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When Faced with the Failures of Leftism, Leftists Want More Leftism. But with Different Leftists.
A recent poll asked about President Biden’s job approval. Among Democrat voters, 73% of them said they approved of the job he is doing. So Biden’s voters mostly support him. But this is less true among Democrat party operatives and elected officials:
“To say our country was on the right track would flagrantly depart from reality,” DNC member Steve Simeonidis told the NYT, adding that Biden “should announce his intent not to seek re-election in ’24 right after the midterms.”
“Democrats are like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Our country is completely falling apart. And so I think we’re lacking in the excitement,” said Jasmine Crockett, Democratic nominee for a key House seat in Dallas.
The power structure within his own party is starting to wonder out loud if it might be best if President Biden were to step down very soon. But the reason they want him to do this is so that they can nominate another Democrat, which seems odd.
The Democrats have controlled the Presidency, the House, and the Senate for two years. When even those Democrats notice that America is quickly disintegrating under Democrat policies, they don’t recognize that this might have something to do with Democrat policies.
No. They just need more Democrats. And different Democrats. That should help!
This seems odd, but it’s common among leftists.
Brett Weinstein, whom I respect, was recently asked how he felt about the UN passing a “COVID treaty” in which the countries of the world would work together in future pandemics, to coordinate the power of their various governments for the common good. Mr. Weinstein explained why he was scared of this international power grab (emphasis mine):
Even if, in principle, in a well-governed world, this is exactly what we would want, And believe me, I’m a liberal, I know that we need governance at every scale that is important, And that means, that ultimately, we want some authority that’s capable of coordinating a global response, to a pandemic. But I don’t want these people anywhere near that kind of power. They have demonstrated they are incapable of wielding it responsibly. So, I am very concerned about this treaty … These people are not good at managing a complex system, and they’ve shown us that again and again.
So he emphasizes that he’s a liberal, and is a proponent of strong government. But not with these people. He doesn’t want these people anywhere near that kind of power.
Just like the Democrats above, he thinks these centralized power structures will work if only they get the right people in power. The Soviets thought the same thing. So did the Romans. So do today’s Californians.
They believe that centralized power works. But not with these people.
Which leads one to wonder which people, exactly, could make centralized power work?
I believe that many leftists would think (although they may not admit it): “People like me. Give me the power. I’d do a better job than these fools.”
The arrogance and foolishness of such an outlook are absolutely remarkable. And, among leftists, very common, in my view. I addressed this phenomenon in a post I wrote five years ago:
Even as a freshman in a college philosophy course, I thought that Plato’s Republic was satire. “People will be happy and content under the absolute authority of kings? And who does this out-of-touch philosopher think would make the best kings? Philosopher-kings? Come on – is he serious?”
My point is that while both conservatives and progressives take a dim view of human nature, their different approaches to dealing with it might be because conservatives are also skeptical about their own human nature. They don’t trust themselves in positions of power any more than anyone else. While progressives believe that if we can just find the right leader (someone like them) and put him in a position of authority, then everything will be ok.
Perhaps that is the true definition of conservatism. I used to think that conservatives just believed in basic human rights, individual liberty, and constrained government. But progressives would agree with much of that. So perhaps the best description of conservatism is simply humility.
You are not perfect, and you should not be trusted with power. And neither should I.
It will be difficult for leftists to accept that the problem is not the people, it’s the leftism. No one can make centralized control systems work, for many and varied reasons. Some of those reasons are complex, like the interactions between powerful governments and free markets. But they don’t have to understand all that. If they even understood one simple reason, that would be a start:
You are not perfect, and you should not be trusted with power. And neither should I.
Solzhenitsyn looks disappointed in us. And he should be…
The more we centralize power, the worse things get. Every time. Everywhere. Every single blessed time.
It doesn’t matter who’s in charge.
So stop changing the people in charge. Change the system. Go back to a decentralized system of federalism like our Founders gave us. We don’t need to figure out how to do this. We already have an instruction manual: our Constitution. All we have to do is read it and do what it says.
On the other hand, it’d be easier to just vote for a nice Democrat — he says he really cares about me.
Yeah, never mind. Let’s just do that.
Published in General
The power structure as you put it never disavows the policies, just the current figurehead. They like the policies and want more – with different outcomes for them. They don’t understand that the policies are intended to benefit a teeny tiny number of the current power structure, and none of these below. And – based on conversations with my sister, prior iterations in time and place(s) of the phenomenon (complete with like results) are not relevant.
I’m reminded again of some of my past neighbors in Phoenix – and, unfortunately some of my still-present relatives – whose attitude often comes down to “Wow, the Democrats have really made a mess! We have to elect more Democrats to fix it!”
It’s complicated, but it’s not satire, and Socrates is serious, and he still isn’t proposing a form of government. Probably.
But before sorting out whether he’s serious about proposing a form of government, we have to take seriously what he says the whole conversation is about. It’s about the soul.
I don’t think that part is odd at all. What I find odd is how the Leftist Democrat power structure allowed things to develop in a way that made Joe Biden the only viable candidate to oppose Trump, and even Biden was questionable so we had lots of questionable practices in the election itself. Joe Biden has never, in my opinion, held to any particular political principles very strongly, he’s always been for Joe Biden. I think Democrats just found themselves in a tight spot and they got Biden, not a real committed, on the record, Leftist
The speaker’s voice has steadily increased in precision and clarity over the past few years to the point where no one on Ricochet, and few popularly read intellectuals elsewhere, express the fundamental moral and intellectual conflict of politics today more clearly. Very few even say it as clearly.
Just my opinion, obviously.
