Comments

Why the left can’t accept defeat — 29 Comments

1. All true, I think. A slightly different way of putting some of your points: the contemporary left has a very high level of moral confidence. Certitude, in fact. They *know* they’re right. That progressivism is a species of religion has become a commonplace, and it bestows the kind of moral certainty (and self-righteousness) that very zealous religious conviction tends to do. Most people on the right, religious or not, are not nearly so confident; we tend to feel ourselves to be on the defensive. This is in part because we (the U.S.) is based on classical liberalism, the principles of which are now being exploited to undermine it.

2. That’s a good list, Neo. I have thought for a long time that there a fair number of people who can be counted in the number who don’t accept defeat, but in fact they did accept the fact that Hillary lost and are just maintaining the appearance of not accepting her defeat as a kind of “pep talk”, to keep their spirits up over having nominated a poor candidate. I’m not sure where they would fit on your list above.

3. Neo, I don’t know if you have a twitter account (I don’t), but if so you should tweet your response to Adrian; he seems a bit clueless.

4. physicsguy:

   Maybe one of my readers who’s on Twitter can do it.

5. The left has melded the concept of evolution [in principle reducible to just an environmental filtering process though that provokes a lot of indignation in some parts], with Vico’s idea of progress.

   In any event, since the rejection of the concept of teleology and with it any coherent notion of a universal and objective human nature and normative development, became standard among intellectuals, some kind of replacement has been necessary in order to save the “humanism” project; and to stop the audience from killing the weak limbed tolerance preachers just for the heck of it.

   That replacement has been a mishmash of ideas abstraced from religious eschatology, and emergent progressive evolution, and the Enlightenment, held together by the cement of emotion, itself conceived of as an ineffable non-verbal kind knowledge … or what used to be derided as “faith”. [Laugh uproariously here]

   Thus thee dull among the religious minded retreated to fideism; while the hucksters among the irreligious placed their bets on the newish progressive evolution and humanism secular mystery religion and its sacred jargon.

   Of course this latter project failed, and failed pretty spectacularly, to convince those who were not already begging to be convinced; and the values theory crisis spread after the second world war to the point where the default position among the high priests of the liberal intelligentsia nowadays is now values nihilism.

   The lower orders of the liberal faith though, still subscribe to their mystery religion mashup of Marxism, and progressive evolution (and probably Wilhelm Reich as well LOL).

6. In addition—lust for power! Either for oneself or for folks that think like oneself.

   With respect to that lust–it is never defeated, except by the death or enfeeblement of the one who lusts for power.

7. To illustrate my point—

   Conservatives want people who think like them to be put in power to prevent the government from interfering with everyone’s life.

   Progressives want people who think like them to be put in power to so that government will direct everyone’s life.

8. IMO, the underlying problem for our future in the left’s inability to accept defeat, is that this is a tactic for long-term success. The army of the Roman Empire, oftentimes lauded as having been invincible, it lost many battles, arguably more battles than it won. It’s penumba of invincibility came from the fact that like the left, they, too, refused to accept defeat and kept returning and attacking until the desired results were achieved regardless of the cost in lives or treasure.

   By Any Means Necessary is a tactic that works in the long run. This is why it is necessary to not just defeat, but to crush and obliterate such an opponent. When Cato the Elder demanded Carthago delenda est it wasn’t rhetorical request for wish-fulfillment, but an imperative command of necessity. Thus, in Charles Krauthammer’s observation lies the seed of the right’s own destruction (“The Conservatives think the liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”). Ones does not destroy the stupid, but one must do just that to counteract evil.

   https://www.amarillo.com/opinion/20180623/krauthammer-liberals-are-stupid-and-conservatives-are-evil

9. Excellent list.

   The left are the new status quo – they have a lot to lose if the current mindset is overturned. Thus they are myopic about history, cherry-picking to support that mindset.

   It IS about power, and if they understood anything about history they would know what a powder keg they are creating.

