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My 750th post: The GUTOL (Grand Unified Theory Of Leftism)
There has been an interesting exchange of ideas recently on Ricochet, in this order:
- I recently wrote a post in which I wondered how my leftist friends, who are intelligent and nice people, could vote for leftism, given its horrifying record of humanitarian catastrophes around the globe.
- Henry responded with a brilliant post in which he suggested that leftism resonates with unhappy people: “My theory is that miserable people often can’t accept that they are miserable for internal reasons, so they externalize.” He suggested that if the left was motivated by compassion for the poor, they would promote capitalism, so the poor could become rich. But instead, they lash out at those they think are making them miserable – the wealthy, the producers, and even society itself. Thus, he says, “Among the hard leftists is a hatred of what is good and beautiful is more of a motivation than compassion.”
- In the comments of Henry’s post, Bryan tossed in this nugget of wisdom: “I think you touch on something very true here, in that miserable people cannot appreciate beauty or joy. I see this more on an individual level in my practice. People do not want to focus on the things they can control and instead spend their energy and attention on things they cannot control. As an example, being a victim absolves one of responsibility, but also agency. It is a miserable way to live.”
- Then iWe suggested in a post (which I don’t think was intended to be part of this discussion) that he didn’t believe that people wanted to really live. He wrote that most people simply want to get through life with a minimum of difficulty, and are reluctant to live life with vigor and passion.
All of this got my propeller spinning a bit. Let’s see if I can make sense of all this.
First, in defense of my simplistic question, I think this is a very important point. In national elections, Democrats consistently win around half the popular vote. That’s incredible. The party of slavery, the party that promotes the same leftism that led to the deaths of 100 million people in the 1900s, the party that is led by inspiring, youthful, charismatic figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer – that party wins about half the popular vote. Regardless of who their candidate is at the time.
And most of the people that vote for Democrats are nice, caring, intelligent, pleasant people. I find that astounding.
Henry’s response was brilliant, I thought. Leftists claim to want a Utopia. And maybe they do, on a certain level. But their primary motivation is punishing whoever they blame for their problems.
Now, we all have problems. But not all of us blame others for our problems. P.J. O’Rourke wrote something like, “One problem with becoming a conservative was that I had more difficulty finding someone to blame for my problems.”
Taking responsibility for our problems is unpleasant. The painful soul-searching needed to find and correct our own flaws is even more unpleasant. It’s easier to just blame rich people. Or Jews. Or Christians. Or heterosexual white males. Or whoever. Anybody but you. You’re a helpless victim of forces beyond your control. That makes you virtuous and that makes government your only hope. Which gives you, and your government, more power than you deserve. And more power than is safe.
Then, to Bryan’s point, I’ve also noticed over the course of my career that people much prefer to have problems that they can’t do anything about.
If someone develops diabetes, I’ll say, “You know, it might help if you don’t live on donuts, sweet tea, Little Debbies, and Fritos.”
The patient will immediately become defensive: “It’s genetic! My brother has diabetes too!”
Me: “He’s my patient, too. And you’re right, he also has diabetes. Because he lives on donuts, sweet tea, Little Debbies, and Fritos.”
I’ve had patients transfer to another doctor after conversations like that. But if I tell them that they have pancreatic cancer and they’re going to be dead in three months, they’re strangely reassured by the fact that it was just bad luck. Not their fault. Which makes it more tolerable, somehow.
Which brings up iWe’s (possibly unintentional) contribution to this discussion. If people wanted to live their best life, they would want to take control of their lives. But taking control would mean also taking responsibility for their lives. Which is difficult. So they voluntarily give up control over their lives, to be absolved of responsibility over their lives.
Either way, things will go wrong. There will be disappointments in your life, no matter who’s responsible.
But if they are responsible for their own disappointments, that leads to unpleasant periods of self-doubt and agonizing efforts at self-improvement. Very difficult stuff. No fun whatsoever.
But if government is responsible for their disappointments, then it’s not their fault. Less pressure on them, I suppose.
