Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Understanding nothing
I came back to this  American Spectator article this morning, because after sleeping on it  "March of the Resenters," by  Mark Gauvreau Judge,  is  the most singularly profound, insightful declaration about what drives anti-war, anti-Bush protestors I've read.  The answer?  It has nothing to do with politics! 
  • Today's leftist protestors are not political.
  • Politics entails reason and arguments about things outside ourselves: the safety of all of our people, how best to educate them, what is acceptable expression in the public square -- it is, as Aristotle said, the way of "deciding how to order our lives together." For many protestors, the public good is of very little consequence ...
  • ... reason is certainly not high on their list of virtues. These are people who call terrorists freedom fighters and claim George Bush is worse than Hitler.
  • St. Louis University historian James Hitchcock summed it up nicely ... "What has happened," Hitchcock wrote, "has been the abandonment of politics, or its annihilation, in favor of public and organized forms of therapy.
  • What the New Left primarily accomplished was to establish a particular style of public discourse which enables emotionally frustrated people to express themselves in cathartic ways.
Perhaps one of the reasons I love this piece, is because it validates my observation that this movement so nicely fits Eric Hoffer's  model of a  ''True Believer.''
  •  ...  the narrow, irrational emotionalism of the protestors resembles religious fanaticism.
  • I don't think the protestors have a coherent world view that answers all questions; rather, I think they are suffering from debilitating, free-floating resentment that paralyzes them and makes realization of their ideas -- or indeed having any ideas -- impossible.
  •  Resentment, he wrote, is about moral values themselves. It was the role of certain people, whether through mental problems or some other disadvantage, to hate the idea of morality itself. This is why resentment is incurable, and different from hatred or jealousy. If you're jealous of your neighbors sports car, you get over it when you buy your own. If you resent him because he's a Christian -- well, there's really nowhere to go with that, other than to this year's protest march. It's also why resenters can't forge a coherent philosophy. If your problem is with the natural law and morality itself, you're not going to be happy in this life. Yes, yes, we all know Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, et al., hate Bush, the war, etc. But what are they for? The world may never know.
There is much more.  It helps me understand what motivates Camp Democrat to behave in such an utterly reckless, and insane manner.  My description of them as "rabid dogs" was not really off the mark, was it?  Eeek.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice post. But it's Eric Hoffer, not "Hoffman."

Jake said...

Thank you Roger for this. It helps understand a group that is isolated from reality and reason. As I said before, I call that group the Religion of the Left. They are just as fanatic in their religion as Al Qaida is in theirs. And just as dangerous to America.

Rodger the Real King of France said...

OMFG ... Hoffer. Yikes. Thanks.

Jake .. it helped me understand too ... I'm serious.

Rodger the Real King of France said...

sonofabithch ... I just checked and my spell checker changed "Hoffer" to "Hoffman" without asking. Bastard.

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