Weekend Must-Read: Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying "Eat the Rich." To me it wasn't a metaphor.

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It's an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors' meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a “dead Jew on a stick” or a “zombie” and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented “flying spaghetti monster.” You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

So, how does such vicious claptrap manage to find buy-in with supposedly rational human beings? It would seem this sort of ideological palaver, ostensibly designed to shape behavior, supports the “thinking” of a zombie, not of a self-conscious, rational human being. It’s as if a huge swath of the American public has voluntarily submitted itself to pre-frontal-cortex lobotomy, under the auspices and funding of the regnant State and all its reinforcing mechanisms. The lobotomized are then fully enabled to admire, and thrill over, the bright shiny object of their delight — “the Venus eye,” the “magic of the extreme,” as Hegel put it, [that] is “the charm that works for us … that fascinates even our foes and blinds them”….

This president is all shine, and no spine. If he says “A,” then by now you should realize that what he really means/intends is to actually do “B.” And he usually manages to get to “B” by doing as little himself as possible. That is to say, he not only lies, but uses lies as shields to protect him against the consequences of his acts, or non-acts as the case may be, in advance.

So, why does he have so many friends, fans, supporters, donors?

There’s a loaded question! I constantly ask myself that question, and have spent a lot of time thinking through possible answers. FWIW, just a couple of stray thoughts.

In navigating such troubled waters, I find an indispensable guide in Friedrich Nietzsche, who most American conservative and libertarian thinkers regard as one of the most nefarious “philosophers” of all time: He is widely deplored as the announcer of the effective “Death of God” as an historical fact.

As a conservative down to my bones, I do not regard Nietzsche as my “enemy.” I do not regard him so much as a philosopher, rather as a world-class literary artist and astute observer of the intellectual and moral trends of his age. I see him as a suffering soul, all his life. He was brilliant — but died in an insane asylum of complications of syphyllis. I think of him as “the canary in the coal mine” of his age, there to warn us of the future of men and societies, should his vision prove correct. [Which boils down to: If there is no God, there is only unfettered human Will to Power….]

What Nietzsche detracters always seem to leave out, in quoting him, is immediately after his statement that “God is dead,” he adds, “for we have killed him.”

Nobody bothers to ask whether Nietzsche himself thought or believed that human beings could actually “kill” God. I strongly doubt that. He may have been “crazy,” but he wasn’t that crazy. I think his point was, the act of “killing God” is a personal act that does not in the least affect the Being of God, but only the order of one’s own personal humanity, ultimately, the order of one’s own soul. It represents an adamant closure of the soul to all spiritual or divine influences. I take this to mean that the loss of God implicates the loss of our own personal humanity, by cutting it off from its Source and Ground in Truth.

I very much admire Thomas S. Hibbs’ reflections on this question:

…Friederich Nietzsche wrote that autonomy and morality are incompatible with each other. What he had in mind was that, while morality is about being bound by and to some standard other than one’s own will, autonomy as self-rule could easily slide into self-expression and authenticity, aspirations governed by aesthetic rather than moral criteria.

Here liberalism faces a quandary. If choice itself is the highest value, a self-justifying one, then there is nothing in light of which — no independent standard on the basis of which — we can distinguish between good and evil, noble and base, or better and worse choices. And that, as Nietzsche saw, is an apt and succinct statement of nihilism. — Thomas S. Hibbs, “Happy-Go-Lucky Nihilism,” National Review, July 21, 2014.

I imagine such distinctions are lost on the folks who find in “our” president a “bright and shiny object” worthy of their delectation and ultimately slavish worship. Indeed, he is a fine example of “the Venus eye that fascinates.”

But the fact remains, there is NOTHING about this guy that any other human being could possibly reliably depend on. He’s all shine and no spine.

Only a fool could love him. But evidently, there are fools aplenty out there in American society. They are the lobotomized ones, already alluded to above.

Never forget the “classic” definition of “fool”: The fool is any man who says in his heart, “There is no God.”

There’s nothing “funny” about a fool. Bottom-line, a fool is a nihilist. But he has free-speech rights as much as you do….

And that is why We the People find ourselves in such a quandary nowadays. Our culture is divided, riven in two. The cultural divide, it seems to me, is driven by disputes as to whether the foundation of personal, cultural, and sociopolitical order is to be found in (1) a moral code; or (2) an aesthetic code. The first is ever “objective” to one; the second gives one a license to elevate personal, subjective experiences/preferences of one’s self above any and all other extra-subjective, that is to say, “objective” standards.