This has been the argument I have gotten every time it is pointed out that leftism has never worked, “But they didn’t have us; we will do it better.” Barack Obama even made that explicit in one of his speeches, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
Well what do you expect? Who else can they vote for? A Republican? Those guys are all Hitler worshippers looking for the next Hitler. They hate everybody that is not a white Christian hetro.
Your view has been criticized recently on these pages as being hypocritical., by this argument:
Keep going. There was nothing defensible about that guy’s groupings. They were completely self serving. At least conservatives and progressives are already defined, well grouped and with widely known concepts of what they are.
This is the obverse of the conservative’s problem. Do not conservatives make similar arguments when Republicans are in control and things are not going as well as expected? “Yes,” we say, “we have the Presidency and a majority in Congress and the Senate but it’s these Rinos who are the problem. We need better Republicans.” So the conservative position is exactly a systemic solution, that is, to encourage a return to the Constitution’s solutions, but by trying to elect better Republicans. Considering how often we are disappointed, perhaps this, too, is a mirage.
I’ve concluded we should have children recite the Penitential Act instead of the Pledge of Allegiance in school:
I confess to almighty God
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have greatly sinned,
in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done and in what I have failed to do,
(striking breast three times) through my fault, through my fault,
through my most grievous fault;
therefore I ask blessed Mary ever Virgin,
all the Angels and Saints,
and you, my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God.
I’m’a shorten that process. “Lord Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me, a sinner” seems ok. Or whatever the guy said in the Bible. Or however the Jesus Prayer goes.
I like the comprehensiveness of “greatly sinned, in what I have done, and what I have failed to do.” I also think striking the breast reinforces by physical means one’s faults in grubby sinfulness. The abbreviated confessing oneself as “a sinner” isn’t quite as potent.
Many people of the left feel a deep existential fear of productive people. They fear for their survival in a world not controlled and curated like Disneyland. This fear is very deep and always unexamined.
This explains, for instance, their cartoonish reaction to DJT.
Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy lovingkindness; according unto the multitude of Thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions; and my sin is ever before me. Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation; and uphold me with Thy free Spirit.
— Psalm 51:1-3,10-12
There. That oughta hold you.
The Anglican version is close to yours…
Its been some years since I’ve been to a service, so I’m missing beginning and ending… but I remember this part.
Ideally, yes. (I was only wanting to shorten the last bit.)
Full up Lutheran version:
It’s not arrogance to say that you would do a better job than the morons in charge. That’s just a function of their incompetence. I’m pretty sure a random member of Ricochet would be a better president than Biden.
There are good kings and bad kings, after all, and one leader can be the difference between death & survival. Besides, we trust people with power over us all the time. If you say we can’t be trusted with power, they will say we can’t be trusted with guns.
I think it is better to look at the issue as will the system work well, if at all? If we replicated the Enterprise from Star Trek, it doesn’t matter if we have ace test pilots, veteran astronauts, and the most competent ship captain in naval history. It is not going to fly since it doesn’t work.
That’s the real kicker – even if we had the best leaders out there, centralized government is less efficient than distributed government. The Left model is a 1980s mainframe, the Right is a distributed computing cluster, with each node also being its own cluster. We have government that is fault tolerant with redundancies. Much like the human body, we can react to crises without central direction.
Do you confess your sins to the church (the Body — my brothers and sisters)? Do you pray for one another? Are there any more righteous members of the Body than Mary and the Angels and Saints in heaven? Paul was an intercessor (mediator). Are you? Do your prayers for others go to the Head — to Jesus?
There is nothing wrong with the Penitential Act as written and prayed. It is comprehensive.
Soviets = Romans = Californians. Love it Dr. B. So true.
Yes, yes, no, yes.
Yes.
I simply don’t know enough Democrats to know what’s going on in their brains. I know one where I can say unambiguously there is nothing going on and one who is totally engaged in a low population state who does good stuff but simply does not understand why the federal government can’t do anything well. Let’s face it, the Federal bureaucracy is more serious, more educated, in theory, if was in their interest to do so, could see more of the country more clearly than city bureaucrats or state politicians, or just regular citizens. The thing is they are unambiguously less accountable and less vulnerable too anything they might do that harms the country or citizens, so of course are better at pursuing their own interests than local bureaucrats.
Less accountable, so able to do more bad things without consequence.
If you ain’t rending your garment, you ain’t that sorry.
And honestly, would a little flesh mortification kill you? Well, ok, it might.
I’ve been working with Augustine’s commentaries/sermons on the Psalms. I don’t know if he said this, but I can almost feel myself reading him:
Maybe some modern pastor could elaborate in the Augustinian mode:
Fear and resentment: Unproductive people are naturally attracted to any political system that promises them undeserved rewards.
“Lord Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me, a sinner”-It is known as the Jesus Prayer-especially popular in the Eastern Churches and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
By the logic of the left they are correct. The lefts holds its ideas are inerrant-their vision will bring the eschaton , failure is due to insufficient expertise of the agents (ie lack of proper training/education) or moral failure (opposition or lack of effort). So try again with more perfected leaders….this also explains why they see the right as either stupid (lack of education/brains to recognize what the left holds as self evident) or evil (refuse to see). When they say that a conservative is evil it just means they agree he isn’t stupid-but often they just shift back & forth between the two alternatives, as in GW Bush is a “chimp/Hitler”.
Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions” is a great exposition on the underlying differences between the right & the left. He uses the terms “constrained vs unconstrained” view of man. I have probably promoted the book on an earlier thread.
“Our chief weapon is fear … fear and resentment … resentment and fear …. Our two weapons are fear and resentment … and hopeless inefficiency …. Our three weapons are fear, and resentment, and hopeless inefficiency …. and an almost fanatical devotion to the tropes …. Our four … I’ll come in again.”