What they don’t understand is that lack of control over one’s life also leads to bitter resentments. For example, I prescribe a medicine to a patient. It’s expensive. He asks if there are cheaper options. I say yes, but they’re not quite as effective. He says fine, give me the cheaper one, I’ll call you if it doesn’t work, and he’s pleased to have saved some money. But if he were on a government health care plan that refused to pay for the good stuff and instead gave him the second-rate drug, he’d be furious.
Either way, he gets the second-rate drug. But in one case he’s happy, and in the other case he’s furious.
Allowing others to control your life leads to anger and resentment. But still, to iWe’s point, many still prefer to avoid taking responsibility for themselves. So they become the miserable recruits for the Democrat party that Henry described in his post.
We tell children, from the age of 3 to their early 20s: Ok, you’re a good person. You don’t have to change – you’re as good as it gets, right now. What a horrifying concept. You’ve just extinguished any hope they have for the future.
By telling them that they are winners – and they can’t fail – you’re also telling them that they can’t succeed. It’s hopeless. No wonder they’re miserable. No wonder they look for someone to blame for their misery.
Ok, so let me try to tie all this together:
Society is fairly prosperous and stable, so many people lead happy, wealthy lives.
But some do not. And those people don’t wonder why they have failed while others have succeeded. Instead, those people look for others to blame. They blame family, religion, societal norms, and other restrictive systems which limit their behavior.
The successful people feel bad for the less successful, so they also criticize and attack the family, religion, and societal norms that led to their own success, out of sympathy for the less fortunate.
Once enough people turn against family, religion, and societal norms, then those things start to lose influence. We start to raise children without those things. After all, we don’t want to oppress them.
Those children, lacking the wisdom of the ages and lacking structure, understandably become miserable adults.
If you’re raised on nihilism, and you believe that your life has no greater purpose than the pursuit of immediate pleasures, and you believe it’s up to someone else to provide them for you, then nothing is ever good enough. And you’re bound to be miserable. Happiness becomes impossible.
Those miserable adults are naturally hesitant to believe that their misery is their own fault (and you could argue that it’s not). So they blame those who are more fortunate. Miserable people hate happy people.
The miserable people feel vindicated and virtuous. They literally can do no wrong – crimes are not criminal if they’re done for the greater good. So their attacks on family, religion, and societal norms become progressively more vicious.
The successful become evil, the less successful become good. Kids start smoking pot and playing video games. Why would they work their tails off simply to become successful, and thus, evil? So we get progressively more unsuccessful, miserable people who want government control, and progressively less successful, happy people who want personal independence.
And eventually we reach a critical mass of miserable people. So government power becomes overwhelming. For everyone.
Now family, religion, and societal norms go from supporting a stable society to having no supporters whatsoever. They shrivel and die, and nobody cares. Government will take care of us. That’s more fair.
The culture that supported that previously stable & prosperous society collapses completely, and everyone wonders why. It must be the Republicans’ fault…
Hmmm…
I don’t know. This made more sense in my head than it does now, after I tried to write it out. I still find it astounding that Democrats win half the national vote every time. And I’m amazed that my nice, intelligent, compassionate friends vote for them.
I just don’t get it. I guess because my brain just doesn’t work like that.
But maybe this is at least a partial explanation. Fear of failure leads to willing forfeiture of one’s autonomy, which leads to resentment and misery, which leads to the hatred of happiness and beauty and opportunity, which leads to attacks on the independence of others, which leads to more government power, which leads to misery, and around and around we go.
I guess.
I don’t know.
What do you think?
NOTE: I very much appreciate the contributions of @henrycastaigne, @bryangstephens, and @iwe to this essay. If I misrepresented your views in any way, please let me know and I’ll make corrections. Thanks.
Published in General
That’s maybe what they claim, for sure. Or at least that’s what they used to claim. But they seem to have given up on trying to lift up the less-fortunate, and instead have become intent on dragging down the more-fortunate.
I’m just happy to be mentioned.
