The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Does Conservative Light Suck At Supporting Lefty Darkness?

Posted on | August 28, 2011 | 22 Comments

by Smitty

Look no further than Salon for your daily dose o’ dreck. “Why won’t America embrace the left?” moans Mandy Van Deven, whose name appears just above a picture that answers the mail on why Americans cannot abide propaganda-peddling putzes of the Lefty variety.

The eloquent, conservative, Baptist, Republican image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. placed on the left of a triptych with Michael Moore and FDR? Really? You think that Dr. King would look at the horror of debt and aborted children wrought by the Left in the name of Progress and not join the nearest Tea Party in his indignation?

You think that by co-opting the image of King you can airbrush history, because Americans have not caught on to the the Left’s recreational dishonesty? You’re sadly mistaken, Mandy. Successful propaganda, like a magic show, is predicated upon a willing audience. Apparently there is a Michael Kazin, who does something to history at Georgtown University (some might call it teaching), and has dropped by Salon for an interview. Mandy introduces her topic:

What has the left really accomplished over the past two centuries? FDR’s New Deal remains one of the great American success stories. In the ’60s, leftist politics created a massive countercultural movement — and sexual and feminist revolutions. The civil rights movement transformed both American society and the American soul. But, if you compare the accomplishments of the American left to those of other parts of the world, like Western Europe, its record is remarkably dismal, with a surprising lack of real political and social impact.

At least, that’s the main takeaway from “American Dreamers,” a new book by Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University, which covers nearly 200 years of struggle for civil rights, sexual equality and radical rebellion. His book explores the way the national conversation has been changed by union organizers, gay rights activists and feminists. He also writes about how their techniques have now been adopted by the Tea Party movement. From Michael Moore to “Wall-E,” he argues that, although the left has been successful at transforming American culture, when it comes to practical change, it’s been woefully unsuccessful.

What has the left really accomplished over the past two centuries? FDR’s New Deal remains one of the great American success stories.
Anyone who’s read Amity Shlaes knows that the FDR’s New Deal, even if you blow by the anti-Constitutional rejection of limited government that it embodied, has proven an economic disaster over the last 75-ish years. So Mandy is either simple, or a propaganda monger.
In the ’60s, leftist politics created a massive countercultural movement — and sexual and feminist revolutions. The civil rights movement transformed both American society and the American soul.
I’m about halfway through the latest Ann Coulter, Demonic and she recounts in much detail just how cool the Weathermen, the campus loonies, et al. were.

. . .covers nearly 200 years of struggle for civil rights, sexual equality and radical rebellion. His book explores the way the national conversation has been changed by union organizers, gay rights activists and feminists. He also writes about how their techniques have now been adopted by the Tea Party movement.
Kazin doesn’t seem too interested in the struggle for liberty, which is the heart of American Exceptionalism, and predates all of the union/gay/feminist twaddle. If we have liberty, all else follows. It is the sheer genius of the Left to take the teleological point of America, liberty, and obscure it with so much chrome and tailfin (“inter-species economic reproductive voting justice”) that no one can quite figure out what the Left is on about anymore. However, if Noam Chomsky says it, the muddle will be served with erudite-sounding faux authority.

Screw your nonsense, Kazin: the Tea Parties are about burning through your intellectual fog, not adding to it.

I’m going to stop after the first question, for reasons of time. However, I trust other bloggers can get on the fisk train and help out.

In the book, you argue that the left has been very successful at changing American culture — but not at making real economic or political change. Why?

It’s easier to get people to think about things differently than it is to construct institutions that alter the basic building blocks of society. When leftists talk about having a vision of how things might be different, they attract an audience and create a new way of perceiving things. It’s a different issue altogether to go up against entrenched structures of wealth and political power. There are few obstacles to talking differently, singing different kinds of songs, or making a different kind of art, but it takes a sustained movement of millions of people to really change the structures, and that is much harder to organize. Also, most Americans accept the basic ground rules of capitalist society. The ideas are that if you work hard you can get ahead and that it’s better to be self-employed than employed by the people. They believe that the basics of a capitalist society are just or can be made just with small alterations. Americans want capitalism to work well for everybody, which is somewhat of a contradiction in terms since capitalism is about people competing with each other to get ahead, and everyone’s not going to be able to do well at the same time. That’s simply not possible.

. . .construct institutions that alter the basic building blocks of society.
First, identify the problem you think you’re about solving. There are few more painful people in life than those who’ve fallen in love with change for change’s sake. They’re either stupid, diabolical, or a fine blend of both.

. . .vision of how things might be different. . .
There is nothing new under the sun, twerp. Among the very old things one can find are pixie dust peddlers, in which ignoble line you stand. Your ‘different’ future boils down to feudalism, and we don’t want it.

. . .it takes a sustained movement of millions of people to really change the structures, and that is much harder to organize. . .
Iron fist, velvet glove.

Americans want capitalism to work well for everybody, which is somewhat of a contradiction in terms since capitalism is about people competing with each other to get ahead, and everyone’s not going to be able to do well at the same time. That’s simply not possible.
It really depends on your definition of ‘ahead’, doesn’t it? By the one-dimensional metric of money, you can bin people easily into haves and have-nots, the better to incite the less reflective into class warfare, no? Your attention is drawn to Bill Whittle for any number of excellent rebuttals.