10. Richard Fernandez has a great article this week that obliquely addresses a very important aspect of this question. The money quote:

    “But unlike the characters in the movie, the Chinese, Russian, European, and American elites are unwilling to start at a point of maximum entropy. Rather, they want to control the future and load the dice by constraining it with their legacy theories. That is because the Woke, EU, Chinese Communist Party, and the Kremlin are convinced they already know the future and the only difficulty is in getting the recalcitrant deplorables to go along.”
    https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/talking-to-aliens/

    So, part of #1 on Neo’s list is the Left thinks they know the future and that only their “legacy theories” are equipped to address them. (I just love that term, “legacy theories”.)

11. Boss,
    I think there’s an argument to be made that your list, #1 – #6 inclusive, has elements of the worst of “religion” sewn through the entire fabric.
    They “know” they, only they, can drive the eschatological future to its proper fulfilment, which also only they “know.” Once you have that…it’s the worst of “religion” through and through.

12. Commenter T on September 9, 2019 at 2:19 pm above makes the best observation I’ve seen on this particular topic.

    If it were the consensus among the left that the most important thing is to be right, that is, to arrive at correct answers to the issues of what causes mankind its various social problems and of how best to solve them, then they could listen to and consider arguments for and against their premises (which includes their values) and their policies.

    But if their greatest concern and highest priority is to win, that is to achieve the ability to dictate without limit and to be acknowledged as the Highest Possible Authority, which is to be obeyed at all cost —

    Then right-and-wrong have nothing to do with it.

    However, moral self-confidence is, absent luck or fortuitous coincdence, necessary to success against adversaries; so all of us, and in particular leftists, each need an inner conviction that in some important way they are right, i.e. correct. It’s that conviction that supports a morale strong enough to stay the course.

    (Of course some silly fools, like our Neo and David Horowitz and David Mamet and Sol Stern and Thomas Sowell and on and on and on, have a fatal flaw in their character that allows the darkness of reason and experience and common sense to enter, and to extinguish the Light of Absolute Rightness of their agenda and whatever means are required in order to achieve the goal. Thus we have outposts, such as here, where Deplorables hang out to p-&-m and buck each other up, and to try to fit the square peg of moral rightness into the round holes of reality-today (any “today”) and of some sort of general social comity. Not to mention insistence on their own individual right to run their own lives. Poor, poor us!)

13. Julie,

    Your comment inspired a further thought. Believing that one is morally correct and/or superior is not a requirement for believing that one’s enemy is evil. One can have misgivings about one’s own rectitude or motivation and still believe that the enemy at the door is evil. It’s the motivation to destroy an evil enemy that permits a “by any means necessary strategy” because the ultimate goal is destruction, not just defeat. This is my point above; until conservatives begin to identify the progressive left as evil, we are, at best, in a holding action (but at least better a holding action than consistently losing).

    This attitude, of course, totally contradicts the Never-Trumpers and RINOs whose proposed angst in the Trump era is explained away by believing that Trump is not gracious/diplomatic/cultured enough to be in the oval office. It is a philosophy of losing graciously rather than winning at any cost. By refusing to lose graciously, Trump defies the leftist/RINO playbook and hopefully is beginning to set an example for the conservative right.

14. Julie,

    I just re-read your comment at 4:45 pm and I think that all I did was to restate what you were saying.

    Sorry! Did not mean to step on your thoughts like that.

15. T,

    The Great Frog preserve us! And here I thought I was the only one who ever made an injudicious comment on account of a misreading! ;>)

    Actually, I like your comment just above. ‘Tis true.

    I wish my system hadn’t crashed when I was in the middle of editing my comment, which might have helped. Thus:

    “…all of us, and in particular leftists, each need an inner conviction that in some important way they we are right, i.e. correct.”

    Your comment, though, about the President, prompts me to remark that my comment was made in the context of a society (could be a society of as small as two or the large society of a body politic or polity) fighting for something or other, whether for status, treasure, or something it deems the moral Good.

    But suppose we have someone who looks and acts just like Trump, not to achieve a moral Greater Good, but simply in order not to come across to others as a loser, or to lose his self-respect.