Right. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Serious about public policy and social statistics. I think he pretty much said that the Great Society was a disaster. It’s not like that now, and people are deluded if they think it is or if it’s ever going to be like that anytime soon.
It’s also the Austrian view. Completely different solutions, obviously.
Fairness itself isn’t fair.
Why does one guy work hard all his life and spend it all on lavish houses and vacations and leaves his children nothing, while another guy works just as hard all his life and forgoes pleasure spending, but when he leaves the inheritance aggregated of all his hard work to his children they are considered unfairly advantaged?
And more to the point perhaps, why does one guy work hard all his life and enjoy a good middle class existence, while another guy who doesn’t work hard or at all and yet expects to get what the one who worked hard has — and he expects “the government” to take it from the man who worked hard and give it to him? And all the while the the guy who worked hard is considered greedy and is reviled.
For examples, why does a guy come to the US from a 3rd-world country, get accepted into American society, rise to upper-level corporate management, and then in the middle of it all leave his American wife and child and move to central America to live in a rustic bungalow by the beach and live on what little he makes on the the side — while another 3rd-world guy from the same equatorial latitude moves to the US, is accepted, stays in the US, rises to the top of a US corporation and decides to buy a hectare of land walking distance from the first guy, build an up-scale house on it, fence it in, have a state of the art security system with guards and dogs, only to visit it from the US for vacations?
Two smart guys otherwise the same sociologically, two different personalities, two different choices, one makes money and lives very well, and the other one gives it all up for his old 3rd-world existence. One guy wants to work hard, and one guy doesn’t. Where’s the fairness or unfairness in all of this?
And that democrat mind set stretches far beyond the US. It’s the default setting for my generation and younger too.
I have an uncle who’s very good natured but who’s had his head turned by all the CNN he’s watched over the years. We were arguing at a family wedding recently and I asked him why he was defending the side that didn’t represent his values. His answer boiled down to wanting to support the party who cared about the poor but also a dislike of thinking of himself as a conservative. The term has so baggage even for someone in their 70’s.
I think I would like you immensely in person.
They think central planning works and you’ll never get it out of their head. They don’t exist unless it “works”.
Everybody needs to stick to discussing public policy as much as possible. If they don’t want to do it, they aren’t serious and they may or may not admit it to themselves.
Why thank you!
I don’t know many Democrats, but there are a couple of things the ones I know have in common. They do not read much and seldom read history or insightful contemporary political books. They do not have broad experience across the US and almost no experience outside the US, so lack a sense of how the US is (was) so fundamentally different. They only watch mainstream television so never hear alternative views on much of anything political.
Oh… I’m sure some of them deserved it.
By tearing the strong and beautiful down like an official Handicapper.
I think some of the criticisms of Zafar’s response may be a bit off base here.
I don’t think Zafar is suggesting that Democrats (or leftists) are able to (or even interested in) make life more fair. He’s simply pointing out that this is the Democrat marketing strategy.
Obviously, when Democrats (or leftists) are in charge, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the government becomes more powerful. Castro took over Cuba promising to liberate the poor from their oppressors, but once he took over he (surprise!) made the poor poorer, the rich richer, the government more powerful, and he became one of the richest men in the world. This is a recurring theme throughout history, over and over again.
The poor in America (black and white) did much better under Reagan than they did under Carter. The lower classes in America (black and white) did better under Trump than any president since we started keeping track of such things. But that didn’t matter.
So yes, it’s obviously true that Democrats (and leftists) make things less fair, not more. Ok, fine.
But still, this is the marketing strategy that the Democrats (and leftists) use, regardless of the inevitable outcomes of their policies. Perhaps Republicans have something to learn from the success of this marketing strategy.
So Zafar is correct, in my view. Taking advantage of the “life is not fair” fears is certainly “the Democrats’ thing”.
And it works.
NOTE: Zafar, if I misrepresented your point, please correct me. But I think I see where you’re coming from, and I agree.
It seems to me that the complaint about life being “not fair” is usually wicked, being based on envy and resentment.
