About Power: Collective vs. Collectivist

Pat Santy and others have written extensively about Obama-Left, Inc. being out of touch with reality and perpetually in denial. I agree with the analysis, but in the interest of simplicity, on the one hand, and praxis on the other, I have adopted a kind of bare-bones way of assessing liberal performance in the world. A way, that for me, answers the question, “so now what”?

I would argue that these people* are absolutely in touch with reality; but it is their reality. Where most of us perform to standards of quotidian efficacy -- i.e., paying the mortgage to keep the house, investing money for retirement, not meddling in other people's business, and so on -- liberals are busy making for themselves a place in Heaven (read Utopian 'justification'). What does it matter if their diplomatic strategy weakens and endangers the nation? If fiscal policy is profligate? If social policy enslaves us? Never mind -- their motives are pure. They have a vision. They belong to a tribe that sanctifies them.

We may call them elitists (which they are) or narcissists (which they are), but we need to know that the reality of our world is not the reality of theirs. We see their behavior as pathological and bizarre, but to them it makes perfect sense. They simply perform to different standards.

A useful conclusion: it is pointless to reason with liberals, for reasoning (in the traditional Western sense) runs counter to their primary goals -- defense of a secular religion and its belief system and the acquisition and maintenance of power. Power (collective power), they understand perfectly. It is their stock-in-trade. And it is opposing, naked power alone -- not persuasion -- that will cause them to change.

One knows one has scored points when hysterical cries of 'righteous' outrage are heard from the left. The potential loss of power threatens their very being. The argument for power is sustained by observing the effects (ranging from defensiveness to open hostility) of tea parties, town halls and the growth of conservative media and the Tenth Amendment initiative. Though the right, historically, has been uncomfortable with the collective exercise of political power and will, when liberty is at stake the time for that exercise has arrived.

It all comes down to this: it is one thing to understand the enemy (I use the word advisedly) but another to know how to defeat him. The left will use whatever power is at their disposal to subject or eliminate -- in one way or another -- those who hold a different world-view. To force non-believers into submission, forced alliance or extinction. Here, there are remarkable similarities to Islam.

One thinks of the dreary, demeaning, undifferentiated existence of persons living in the former Soviet Republics -- statism in one of its more benign forms. But is a short journey to recall crematoria, gulags and killing fields. Only a few years ago I would have dismissed that last sentence as pure hyperbole, but no longer. There is no want of historical precedent in the annals of collectivist governance.

When individual liberty is attacked by political powers that are not amenable to reason or persuasion, it must be defended by political power. Modest conservative organization (above) has so far been surprisingly effective, which suggests that the power of the left may be overrated. But the left, over the span of a century, has had enormous influence in government and society precisely because its power has been organized. Therein lies a lesson.

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When I use the terms "liberal" and "Left" in most of my critical essays I am referring to to committed ideologues on the far end of the political spectrum -- those whose intellectual heritage derives from Rousseau and Marx. These are the True Believers and their enablers.