Must put a wrap on it for now. Thank you ever so much, servo1969, for posting this outstanding article by Danusha V. Goska.

P.S.: I don’t know why it is, but it seems to me that it is the immigrants to the U.S. over the past century or so who are the most passionate defenders of the idea of American exceptionalism, of America’s foundational ideals.

Three of my grandparents were foreign born, but all became naturalized American citizens, and raised American children. Between the two sets of grandparents, four of their eight children served in World War II, including my own mother — a natural-born American citizen of Polish descent — who recently passed away (June 1). She was buried with full military honors as a United States Navy Nurse Lieutenant having served four years in the South Pacific during WWII, where she tended not only our own “boys” fallen on the battlefield, but Japanese POWs as well. She was an amazing woman. R.I.P.

The current stream of [illegal] immigrants is “a horse of a different color.” Or so it seems to me.

"All shine and no spine"

Thank you, dearest sister in Christ, for your kind words.

Indeed, I'm convinced that Obama is best understood as a "bright, shiny object" whose purpose is to distract and divert attention from the pressing needs of our national polity. He is "the Venus eye that fascinates...."

Some thoughts re: assessing the president's character.

On that subject, Michael Goodwin, in last Sunday's New York Post (July 20, 2014), cites David Resnick, Obama's biographer, from his interview with Valerie Jarrett — perhaps the most influential advisor this president has. Quoting Ms. Jarrett:

“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is…. He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is…. He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Yikes. Do other people feel as creeped out by these remarks as I do?

Among other things, it seems Jarrett is suggesting that the Office of the President of the United States is actually beneath Obama's dignity.

Jarrett is a very long-time aide to the president. It seems her job is to stoke 0's narcissism full-time. As if he needed any encouragement along such lines. So if he is a no-show on vital public affairs, it's just because he feels he has better things to do. Do not question the genius!!! He's smarter than you!!!

Then I wonder how a man like this could ever obtain the presidency. Especially when his qualifications to hold the office are dubious, still suspect, in the first place.

The legend has it Obama was born in Hawaii. Certain relatives in Kenya say he was born in Kenya — and claim they were present at the birth. The "Long-Form Birth Certificate" ultimately was produced, so to end the controversy. Somehow I suspect that Obama's political operators actually welcomed this controversy [and very likely may have fabricated the LFBC] — as a side show, a misdirection, a smoke screen, a way to "stir up the muck" — for it distracted all attention away from the question: Who was Obama's father? Plus the additional question: Who was Obama's mother? Can we find clues into Obama's' worldview and intentions by asking such questions?

The question about the father is particularly relevant. Historically, traditionally, citizenship has been regarded as descending from the father, not the mother, regardless of the geographical location of the birth. [This would be the Jus sanguis theory of citizenship in international law.]

On the basis of public records, it can reasonably be inferred: Barack Obama Senior was: A Kenyan national; a revolutionary anti-Colonialist; and devoted Marxist. He was also a fundamentalist Muslim.

Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro evidently was a lady who had a penchant for third-world men of color who held radical/revolutionary political views. She married two of them — Obama and Soetoro. And like Obama, Soetoro was a fundamentalist Muslim. It seems fairly likely that Stanley Ann was herself a child of socialist parents.

All of which is to suggest that a young boy growing up in this milieu during his most formative years would have had no inkling about American society and culture — I do not believe that is a subject taught in an Indonesian madrassa. And it appears his mother didn't have much sympathy for American order and values, so did not teach her son about such things.

Yet this "boy" has been elected president by the majority of the American people not once, but twice. Despite the objective fact that his presidency has worked tirelessly — though overt actions, inactions, or covert ones — to undermine the historical liberties, institutions, and interests, both domestic and foreign, of the American people.

Go figure!!! This result must have something to do with our fixation on the "bright, shiny object" — such as the watch a hypnotizing magician might use — whose sole purpose is to get us to suspend Reality in our consciences, to lull us out of any concerns we may have about the state of actual Reality in which we are totally rooted.... "The Venus Eye That Fascinates" stands before us.

Or rather, is sitting in the Oval Office.

Time to stop for now. Now, I shall just sit back and await the onslaught of screaming meemies coming out of the wordwork, to excoriate me for my "racist views," and to trivialize public discourse down to the level of complete insensibility and incomprehensibility.

But that's okay. Such people never grasp the main point anyway. Indeed, they are the mob deployed to ensure that the main point cannot be engaged in any kind of rational manner. Yet I, as a Christian, have to put up with these people — with as good a grace as I can muster, God willing.

Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ!

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