There are exceptions, I think, in circumstances in which someone is genuinely treated unfairly by a particular individual or institution. An example would be substandard education provided to black children in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. That was unfair, I think.
But one person having superior natural endowments in some areas, or having parents who provide more support and opportunity, is not “unfair,” in my view. It’s just the way that things are.
I think that it is particularly damaging to direct the argument about “unfairness” toward benefits provided by parents. Say that you have pretty good parents, who provide you with a prosperous childhood and many opportunities. This certainly does give you an advantage over someone who did not have such parents. Are you supposed to feel guilty about that?
I think that you should feel grateful.
The answer to these complaints is to be disagreeable, I think. To point out that I don’t feel guilty about having had good parents. I’m very thankful for that. If you didn’t, that’s rough, and you should do the best that you can. But put the blame on your bad parents, where it belongs. Do better. Grow up to be like my parents.
From what I can see, Zafar may understand the actual evils of leftism, but supports them anyway for his own selfish purposes because he sees the left as being more favorable towards homosexuality.
Which is probably another mistake based on falling for their marketing, but I doubt he could ever see it. Even if he can see how others are deceived by the left’s marketing, he has his own blind spot that likely cannot be corrected.
Ummm…
I didn’t read his comment that way. Although, obviously, I could be wrong.
If I misinterpreted his statement, I apologize.
Well, it’s not all in this one post/thread. Here, he shows how he sees the problems of the left/Democrats with clear eyes and thinking. Everywhere else, he supports them over conservatism. Most likely because he views them as being more favorable towards homosexuality. (i.e., himself.) At least, I can’t think of any other reason for the self-contradiction/cognitive dissonance.
I think it’s more productive to think of leftism as unchecked radicalism. That is, I don’t think it’s a particular philosophy, but rather an extreme expression of a generally hostile relationship with the established order.
As long as the institutions — the press, the universities, entertainment — were not dominated by radicals, radicalism was kept in check by the weight of popular opinion. The drug-addled beatnik, the shaggy hippy, the bomb-throwing Marxist, all of these were seen as outsiders, rejected by normal people and the institutions that reflected their views.
But the institutions changed. For reasons that I suspect have more to do with rapidly growing post-war prosperity and the shrinking agricultural sector than anything deep and philosophical, the tail of the baby boom generations grew up simultaneously secure and bored. Fewer kids grew up working alongside their parents, inculcated with respect for those parents and for the world of adult labor they inhabited.
A kid who grows up on a farm knows how to farm. A kid who grows up watching his father put on a suit and go to the office knows little about what his father does to earn a living. Growing up is hard enough; growing up in a world you know you don’t understand, but that you know you’ll soon have to enter, is harder still. I think it breeds a kind of fearful resentment in a lot of young people, a desire to see the adult world they don’t understand as a shallow rat race.
Tune in, turn on, drop out.
Still, you need a job. The smarter more capable ones go where they have a lot of personal autonomy, where the standards are subjective, where a particular kind of creativity — the kind that doesn’t require a lot of precise math and years of boring and exacting instruction — is rewarded. They end up in the arts and humanities, in entertainment, in politics — pretty much any sector where objective assessment is difficult, and there is little direct one-on-one feedback that could challenge them. Teaching, the press, entertainment — these are all fields where opinions flow overwhelmingly one way, from the performer to the audience, and in which the performer needn’t engage in a dialogue.
And there can’t be a dialogue, because most new and untested ideas are bad. Conservatism works because it values tested ideas, whereas radicalism embraces new and untested ideas. Few of us are as smart as all of us.
Most people remain conservative, but radicals have colonized high-leverage opinion shaping spaces, other than talk radio which is inherently bi-directional and so unsuited to the left. These are environments in which radicals thrive, in which their affinity for novelty and disregard for traditional forms is rewarded, and in which ideas can remain safely untested. (I think the press was an exception, until corrupted by J-school graduates who had been taught that it was a venue for activism.)
This is an important distinction, and it intersects nicely with this:
I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the breathtaking speed with which the Democratic Party went from relatively normal and sustainable to just plain nuts.
