Screeds
Sunday, October 03, 2004
Coming Together
November 26, 2002
You have to wonder about leftists. Sometimes I think they’re afflicted with a disease that affects the logic centers. But other times, I think they’re just intolerably lonely.
It’s a strange kind of loneliness, though. The comforts of family, friends, and voluntary associations seem to do nothing for it. Leftist loneliness seems to be exacerbated by these traditional forms of companionship. At any rate, they show little regard for them.
Leftists only seem to get that warm fuzzy feeling of belonging from coerced togetherness.
I know it sounds absurd. It is absurd. But name me another reason why people with anything like ordinary self-regard would forever be trying to herd all of us into the embrace of the Omnipotent State. No, not malevolence; something that wouldn’t render a man a danger to others, except at the polls.
Al Gore, the Whack-A-Mole the Democrats can’t seem to put down for good, is back touting government managed single-payer health care—socialized medicine. This is an idea so horrendous that Bill and Hillary Clinton couldn’t make it fly, with control of the White House and both houses of Congress. Not one good thing has come from any implementation of this socialist idea. People with urgent medical needs stream across the border from Canada, that socialized-medicine paradise, by the hundreds and thousands every week to be exploited by fee-charging, profit-seeking American doctors and hospitals. But economist Robert Kuttner has advocated socialized medicine on the ground that “it would be an immense gain for our sense of public space.” (Kuttner has also condemned any attempt to privatize first-class mail delivery, on the ground that “the U.S. Mail is what pulls us together as a people.")
Recent attempts to put such bagatelles as the security of the country above the overriding importance of the security of government jobs have been opposed on the ground that it would split the federal workforce into two camps with divergent priorities. It seems the 170,000 workers in the Department of Homeland Security would feel so isolated without full Civil Service protections that their lives wouldn’t be worth living. This battle went against the Left, so we’ll be finding out soon enough.
Leftists have argued for open immigration by claiming that by differentiating illegals from their ethnic confreres with legal vulnerability, we set them culturally adrift. Latin-American illegals, they claim, are avoided by Latin-American legals, distorting their lives through isolation from their linguistic-cultural group.
And the income tax! With proposals coming thick and fast for the radical transformation of federal taxation, leftists are aghast at the possible loss of this magnificent engine of harmony. Apparently the transfer of large amounts of money from the top 50% of the wage structure (which pays 96% of all income taxes) to the bottom half is part of what gives us that big from-each-according-to-his-abilities Family Feeling. Never mind that nasty Fourteenth Amendment; they never meant “equal protection of the laws” to apply to this!
The aforementioned Al Gore has argued, in his recent book Joined At The Heart, that a “family” is any grouping of people with emotional bonds to one another, irrespective of any blood or marital relations, or the lack thereof. Therefore, such matters as marriage, adoption and visitation rights, Social Security survivor benefits, and employer-paid marital benefits should not discriminate in favor of traditional husband-wife marriages and their progeny. I am deeply disturbed by how much this man loves us all. Thinking about it makes me want to leave the planet before he can save it any further.
“Family" means something different to these folks. Or perhaps they see themselves as all-wise father figures, and the rest of us as toddlers to be fed, bathed, nursed, hugged, spanked and put to bed according to their schedules.
Makes me want to gather ‘em all up in one giant hug, I tell you. And squeeze until their eyeballs pop. [Memo to Arnold Schwarzenegger: Hint, hint!]
It’s all of a piece. There are only two motivational patterns for the sort of thoroughgoing social transformation the Left wants to perform on America. One of these, the Class Struggle model, has been tried and found wanting. The other, Love Evangelism, has worked pretty well for the more activist Christian denominations, so why not try it in politics?
Of course, most dictators in recent history have combined the fantasy of their love for their people with a denunciation of an imagined national enemy. Hitler promised the Germans greatness and world-girdling glory, if only they could get rid of those pesky Jews. The Soviets were told that Stalin’s love for them was boundless, that he thought only of their good, but that the “bourgeois” and the “cosmopolitans” were forever undermining his heroic efforts. Juan Peron execrated the “reactionaries,” and the Ayatollah Khomeini had his “enemies of the Islamic revolution.”
The American Left has tried out a few candidates for the enemy role: “big business,” “the rich,” “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” and so forth. They’ve had only modest success—too many Americans find, on sober reflection, that they belong to one of these groups by the Left’s definitions—so their rhetoric has been trending back toward inclusion and an affectionate miasma of government-managed togetherness.
A friend of mine with more than a few battle scars earned in combat with local government has opined that statists would prefer that all our associations be mediated by the State. Voluntary groupings outside the State’s embrace constitute a threat to it, transmission media for dissident opinions and wellsprings for resistance to its decrees. Traditional families, clubs, churches, and the like have always served to dampen the influence of political power. Statists don’t like that.
Twelve years ago, I wrote a parodic series about a fictional Totalitarian Party. Its motto, as expressed by its avuncular, pipe-smoking founder Gordon S. Thrushbotham, holder of the Rexford G. Tugwell chair in Social Engineering at an unnamed state university, was “Trust us. We know what’s best. We’re here to help.” It outraged a lot of people back then. Today it seems too close to leftist reality to command attention.
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