    (I don’t presume to know what makes our President tick, but I think it’s more than defense of his own sense of self — which in itself is something we all have to fight for, the trick being to defend a healthy sense off self, so there’s no shame in that.)

    If Pres. Trump needs to see himself as a victor, that’s fine. But in his case, I don’t think that his sense of self rests ultimately and finally on his being seen as the biggest baddest bully on the block. I think his sense of himself at present requires his doing the best job he can by the country. And I don’t think he believes that he has to destroy our country in order to save it. (And a pox on Shrill for saying such a thing in the context of Viet Nam. She should be bitterly ashamed at such vicious, evil calumny against our military and our country.)

    The quickest way to explain that statement is to contrast this aim with that of his predecessor:

    Does anybody seriously think that BHO cared most of all about about the well-being of our country, and in particular about strengthening its ideals of political liberty and equality? It is to laugh. Or break down blubbering. (It’s too late to go nuclear…..)

    … Anyway, the fight against error and evil is never going to end — at both the individual (to maintain a healthy sense of self) and the social levels.

    Recap: The left (on the whole) intend to win against the rest of us by becoming as close to totalitarian dictators as possible; by destroying others’ sense of self completely and unquestionably.

    Hello, 1984.

    We hope to win our freedom, our right to lead our own lives without anybody’s permish, and to be “secure in our persons and effects” from predations by government or anybody else.

    Unfortunately, we live on the horns of a dilemma, because we just can’t bring ourselves to Total War. But we do need the moral courage and the morale to bring every acceptable weapon to bear against the Enemy. And not all those weapons are pleasant.

16. Because they actually don’t believe in democracy. For them, democracy is merely a means to gain enough power to overthrow the constitution and achieve ultimate political power. Once they control all of the institutions of the state, elections become a proforma affair with a preordained outcome, such as in Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, etc…

17. I have to take issue with some of T’s assertions.

    An inability to accept defeat, precludes learning from one’s defeats. Perfectly illustrated by the democrat candidate’s extremism.

    “By any means necessary” implies a willingness to act inexcusably. Demonstrated by a reactive paradigm shift on the right. Millions on the right have become convinced by the Left’s actions that the Left IS evil and that liberal refusal to recognize that evil… enables that evil.

    Just as ordinary Germans working in the factories enabled the Nazi war machine. And whereas, once Hitler had seized power the German people had little choice, that is not the case with those who still vote democrat. Today, ignorance for any adult equates to willful blindness. Those whose moral compass is still intact are repulsed by democrat extremism and that repulsion enables a new openness to the right’s POV.

    It is a certainty that the Left will not stop and as most liberals, having swallowed the Left’s virtue signaling kool-aid will continue to support it, almost certainly makes inevitable the settling of the dispute by “other means”.

    The hell they are fomenting, they bring upon themselves.

    And that hell will arrive when they imagine they have the power to force the ‘deplorables’ upon their knees to worship at the altars of their PC ‘gods’.

18. https://pjmedia.com/trending/valerie-plame-drives-a-fast-car-so-new-mexico-should-elect-her-to-congress/

    Somewhat OT. Is anyone else getting the impression that the Democratic Party is recruiting lapsed intelligence operatives to run for Congress?

    (She lies in the ad, btw. Her cover was blown by Richard Armitage and she was no longer assigned to deep cover work at the time).

19. If it were the consensus among the left that the most important thing is to be right, that is, to arrive at correct answers to the issues of what causes mankind its various social problems and of how best to solve them, then they could listen to and consider arguments for and against their premises (which includes their values) and their policies.

    But if their greatest concern and highest priority is to win, that is to achieve the ability to dictate without limit and to be acknowledged as the Highest Possible Authority, which is to be obeyed at all cost —

    Yes, but bear in mind at the same time the existentialist slogan which became their tacit metaphysical premise: “Existence precedes essence”

    Thus “right and wrong” are (so they imagine) the result of creative processes which are impelled by accidents and chance [in the formation of types, tastes and desires] and which then struggle for supremacy in the social and living-world.