I’ll give you an example: Back in 2007, three authors were nominated for the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers prize for nonfiction. They were:
Kate Braestrup’s memoir Here If You Need Me (Little, Brown)
Elizabeth Samet’s nonfiction title Soldier’s Heart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
and Yaroslav Trofimov’s The Siege of Mecca (Doubleday)
SORRY: Accidentally posted before adding the part that seems important! All three books are on subjects, and have themes, that would exclude them from consideration for such a prize today. (Also, and not incidentally, all three writers are white).
Samet’s book was about teaching literature to soldiers at West Point: ” Intimate and poignant, Soldier’s Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet’s relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet’s former students share what books and movies mean to them–the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. ”
Trofimov’s book is about the events of November 20, 1979, when “worldwide attention was focused on Tehran, where the Iranian hostage crisis was entering its third week. That same morning, gunmen stunned the world by seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca, creating a siege that trapped 100,000 people and lasted two weeks, inflaming Muslim rage against the United States and causing hundreds of deaths. But in the days before CNN and Al Jazeera, the press barely took notice.”
And Braestrup’s book—which is, of course, brilliant! Not to be Missed!—was about a chaplain who works directly and intimately with law enforcement officers on search and rescue missions in the Maine woods, giving comfort to people whose loved ones are missing, and to the wardens who sometimes have to deal with awful outcomes.
The past is another country. They do things differently there.
But fifteen years? In discussions with various people who have reason to know about such things, I am persuaded that any of these three books would be hard pressed, today, to find even a toehold in the liberal world of book publishing, let alone enjoy acclaim and success.
At the same time, I am often approached by people who want to tell me how much they love “Here If You Need Me” and still give it to friends: They would be shocked to learn that this book might not even have been published today. There is, in other words, a disconnect between the world that normal people think they (still) live in, and the deeply weird, twilight world that the left has imposed. Most of my friends think, for example, that #BLM is sort of MLK with nose-rings: That it seeks reform not revolution. Unless and until a normal, nice, left-leaning person bangs up against one of the jagged new realities, they can keep going and keep voting for the “nice” people for years. I’ve got friends who voted for Biden thinking they were voting for “nice normal,” believing, in fact, that America would then return to the Democratic Party of the 1990s, when it was okay to need and like cops, and it was understood that America had racism like a kind of virus, but wasn’t congenitally or intrinsically racist.
100%
The left and the Democrats are going backwards if they don’t force things around like this.
Just for the record, the quote structure is wrong there. That is Old Batho’s writing, not mine.
Just for the record, the grammar structure is wrong there. That would be Old Bathos’s. (Adding ‘s rather than just ‘ because Old Bathos is – apparently – one person.)
I’m sorry. I always somehow screw that up.
Most simply put: leftism is a meta-idea. It isn’t a set of values or ideas unique to people on the left. Rather, it’s a way of thinking and feeling about ideas themselves and deciding which to embrace and which to reject.
Conservatives are wary of new ideas, and radicals are dismissive of old ideas.
There is no limiting principle on the left. If it doesn’t “work”, do more.
On the right, the limiting principle is what you are going to privatize. A million years from now, if we are lucky, the GOP and the anarchists are going to argue about what they are going to privatize.
Yes and the Lefties never consider the consequences until it s too late.
First we had to let in as many immigrants as could climb a small hillside serving as a detriment to their getting across the border, as otherwise it would be unfair to leave them in the poverty south of the border.
Then it was unfair to expect the immigrants to learn English. (Despite the fact that prior to the mid-1980’s, each and every immigrant group who came here either attempted to learn the language of the land, or at least to encourage their children to do so.)
But those advantages were not enough. Soon it became expected practice to allow any who applied at the County Social Services centers a full AFDC check, whether they were working or not, food stamps, free med care, free medical insurance and now free tuition at the University of Calif pricey university system.
