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The Narcissism of Democrat Social Policies
The old stereotype says that leftists love humanity but hate people. I haven’t yet figured out the left’s peculiar combination of narcissism and self-loathing, but they do seem to dislike people in general. Particularly people who don’t agree with them about absolutely everything. Which, come to think of it, is nearly everyone, I suppose. But what I’m trying to get at is that I really don’t think that they’re motivated by their love of the downtrodden masses, as they claim to be. Leftists don’t love poor people. They just hate rich people. And many of their social policies appear to be more focused on hurting the rich than on helping the poor.
Think about leftist policies, of all different varieties, such as:
- Confiscatory taxes on successful people to fund social programs with no measurable benefits to those they profess to help.
- Affirmative action, which denies college spots to qualified applicants if they are perceived to be a member of the privileged class (It’s not really based on race – ask an Asian college applicant.).
- Not keeping score in children’s sports. The losing team still didn’t win, but it wouldn’t have anyway. You’re just denying the winning team of the recognition it earned.
- The left seeks to ban my profession, of concierge medicine. If there were no concierge medicine, would the poor get better health care? Of course not – they would be entirely unaffected. But the successful would no longer have the option of using their own resources to get better care, like they use their resources to buy nicer cars or drink better beer.
- “White privilege.” When racial discrimination against blacks becomes increasingly rare and difficult to specify, you just punish whites for benefits they never received. Elizabeth Warren is a good illustration of this – she talks about white privilege all the time, but if she really believed in it, she would not have pretended to be an American Indian.
You may think I’m being overly critical. “Ok, taxes are too high, and social programs may be inefficient, but they do help somebody!” Well, maybe. But we have spent enormous amounts of money in our “War on Poverty” and poverty rates have not improved, so good luck showing real benefit. I’m not saying we should have no social programs – quite the contrary – I’m just pointing out that their benefit to actual poor people would be difficult to prove.
The same with affirmative action. By sending minority students to schools they’re not qualified for, are we helping them? In some cases, maybe. But many minority students fail because they’re not at schools more appropriate for their skill levels.
And so on and so on.
I’m just trying to point out that the impact of leftist policies on the poor is either difficult to prove, or perhaps even hurtful to those they’re trying to help.
But they are universally punitive to the rich.
It could be an accident, I suppose. But I saw a news story about the automatic scanners at a retail chain that had a certain percentage of wrong prices – say, 2% of their scanned prices were wrong. No big deal, right? Well, the incorrect price was too high like 80% of the time or something. Now that’s a big deal. The problem was not the 2% rate of incorrect prices – the problem was that it didn’t appear to be accidental. Neither does this.
This is more hurtful to all of us than it would first appear. The constant vilification and punishment of the successful has a huge impact on our culture and economy. Adam Smith discussed this idea, and a big part of the Sottish Enlightenment was an effort to deal with such issues. My Uncle Fred (Bastiat) would describe this drag on the economy as one of the “unseen” impact of leftist policies.
By punishing the successful, you make success less attractive, and less worth the work needed to achieve it. Why bother? So, many people who are capable of great things, which would have helped all of us, just don’t bother. Nothing is destroyed, exactly. It just didn’t happen to begin with.
And the constant vilification of the successful makes the pursuit of success seem distasteful, or even evil (greedy bastard, etc.). So it just doesn’t happen. Nothing happens. We stay right where we are.
Such societal stasis is actually attractive to the left. It’s easier to measure, predict, modulate, and control. After all, things are pretty much ok, right? Let’s avoid disruptions caused by those greedy bastards who only care about themselves.
The tenth commandment (NSV: “You want a donkey? Get your own!”) is brilliant, because it recognizes the destructive force of jealousy. Jealousy makes us prone to view those who are more successful than ourselves not as admirable individuals who have helped their fellow man and achieved a great deal, but instead like a James Bond villain, whose relentless selfish pursuit of personal wealth is really just a desire to destroy the world. Such absurd villains make for stupid movies. But they’re attractive to our baser instincts of petty jealousies.
So, to help your fellow man and improve the world in which we live, you don’t have to work your tail off to provide something that people want or need, and in turn be reimbursed for improving their life. No, that’s for the evil greedy bastards.
It’s easier, and more virtuous, to just vote Democrat. My, what a nice person you are!
Punishing the rich seems so easy. And fun! And gratifying! Hey, why not, right?
My Uncle Fred is shaking his head at our greed and jealousy, which we disguise as virtue.
This is not about poor people. It’s about us. And I don’t think we’ll like what it says about us. It’s better if we don’t think about that.
Just vote Democrat, enjoy the illusion of virtue, and try not to think too much.
Published in General
I endorse this screed, and add this:
The progressive project is and has always been to transfer wealth, status, and power from us who produce to them who persuade.
The left is the part of us that feels cheated that biting that one forbidden apple did not make us god-like after all. Not to rule but to be merely part of the world, trapped in a fragile physical body, unable to make ideation real and expected to affirm this condition as if it were a gift.
Religion, history, culture, morality, patriotism are all just sneaky and evil attempts to bind us to a reality we should resent. If instead we can harness a mass of others into an instrument of power, then the dream of making the world in our image and likeness becomes possible. We can take reality away from its unworthy current owner.