    Thus there is as they see it no objective type or natural kind which defines, or conditions what is both typologically and ethically normative.

    It’s all conflict: and the words “right” and “wrong” are merely and self-consciously, if powerfully and deceptively, used as rhetorical terms ostending subjective preferences.

    Power, and dominance, are then not the primary game, but the only game as they view reality.

    The only question to be asked is the famous one Lenin outlined.

    They really do embrace an anthropology at radical variance with that held by conservatives or traditionalists.

    It doesn’t even really employ the same language or conceptual framework.

20. Man is a religious animal.

    Someone said “man is the animal who laughs”; and that’s all very well but insufficient. It was, I think, Chesterton who put it better: Man is the animal who makes dogmas.

    Everyone has a functional religion.

    A man’s functional religion is the worldview built up from his…
    – metaphysics
    – epistemology
    – cosmology
    – anthropology
    – ethics
    – approach to the great problems (human sin, natural disasters, suffering, death)

    Each man’s answers to the “great questions” in the preceding list of categories are the first part of his functional religion. The second part consists of the culture, ritual, education, and means of advocacy he adopts for…
    (a.) reinforcing those answers in himself;
    (b.) changing his own behavior to help himself live in accord with those answers;
    (c.) passing on those answers and behaviors to his children and others under his influence;
    (d.) extending his influence to broaden his ability to popularize those answers.

    These answers (and the associated culture, ritual, education, and advocacy) function in an atheist in the exact same way that they function in a Catholic or a Wiccan. The answers given by the Atheist are different, to be sure, from those given by the Catholic or the Wiccan, but they still serve as his functional religion, since the things he does spring from them in much the same way. The “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism” a decade ago were simply Popular Evangelists for their Religion.

    In fact, the atheist often doesn’t realize he has a metaphysics (as a result of which it’s often a bad, even self-contradictory one). The dupes of mainstream mass-media propaganda don’t have a good epistemology, but they have a bad one. Proponents of “scientific”/reductive materialism have a very clear, if intrinsically meaningless, cosmology. The anthropology of the materialist neuroscience is straightforward enough. I suppose it’s vain to talk much of the ethics of men inasmuch as one’s chosen behavior often varies from his professed ethics. But modern man’s approach to sin and suffering and death is painfully obvious: Call the first item a myth, use pharmacology to alleviate the second, and delay the last one as long as possible (or until pharmacology falls down on the job).

    All these items work together to produce the worldview of each person, even leftists. The average leftist follows either no name-brand religion, or a watered-down and vestigial version of one. But that’s because his functional religion is leftism: There is no room in his mind and guts and will for another.

    So, yes, the cognitive dissonance of the leftists is results from a theological problem in the same way that the cognitive dissonance of Harold Camping’s followers resulted from a theological problem when Harold Camping predicted the Rapture occurring on September 6, 1994. (When it failed to occur, he revised the date to September 29 and then to October 2, and then, to May 21, 2011, and finally October 21, 2011. Eventually he was incapacitated by a stroke and passed away late 2013.)

    It’s sad that very few leftists have responded by examining the blind-spots in their theology. But it isn’t very surprising: After all, “a mind is a difficult thing to change.”

21. There’s a long piece on Vox today related to this discussion, “The anti-liberal moment–Critics on the left and right are waging war on liberalism. And liberals don’t seem to have a good defense.”

    I’ve read only a bit of it so far, but noted that it talks about Adrian Vermeule, whose tweet led into Neo’s post.

22. Ann on September 9, 2019 at 8:20 pm said:
    There’s a long piece on Vox today related to this discussion,
    * * *
    It was indeed very long, so long that fisking it properly would take more time than I want to spend, or that any of you would want to read.

23. As a conservative i want to defeaat leftists so thoroughly and brutally it wont matter what they are willing taccept.

24. I am a nice guy that way.

25. R.C. i dont think you take religion seriously enough. It is why i can laugh at myself.

26. Steve57,

    Re: R.C.