On top of that, nursing agencies clinics and hospitals employ doctors, nurses, and others who barely speak English. There is a Calif state law on the books that stipulates any health workers must speak the language of the majority of their clients. But it is conveniently ignored.
Recently my husband was recently assigned a very rude arrogant Chinese doctor whose English was so poor that Mark said most of the visit was spent with him saying “Excuse me… What did you just say?”
The next day the clinic called us to tell him an audiologist consult was needed, as this Chinese woman decided his hearing was bad. (For a man whose hearing is so good that he wakes up at night because a cricket three blocks away is chirping.)
Luckily we were able to arrange for a different doctor.
And as Vonnegut used to say, “And so it goes.”
How do they get away with having Chinese doctors in Mexifornia?
I expect the law would be strictly enforced in that situation.
Somewhat in defense of Zafar, let me just say that being supported (or being rejected) by a group does tend to color the view one takes of them.
For instance, had the left not made a specific target of American police officers, and lied about them persistently, causing genuine and even lethal harm, it probably would have taken me longer to recognize all the other flaws and problems.
And because conservatives did not make a practice of attacking people I love and care about, I was more inclined to listen generously to them (that is, to y’all) when you were speaking about non-law-enforcement subjects.
For many people I know, “conservatism” is conflated with Christian conservatism which is then conflated with “of the kind that is or wants to be cruel to my gay brother.” So many people have a gay or lesbian family member that loyalty to that person can make voting for the party that is associated with anti-gay-ness (justly or otherwise) will feel disloyal. ( One of the things that made Trump acceptable to more Americans is that he was so obviously tolerant of peoples’ private lives, and fine with gays and lesbians, for the obvious reason that his sexual past was nothing to brag about. )
Zafar is pretty tactful, doesn’t go in for melodrama and generally stands for live-and-let-live tolerance. He seems genuinely interested in human beings-qua-human beings, rather than categories and types, and in this sense, sadly, he also seems “conservative” to me! (“Sadly” that is, because I wish my left-leaning friends were more like him.)
Which is utter BS crap they believe.
No excuses.
I’ve been thinking about the excellent points made in the OP today.
First off, I’m a conservative, mostly, and I too blame the government for my problems. :-) In fact, I blame the government for nearly all of the problems Americans have. This gets to a pet peeve of mine with Republicans generally: we see the harm the government does, but we fail to be forgiving of individuals who have, of course, as we said they would, suffered because of those problems. Yes, I think government can fix a lot that’s wrong: they need to quit and get out of the way. I would bet Donald Trump would agree. I think he was working on this–his cabinet was engaged in an effort of unprecedented scope to slash federal regulations. We allow our justified irritability with the government in general and politicians in particular to spill over to the way we engage Democrats on some really important topics. We actually have a common enemy.
Second, the Democrats are as mixed a bag as we are. Sanders is such a good example. Before the DNC made him sanitize his website, he came out swinging against unchecked immigration as robbing Americans of jobs and housing. His position was closer to Trump’s than it was to Clinton’s. And Trump picked up some of Sanders’s support because of it.
Another good example is Bill Clinton. Republicans actually liked the guy. He went ahead with NAFTA, breaking his promise to his fellow Democrats, and he pushed ahead with the welfare reform act and school choice to a limited extent, much to the unions’ dismay. Peter Edelman, who resigned as soon as Clinton was elected, wrote a scathing piece for the Atlantic on this subject of Clinton’s betrayal. When they voted for Bill, many northern Democrats had forgotten what my mom had always told me: southern Democrats are just like northern Republicans. That’s not true today, and its truth was fading when Bill ran for president, hence no one realized it. But he was a fiscal conservative at heart.
It is so weird to me to listen to the Democrats and Republicans. They have literally switched sides on the game board. Now the formerly isolationist Democrats are the Davos one-world crowd, and it’s the Republicans who want to come home. The Democrats are pro-unchecked-immigration. The Republicans are not. And the Democrats are pro cancel culture and censorship. And it’s the Republicans who want the censors abolished.
It’s really hard to follow the bouncing political ball sometimes.