. . . to beat progressives (and this remedy is always temporary). In the meantime, however, we can laugh at them. America's master of ceremonies for mocking the left is P.J. O'Rourke. Read and enjoy:
Faith and greed make me . . .
. . . a Reagan conservative. I admit to conventional amounts of both. But it is the shocking convictions and astonishing grabbiness of the Left that impels me to the Right. Since the eighteenth-century beginnings of foolish modern political thought, the utopians, anarchists, syndicalists, communists, socialists, progressives, liberals, members of the Democratic Leadership Conference -- let the Jacobins call themselves what they may -- have wanted everything. They don't want to improve institutions, laws, and material well-being. That's not enough for them. They want to improve you. Being kind to minorities and the poor isn't sufficient; you have to identify with the oppressed. Proper custodianship of natural resources isn't adequate; you must be sensitive to the environment. Tolerating people whose values, tastes, and modes of existence are peculiar or distasteful won't do; you need to celebrate their diversity.
The Left does not want a world of people with better lives. It wants life in a world of better people. God made people. To remake them requires all the power of God and -- with the suppression of free will -- then some. Thirsting for more power than God is greed on a scale to shock the most rapacious Martha Stewart.
The Left desires people to be virtuous. And, to be fair, the leftists desire to be virtuous themselves. Unfortunately, they covet virtue so much that they take moral shortcuts to achieve it. In left-wing life, as in left-wing legislation, easy words are given the credit of difficult deeds. Mere declaration of "War on Poverty" was enough to give the Great Society heroes their triumph and victory parade. When a Reagan conservative says that someone "means well," it's hardly a compliment. But when a Clinton liberal says someone "wants to do good," it's enough to excuse a Clinton (or two).
And the good that the Left wants to do is to be done not with their goods or their services but with ours. Taking a single thing from anybody is theft. Taking many thinks from a lots of people is social justice -- because, then, everything can be given back to everyone. By the circular logic of collectivism, the Left leads its audience around the political stage and behind an Iron Curtain.
Not that today's Left means to take power the way Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro did. Modern leftists are too anxious in their gluttony for command. They don't have the patience for long years of tedious organizing. And fighting the kind of revolutionary wars that led to communist dictatorships could get a caring, sharing person hurt. Why bother with all that when the bar to entry in politics is set so low? Becoming a Teddy Kennedy requires no prior accomplishments and even fewer accomplishments thereafter. Just say that man is good inside and vow to turn man inside-out. Economic greed requires buying and selling at values set by the marketplace. Political greed can be satisfied in return for pious sentiments that cost nothing (at least to those who hold them).
Thus the Left worships government. From government all blessings flow. Government is omniscient and omnipotent, or should be, or will be soon. Some on the left say that they believe in God, as well -- thought I doubt the compliment is returned. The real faith of the Left is the holy goodness of humanity (as soon as the Left gets humanity reformed) and the collective cosmic solidarity of mankind. These pious sentiments have been heard since the time of that poetic genius -- and political idiot -- Percy Bysshe Shelly:
Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul, / Whose nature is his own divine control
But leave it to Lenin to put it more bluntly: "Man is god to man"
We've seen just what kind of god, with Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. But suppose an example of the virtuous "New Man" imagined by the Left reigns over heaven and earth. Call him "Ben." Or call him "Jerry." Anyway, Adam sacrifices all his ribs and half his backbone so that the Garden of Eden is representative of the full spectrum of human sexuality. Endangered species go first into the Ark. (Now, who do we get those brontosaurs out of the vegetable garden?) Moses is called to the mountaintop to retrieve the Ten Thousand Commandments cajoling the Israelites to be "in touch with themselves" and deploring behavior that's "hurtful, divisive." Joshua blows his horn and the residents of Jericho joins in on recorders and tambourines. There's no capital punishment in the Judea of Pontius Pilate. Jesus does three to five in a minimum security imperial pen. He writes The Gospel of Prison Reform and starts a socially conscious, sustainable small business by using his heavenly powers to invent refrigeration. The symbol of universal salvation is an ice cream sundae. We are blessed with an infinite number of cleverly named delicious flavors. But we are required by law to use someone else's tongue to lick them.
(P.J. O'Rourke, "The Shocking Convictions and Astonishing Grabbiness of the Left," essay contributed to Michael K. Deaver, ed., Why I Am a Reagan Conservative (William Morrow 2005)
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