    On the contrary. He takes religion very seriously and has given it a great deal of thought.

27. Geoffrey Britain (@ 6:50 pm above),

    I have read and re-read both your and my comments above. If you are taking issue with me it seems that while I am saying that conservatives continue to fight a rear-guard action and will do so until they recognize the left as evil; you, in contrast seem to be saying that conservatives already recognize the left as evil and are taking action. Am I correct in this interpretation?

    You write: “Those whose moral compass is still intact are repulsed by democrat extremism and that repulsion enables a new openness to the right’s POV.” I suspect that such a broad statement is more wishful thinking than provable fact, but I hope you are correct.

    If true, why weren’t the 2018 elections a Republican sweep. If true, why do any Never-Trumpers remain at all? I fear that there are still many, many voters out there who see the Dems as well intentioned even while they think they are wrong. I live in an urban blue enclave and I see it all the time. While such voters might be willing to vote non-Democrat, they see no need to crush and destroy the Democrat party even after the debacle of the Democrat debates and CNN’s climate change town hall.

    I think conservatives are only in the very beginning stages of bringing century-old Democrat Progressivism to heel and while I am optimistic, I am hardly certain of what the eventual outcome will actually be.

28. Steve57:

    I do take religion seriously, as Roy stated. When by the grace of God I trip or blunder my way into humility, then I laugh at myself, for there’s plenty to laugh at.

    In saying that Leftists are acting out their functional religion, I’m certainly not disparaging religion per se. I wasn’t even disparaging their functional religion (Leftism) although it certainly deserves disparaging.

    I was merely agreeing — in my usual longwinded way — with Adrian Vermeule’s comment that the Left’s insanity is “theological” in nature (“theological” being a shorthand for “related to their functional religion”).

    Reality currently stands in obvious contradiction of the Left’s functional religion. Their self-image — there assuredness of their own moral acceptability and freedom from crushing guilt, for example — is built entirely on the foundation of that religion. That is why they’re doubling down on the religion more and more frantically as its tenets become increasingly risible. For if Leftism turns out merely to be wrong…what then?

    Here’s an example in miniature: Consider a woman who had an abortion. In the days after the abortion, she fiercely resisted allowing herself to think the thought, “If that was really my unborn son or daughter, then what, exactly, have I just done? And what does that say about me?” Such a thought was painful, so she habitually distracted herself from thinking it, or even anything close to it. She erected an “Ugh Field” in her mind: A little invisible force-field, a frictionless cloaking device, around that topic. Any time her mind wanders in that direction, her mood shifts to agitation…which is not fun, so she doesn’t let her mind wander that way.

    Unsurprisingly she finds the company of persons who talk about that kind of thing intolerable, and prefers to surf on the feelings of confidence and camaraderie she experiences around a coterie of Leftist women. (They, of all persons, are the least likely to ever utter the sentence, “I wonder sometimes if maybe abortion isn’t a kind of murder, after all.”)

    So it’s no surprise when she becomes a Leftist herself. She may even utter testimonials about how wonderful her abortion was. But she didn’t conclude that Leftism was true and therefore it was okay to have an abortion. It’s the other way around: She had gut instincts telling her something was wrong about the abortion, when she did it. But afterwards she suppressed those and settled, via emotional associations, into a firm conviction that Leftism must be true. Because if it wasn’t, then she willfully contracted the murder of her own child, and how could she possibly live with herself then?

    And what if reality (in the form of technological advancements and plain reasoning from scientific facts) were to challenge the foundations of her Leftism?

    That would run the risk of piercing that “Ugh Field,” which would be intolerable. Thus her frantic shrillness in denouncing anyone who questions her functional religion.

    Multiply that one example by some 25% of the American population, and that’s why the Left is unhinged.

29. Argh. Second sentence, fourth paragraph, should have been “their assuredness,” not “there assuredness.” Wish I could edit it. Oh, well, another opportunity to laugh at myself!

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>