad people? Were all the Russians who wept at Stalin’s funeral supporters of torture and mass murder? Of course not. For that matter, few Germans who voted for Hitler and the Nazis were voting for the extermination of the Jews.4 Aside from the core Nazi Party leadership and early true-believing members—who were Jew-haters above all—most German voters for Hitler were preoccupied with reviving Germany after World War I.
Let me restate the major lesson to be learned from all this in the words of the late Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, head of America’s Conservative rabbinate for many years. As a young man, I sought advice from him, and he offered this piece of wisdom: “I pretty much have my bad inclination [yetzer hara was the well-known Hebrew term he used] under control; it’s my good inclination [yetzer hatov] that always gets me into trouble.”
When it comes to personal relations and, even more so, to formulating social policy, intending to do good is completely insufficient. In order to do good in both the personal and social spheres, people also need wisdom, common sense, and a moral value system.
THE UNIMPORTANCE OF WISDOM
Because the Left relies heavily on feelings and intentions, wisdom and preexisting moral value systems do not count for much. This attitude was encapsulated in the famous Left-wing baby boomer admonition, “Never trust anyone over thirty.” With that sentence, the 1960s and ’70s youth announced that there was nothing to be learned about leading a good life—the purpose of all wisdom teaching since Athens and Jerusalem—from anyone older than the baby boomers, let alone anyone who lived long ago. It was enough to rely on one’s own feelings for such insights.
The Left-wing adulation of youth was part of this rejection of wisdom. One can revere youth or wisdom, but not both. Thus, the 1960s and ’70s in America saw the end of required courses at universities: Eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds would choose what to study.
Western universities have an abundance of professors with intellect, men and women who possess a vast repository of knowledge (though often in increasingly narrow areas of study), who are certain that they mean well and that they know better than others. Yet the Western university has been morally wrong on nearly every disputed great moral issue—support for Marxist ideas and causes, nuclear disarmament during the Cold War, belief that America was as responsible as the Soviet Union for the Cold War, sympathetic views of Communist tyrants such as Mao, Ho, and Castro, the portrayal of the United States and Israel as international villains, support for pacifism, and so forth.
Why? One reason is that it lacks wisdom. The university relies on the good, the “progressive,” intentions of its professors, not on the accumulated wisdom of the ages, for solutions to society’s problems. That is why, in the Left’s view, the American Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and in particular the Bible have little or nothing to teach people today. The Bible is deemed completely out of touch—its being rooted in belief in God is enough to invalidate it; the Constitution is antiquated, written by slaveholding, affluent white males who were therefore morally flawed, men of their time who could not have anticipated the complex world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In order to be relevant to today’s America, the Constitution means whatever the contemporary progressive says it means.
Those of us who grew up in religious Jewish and Christian schools were taught early in life that our heart is an awful guide to doing what is right, that the human being is essentially flawed, that human nature needs to be constantly controlled, and that the greatest moral insights preceded our birth. For this reason many Americans who studied at traditional Jewish and Christian high schools have more wisdom (though, of course, less knowledge) than many professors, artists, and editorial page writers.
For example, unlike the Left, those who value wisdom know that when you give people something for nothing, you produce ungrateful people; that when you obscure the differences between men and women, you end up with many aimless men and angry women; that when you give children “self-esteem” without their earning it, you produce narcissists who enter adulthood often incapable of empathy and of handling life; that if you do not destroy evil, it will proliferate; and that if you are kind to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the kind.
If you really want goodness to prevail, wisdom is a key to unlocking it. The heart is not. That’s why we have a minimum voting age and a minimum age for running for public office. As good as a young person may be, personal goodness is not enough to be competent to choose society’s leaders or to be one.
So, why do otherwise good people do bad things? In large part, because they lack wisdom.
STAGE ONE THINKING
The Left-wing reliance on good intentions is the major reason for what one of this generation’s greatest thinkers, Stanford professor Thomas Sowell, has called “Stage One Thinking.”
Think of a problem and ask what policies would be suggested by good intentions alone—that is, not taking into account other factors such as what works, what is responsible, and what the costs and the consequences might be—and you will understand how most Left-wing policies are devised.