The narcissism is palpable. The self-loathing is inevitable if one aspires to powers one does not have but thinks are deserved.
I nominate this chunk of brilliance for comment of the month.
The first truth is that one’s mind is a reflection of God’s world. We know that’s the first truth because it is refuted by the first lie – that we can be as God, whose thought is our reality.
Dr.,
And so often their policies hurt the poor most of all.
Regards,
Jim
To “them.” Not to all of “them who persuade“. You persuade, I persuade, but they aren’t working to transfer wealth, status, or power to us.
If you really want to be depressed, read this critique of the Age of Narcissism:
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/30/the-boomer-revolution-and-its-consequences/
My current theory is that the apparent self-loathing is still a focus on the self, and thus in at least some ways consistent with narcissism. Most of the expressed self-loathing are variants of how powerful “I” am that “I” can cause all these problems of the world. The world revolves around “me.”
The most miserable people I know are leftists. They’re also the most self-righteous.
This is all done in the name of equality. Click below and listen for a few minutes to listen to Andrew Klavan.
I tried but I couldn’t finish it. As you say @westernchauvinist, it is “really depressing” .
The “white privilege” meme fosters dysfunction among both blacks and whites. For blacks, it reinforces the myth that the game is rigged against minorities in general and blacks in particular. To the extent that the myth is believed, it robs people of agency. It instills the belief that they can’t make their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, better by their own actions.
For whites, the meme fosters a reaction in the form of “white identity politics,” making white people just another special interest group vying to feed at the government trough. Again, such thought robs people of individual agency.
It’s always been the case that the intellectual left is so impressed by their own perceived intelligence (as opposed to common sense) that they think their ideas are what everyone should follow. They then get tremendously upset and angry when those of lesser intellects fail to do so, and at the times they do gain power and enact their plans, refuse to believe those plans failed because they weren’t well thought out, and ran afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Other evil forces obviously sabotaged their plans, which would work perfectly if those people were removed from the political conversation. Then it’s wash, rinse, repeat as more and more people are sidelined as things continue to get worse. (Pre-assumption of power, it’s also why those types of people also can’t get along with others who may share 99 percent of their ideas, because that one percent of disagreement can’t be tolerated. The perpetual factionalization of the left is the result of those narcissistic collisions.)
I’d like to point at that white identity politics is a reaction to leftist identitarianism. We should really just scuttle the whole thing and be Americans.
And there are, at the very least, some issues of insecurity at the core of narcissism. I heard a psychologist once cleverly describe narcissism as “unrequited self-love”.
I think these dovetail together nicely. We should all use our aptitudes and talents to benefit humanity…..but I’ve always suspected that some of leftist disdain and elitism is motivated by a deep awareness that they can’t understand the material and hence control the people dedicated to hard sciences, medicine, engineering, invention; or successful at business, manufacturing, research, faith building, fine arts etc. which clearly help or delight others. Hence the empty assumption of virtue and superior “values” and self-appointment as guardians of “social justice,” coupled with crowding into politics and journalism and assigning poor motives to those in the other groups.
(Even if they do engage in some of those fields I named, I’m willing to bet that their inner selves don’t think they were sufficiently recognized, that it was “too hard,” etc. but can’t pass laws addressing themselves, so they substitute whole invented classes. Why people can be obviously well rewarded and still push socialism is that they secretly know they DON’T deserve the wealth, but want to deflect criticism while still wallowing in it).
Socialism is just a seductive and simplisitc way to transform jealousy and resentment, lessen the ardors of trying to understand random events and results, deny mediocrity…and to enshrine self-importance and be comforted by membership-approval.
“American” is code for white supremicist, as it harkens back to a national identification that excluded everyone except whites. In the face of a climate emergency, we must find our identification in our shared humanity, and reject the borders that make false distinctions between people. You know who else saw us as “Americans”? Hitler. Do better, please.
@eridemus
The inequality that naturally exists in nature is absolutely daunting.
Watch the first Incredibles and read Harrison Bergeron and you can understand why people are so freaked out by natural inequality.
It is a mistake to believe that the wealthy are Republican. The very wealthy, especially older and bigger wealth, don’t have to worry about taxes and government as much as we think and they have enormous influence and don’t like change. They’d pay more with simpler lower taxes and service in the home would cost more. Big companies are run by professionals and do not act like upwardly mobile new wealth. This is old politics, we could sort it out, but new tech has changed everything. They’re trained more than educated. They benefit from the largest possible market and they dominate media.
There are two giant fundamental challenges (along with everything else), we must disempower the huge bureaucracy by actually following the constitution. They take taxes but just make it up, because the world is simply too complex for almost everything they say they must do. If any of it matters it should be done locally. This is the old challenge of all government throughout history and centralization wins until it kills the place. So far no exceptions. But our big new challenge is to figure how to manage big new tech that enjoys falling marginal costs and will dominate any regulatory regime we come up with. I’m not sure we can, but if political power now run by the Washington bureaucracy is eliminated or returned and remains with local governance, maybe. If big new tech and Washington remain allies we can’t win and will end up like every large and small society throughout history.