Hate is the Force that Gives the Left Meaning
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The American left has never had it this good. It
has never had two terms of an unabashed and
uncompromising leftist in the White House dedicated
to its agenda functioning as a dictator without the
military uniform, making and unmaking laws at a
whim, siccing the IRS and Federal prosecutors on
political enemies and transforming the country at a
breathtaking pace.
Obama is what generations of the left have
dreamed of and worked toward. This is the flicker of
hopethey kept alive after JFK's assassination, the
Nixon years, Carter's collapse and the long stretch
of Reaganomics. This is what Bill Clinton robbed
them of prematurely by gauging his actions against
the polls instead of blasting full steam ahead
regardless of what the public wanted.
The left finally has its Un-American tyranny. So why
is it so angry?
Watch MSNBC or browse any left-wing site and you see
a level of anger that would make you think that Al
Gore had just conceded or Nixon had just won
reelection. There's more anger in the privileged
circles of the left than in the political rearguard
of the Tea Party.
That anger trickles from the top down. Obama's
interview with Bill O'Reilly was yet another
opportunity for the most powerful man in the country
to blame a vast right wing conspiracy. A day doesn't
pass without another email from Obama, his wife,
Sandra Fluke or Joe Biden warning that without
another five or ten dollar contribution, the "right"
will take over America.
The left has unchallenged control over the
government, academia and the entertainment industry
and yet it talks as if the country is 5 seconds away
from Sarah Palin marching into Washington D.C. at
the head of an army of Duck Dynasty fans to outlaw
abortion.
The apocalyptic political paranoia and the
uncontrolled outbursts of rage haven’t changed much
since 2003. Ten years later, the ideologues in power
still act as if George W. Bush is serving out his
fourth term. Every day on MSNBC, a stew of
conspiracy theories about oil companies, Israel, the
Koch Brothers, Wal-Mart and Karl Rove leaves a slimy
trail across the television screen.
On the internet, manufactured outrage has become the
only progressive stock in trade. Did Jerry Seinfeld
say that he values humor over racial quotas? He's a
racist. Did an ESPN magazine out a compulsive liar
who also happened to be pretending to be a woman?
Lock him up. Did Mike Huckabee say something that
could be misinterpreted with enough ellipses and out
of context “Twitterized” quotes? Before you know it,
he's a sexist pig.
Pageviews are the obvious profit motive behind all
this and yet it says something deeply disturbing
about a progressive readership that eats up hate and
doesn't react to anything positive. The rash of fake
hate crimes feeds into that same perverse need for
an enemy to hate and fight. The left used to pretend
that it wanted to do something positive. But now
that it has the power, it can't stop searching for
someone to hate instead.
The left is more comfortable being angry than being
anything else; it finds it easier to rally the
troops against something than for something so that
even its triumphs only lead to more anger. The MSNBC
tweet about an interracial Cheerios commercial was
revealing of a deeper problem within the left. It
was assumed that the MSNBC audience wouldn't care
about an interracial ad unless it could somehow
pretend to “spite” the right by watching it.
Obama's awkward stumble from cause to cause, letting
the old Bush policies run on Autoplay unless a
crusade kicks in, as it eventually did on gay
marriage and illegal immigration, is indicative of
the problem with the left's governing style. As with
an interracial Cheerios commercial, it cares less
about gay marriage or legalizing illegal aliens than
it does about stirring up conflict.
Like an overgrown teenager for whom music or
clothes aren't about enjoying life or expressing an
identity, but about upsetting and offending his or
her parents, the left needs the negative validation
of the right to be secure in its bad choices.
Without that negative feedback to affirm its
rebellion, its pet causes no longer seem all that
compelling or meaningful.
That is another reason why the left began neglecting
some of its bread and butter issues after Obama won.
Aside from the need to protect its own man, it
wasn't really all that interested in closing Gitmo,
gay marriage or opposing the War in Iraq. The things
it wants to do are never as important to it as its
obsessive need to feel that it is fighting against
the right.
For all the Obama Worship, the left is more united
by hatred for Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz or any other
conservative villain of the month than by its
support for its own leaders. It derives its identity
more from the things that it is against, the middle
class, the country, the businessman, the white male,
than from the things that it is for.
The left's sense of self is strongest when it is
attacking, not when it is inspiring, when it is
destroying, not when it is building.
Deprived of an external enemy, its ideologues carve
out narrow orthodoxies and denounce each other for
violating them. When the right and the center have
been purged, the purges of the left begin and don’t
end until there is nothing left except one
tyrant-guru and his terrified minions. Or until some
outside force throws a pot of cold water on the
quarreling and shrieking acolytes brawling over
minor points of doctrine.
The small scale bloodsport documented in the outward
reaches of feminism by The Nation in its article
"Feminism's Toxic Twitter Wars" as transgender
rights activists denounce Eve Ensler for excluding
them by using the word "Vagina" and black feminists
denounce white feminists for ignoring their
concerns. This is what the left begins doing when it
has free time on its hands. It doesn't stop
fighting. Instead its wars become pettier power
struggles over points of doctrine.
When all enemies to the right have been eliminated,
the left doesn't find peace. Its ideology is a
weapon, its gurus are egomaniacs and its followers
joined to fight. When it wins in an arena, whether
it's academia or entertainment, the winners begins
warring against each other proving that even in an
ideological vacuum, its ideology remains a
destructive force whose followers would rather
denounce and destroy, than educate and enlighten.
As a victorious parasite writes its own obituary, a
successful left is a threat to its own existence and
the only thing saving the left from the violent
disintegration into its own insanity is the right.
Hating the right is the only thing that keeps the
left together. When it doesn't have Nixon to kick
around anymore, it dissolves into a wet puddle of
goo. If it didn't have Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Mitt
Romney and every other figure who took his turn
starring in their grim theater of the Two Minutes
Hate, it would revert back to the petty infighting
of a thousand minor eccentric causes.
The left needs to believe in a vast right-wing
conspiracy. It needs the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove,
Evangelical Christians, AIPAC, oil companies,
defense contractors and every other element of its
conspiracy theories to keep its gurus and followers
focused on the "real" threat instead of purging each
other for tone policing, insufficient privilege
checking and any other outrage of the week.
Like the Salafists shooting and shelling each other
in Syria, the ranks of the left are filled with
dogmatic and intolerant fanatics whose only goal in
life is the absolute victory of their point of view.
Their mutual fanaticism and aggrieved sense of
victimhood gives them more in common with each other
and that very commonality is the source of their
mutual hatred. Only they can understand each other
well enough to truly want to kill each other as no
outsider possibly can.
Hate is the force that gives the left meaning. It
isn't hope that animates its leaders and thinkers,
but the darker side of human nature that calls on
them to destroy and to kill. That dark side is why
the left's victories end in tragedies, why the red
flags are painted with blood and when its followers
have run out of enemies to kill, they turn on each
other and destroy their own movements with firing
squads, gulags and guillotines.
The left finds its identity not in its utopian
visions, but in the things and people it wishes to
destroy. Only by knowing what they hate, do its
followers know who they are.