#49: The Mind of the Progressive

Though progressives will immediately respond, they do it too, I see a definite difference in the attitude with which their people engage in the political fray and the attitude of grass roots conservatives. Note that I don’t say “republicans.” Progressives exhibit an unconcealed contempt for those who disagree with them that isn’t found among the conservatives. The progressives feel not only free, but entitled, even obliged, to be disgustingly personal in their attacks and to attack people rather than ideas. They also have no limits in what they are willing to do behind the scenes to undermine their opponents. Just a small example is the recent attempt to punish Joe Lieberman by putting behind-the-scenes pressure on a breast cancer charity to remove Hadassah Lieberman, his wife, from the role of representing the organization.

This is not a BIG deal, but it is very illustrative of the mind of the left. The action is low, petty, vindictive, vicious, and small-minded. The action would be at home within Leninist Bolshevism. But the mere fact that the action is small and dirty does not make it “beneath” the leftist, and that is because nothing is beneath him. The Lieberman example can be multiplied endlessly. And what is fascinating in a revolting kind of way is that it is precisely the outfit that claims to “care about people”, the outfit that constantly maligns conservatives (who are also “people,” by the way), and who likes refer to the Republican party as “mean-spirited” that engages naturally and spontaneously in this kind of primitive filth.

The first thing one thinks of when trying to understand this phenomenon is that it reflects a fanatically “religious” sensibility. The only other context in which we find this comfortable abandonment of civilized behavior is that of the Islamic terrorist with his use of mutilations, child and woman suicide bombers, hostage murder, mass killing of civilians. The Islamofascist is not troubled by his own behavior because it has been sanctioned by his god. The same is true, I think, of the modern leftist. For the modern leftist, the achieving of total political power has all the character of a divine mission and there is little to choose between a Lenin (or an Obama), on the one hand, and a Torquemada, on the other.

But there is something else that makes his behavior possible for him. As I have stressed time and again, socialism is and has always been from the time of its earliest formulation, a revolutionary social theory. Not enough attention is paid to what this actually means. The true revolutionary rejects and abandons the society from which he emerges, and that means he abandons all of its traditional rules of behavior, whether they be rules of etiquette, of dispute, or of war. The revolutionary seeks to be sui generis and he wants his brave new world also to be sui generis. In the case of the socialist, his narrative is that in place of all tradition (“bourgeois constraints”), he is placing two things: 1) the happiness of the worker as the goal, and 2) anything without limits that may work as the means.

Once we understand the mind-set of the progressive, a mind set shared by fanatics, on the one hand, and criminals, on the other, we can also understand the progressive’s attitude towards the Constitution and law in general. For the progressive, the Constitution is, at best, a convenient stick with which to beat the opposition and, at worst, an inconvenient obstacle to be ignored or overridden. The same is true of the progressive’s attitude towards the law: use it when it’s convenient, ignore it when it’s not.

Both for progressives and criminals, there are objectives at stake that make the law irrelevant. For the progressive, the goal is the accumulation of centralized power, for the criminal the accumulation of personal wealth. It goes without saying that these two objectives are not mutually exclusive.

And it is this, I think, that differentiates conservatives from progressives. Conservatives govern themselves according to principles, whatever one might want to say about those principles; progressives are, as it is now popular to say, “pragmatic.”

The old-fashioned way of expressing the progressive mind-set is that it is unprincipled. And in the old days, to say of a person that they were unprincipled was to say something critical about them. Nowadays, we avoid this connotation by eschewing the word “unprincipled” in favor of the word “pragmatic,” where the latter has a positive connotation, but actually means the same as the former. It’s really “all about” words in the leftist universe.

Progressives backing Obama during the campaign said of him, as a compliment, “he’s not an ideologue, he’s really pragmatic.” But what does this mean? I think it just means that he’s unprincipled, that we can expect him to do anything “that works.” This is, after all, what “pragmatic” means. And what this further means is that he won't let himself be impeded by any constraints at all, not ones of good taste, of manners, of civilized behavior, not even the constraints of Constitution or law. But that’s exactly how criminals act, which should not surprise us since Obama learned the craft of politics in the crucible of Chicago, the original home of Richard J. Daley as well as Al Capone (and now Rod Blagojevitch).

He made it clear in various interviews that he thought of the constitution as a “living thing” that had to change “with the times” to meet new circumstances; that he thought of the Supreme Court as an instrument for meting out “social justice”; and that laws had to be periodically “re-interpreted.” The world that Obama wants to bring into existence is not a world subject to the rule of law, it’s a world subject to the rule of monarchs who pretend to be constrained by law, but are not. Obama’s world is one in which nothing means what it seems to mean and meanings change from one context to the next, it's a world in which even nuances don’t mean what we think they mean, for they themselves have nuances of their own. Paraphrasing Heinlein’s little poem:

And little nuances have littler nuances

Upon their backs that bite ‘em;

And litter nuances have littler nuances,

And so ad infinitum.

The only positive thing in this god-awful socialist mess is the possibility that now that the American people have gotten this affirmative action experiment out of their system and they see the damage that an ideologically driven, inexperienced, posturing incompetent can do while in office, they will snap out of their momentary liberal narcosis and return to sane and stable government. Not perfect government, just not mind-bogglingly stupid and destructive government.