Let’s take two examples.
Societal Problem: There are disproportionately fewer blacks than whites or Asians on college campuses.
Solution Suggested by Good Intentions Alone: Lower the admissions standards so as to enable more blacks to enter colleges they would otherwise not have been admitted to.
The Consequences: Blacks who were not ready for colleges that lowered standards for them dropped out of college at higher rates than other students. Liberal defenders of affirmative action dispute this by pointing out that blacks admitted to the most elite universities do not drop out at particularly higher rates. But, as Sowell points out, that is irrelevant. Harvard has no need to lower standards to admit any group. Blacks who are admitted to Harvard have very similar SAT scores to other Harvard students. What matters here is how well or poorly blacks do when admitted to universities that did lower their admissions standards in order to admit them.
Here is Sowell:
The real issue, however, is not how highly ranked the institutions are, but how big the racial difference in admissions standards has been. This they [the defenders of affirmative action] never tell us, despite mountains of statistics on everything else. From other studies, however, it is clear that racial differences in SAT scores, for example, are much smaller at Harvard (95 points) than at Duke (184 points) or Rice (271 points).
In other words, where the racial preferences in admissions are not as great, the differences in graduation rates are not as great. The critics of affirmative action were right: Racial preferences reduce the prospects of black students graduating. Other data tell the same story.
Compare racial preferences in Colorado, for example. At the flagship University of Colorado at Boulder, test score differences between black and white students have been more than 200 points—and only 39 percent of the black students graduated, compared to 72 percent of white students. Meanwhile, at the University of Colorado at Denver, where the SAT score difference was a negligible 30 points, there was also a negligible difference in graduation rates—50 percent for blacks and 48 percent for whites. (emphasis added)5
Having to drop out of a college for which they were unprepared was not the only negative effect that affirmative action programs had on black students. The other was walking through campus day after day thinking that other students wondered if you were there because you merited it or because you were black. It is difficult to overstate the humiliating impact of such thinking.
Left-wing defenders respond that any suspicions on the part of white or other students regarding the academic worthiness of black students emanate from racism. This argument is classic Leftism—since Left-wing policies come from good people (progressives), those who oppose such policies must be bad people.
Liberals further respond by asking why no one suspects the academic abilities of white students who are beneficiaries of a different type of affirmative action—those admitted to a college because their parents were alumni of, or big donors to, the college.
The answer is that other students cannot identify the white students who were admitted because of their parents. Blacks are immediately identifiable, but these students are not. If every white student admitted thanks to Mom or Dad wore a sign saying, “My parents gave a lot of money to this university,” they would walk around campus under the same cloud of doubt.
Societal Problem: Millions of citizens live under the poverty line.
Solution Suggested by Good Intentions Alone: Spend trillions of dollars on the poor.
The Consequences: Massive governmental spending has affected societies adversely. Among the many terrible consequences are a great number of citizens who come to rely on the state rather than on themselves and on their families and neighbors, the creation of an entitlement mentality that chips away at the moral foundations of society, and the rendering of the individual increasingly less significant.
Fear of the Right
FINALLY, MANY PEOPLE SUPPORT the Left, not because they necessarily affirm Leftist doctrines, but because they fear the Right. It is fair to say that the Left has succeeded in demonizing the Right more than it has succeeded in any other area of life. This is discussed in detail in the next chapter. But it must be stressed here that vast numbers of people on the Left have convinced themselves or been convinced by others that the Right is essentially fascistic, not to mention sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted, small-minded, anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-intellectual. Once one believes all this, it becomes morally compulsory to be on the Left. One does not have to seriously think through the issues. All one has to know is that he or she is against whatever positions fascistic, bigoted, anti-intellectual haters hold.
If only people who considered themselves Leftists held Left-wing views, Leftism would be far weaker. This is especially true in America where, according to Gallup 2010, only 20 percent of the population self-identifies as “liberal or very liberal.” Yet Left-wing ideas are dominant in many institutions and are held by many individuals who do not think of themselves as Leftist. Why has that happened?