The Progressive Left is withering under the weight of conservative dialogue in the information age. The more the American people talk to each other, the more they realize the Left are nothing but theives, albeit well-dressed. They want to steal our liberty and replace it with lame substitutes.

(via Memeorandum)

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Comments

22 Responses to “Why Does Conservative Light Suck At Supporting Lefty Darkness?”

  1. Pitbull
    August 28th, 2011 @ 1:44 pm

    Smitty, “the left,” with its delicious flavors of Communism and Nazism, managed to kill about 100 million people in the 2oth century. I think that’s achievement enough.

  2. Anonymous
    August 28th, 2011 @ 1:56 pm

    I’ve always been amused how the “anti-Nazi Left” was rabidly isolationist until Hitler attacked Russia.

  3. rosalie
    August 28th, 2011 @ 2:10 pm

    I would like to challenge these people, who are so against this country, to live in a communist country for at least one year.   Perhaps they could live in Cuba for a while or how about Venezuela?  Live with the common folk and see firsthand what it’s really like.    Michael Moore loves Cuba so much,  go there for a year.  If he gets sick, he will get that wonderful medical treatment that he likes so much better than ours.   Sean Penn’s another big phony.  And please take Van Jones with you!

  4. McGehee
    August 28th, 2011 @ 2:17 pm

    Why won’t America embrace the left?

    Because America isn’t suicidal.

  5. Beto Ochoa
    August 28th, 2011 @ 2:45 pm

    That, and people generally don’t like “Piss Christ”, pedophile trolling of school children under the guise of inclusion and diversity or being called racists for wanting to protect their children’s future from parasites and tyrants.

  6. ThePaganTemple
    August 28th, 2011 @ 4:52 pm

    If King was a Republican, which is a very dubious proposition at best, he was a bigger RINO than Colin Powell, regardless of the good he did. I’m not interested in jumping on the King is a God bandwagon any more than I am for Mohandas Gandhi, who was King’s major influence. By the time another ten or twenty years has gone by we’re going to be debating the merits, or lack thereof, of a Jesse Jackson Day, and of course, Barak Obama Day. Maybe even an Al Sharpton Day.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to cede that King was deserving of a holiday. But he wasn’t the God his more fanatical worshipers imply he was, and he damn sure wasn’t a conservative Republican. If he were still around today he’d probably be on the Global Climate Change Bandwagon, and I have no doubt whatsoever he’d be John McCain’s biggest ally in pushing for “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”. And make no mistake about it, when Obama signed Obamacare into law, King would have been standing right at his side.

    If you want to point to the merits of a black Republican, stick to Clarence Thomas. Sure the Left hates him. They’re supposed to. That proves his conservative bona fides.

  7. Anonymous
    August 28th, 2011 @ 5:07 pm

    1. Thanks for doing this, Smitty. I saw the Salon article on Memeorandum, read it and . . . Well, other than putting Michael Kazin on my ever-growing list of Left-Wing Assholes to Ignore, I could think of nothing to write.

    2. As Ronald Reagan said, the problem with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t true.

  8. Anonymous
    August 28th, 2011 @ 5:41 pm

    Death to the Oikophobic Overlords.

  9. Anonymous
    August 28th, 2011 @ 5:49 pm

    Charlton Heston walked with King and the Freedom Marchers.  Was he a RINO?

    King was a Republican, and a professed Republican, for the very good and simple reason that the Democrats were turning dogs and firehoses on him and his people.
    Do NOT confuse the civil rights conflict of the early 60’s with today’s grievance mongering.  The one was a battle against very real injustice; the latter a two-fisted grab for more freebies,

  10. “Why won’t America embrace the [L]eft?” [Darleen Click]
    August 28th, 2011 @ 1:57 pm

    […] Smitty at The Other McCain comes this bit of illiberal nonsense and revisionism under the rubric of, all things, History What […]

  11. KG
    August 28th, 2011 @ 6:19 pm

    One year is not enough, I want them to go live in a communist country for 10 years. Long enough for them to piss away the savings they’ve accumulated here in America, and to try hit the bottom in said country.

    Then maybe, *maybe* they will come to an understanding.

  12. KG
    August 28th, 2011 @ 6:20 pm

    Gah, “and to hit rock bottom in said country.”

  13. Adjoran
    August 28th, 2011 @ 6:25 pm

    America won’t embrace the Left because the Left empowers blithering idiots like Mandy Van Deven to hector decent people with her screeching screeds.

  14. ThePaganTemple
    August 28th, 2011 @ 7:15 pm

    Actually, Charlton Heston was a pretty liberal guy until he got involved in the anti-gun control movement. All that aside, I wasn’t even talking about the civil rights marches. King was simply a liberal. To try to identify him as a conservative is simply revisionist history.

  15. Anonymous
    August 28th, 2011 @ 7:54 pm

    King was simply a liberal. To try to identify him as a conservative is simply revisionist history.

    It’s also an attempt to hijack a dead man’s name in support of an argument that he has no part in. It’s like when liberals use Ronald Reagan as a stick with which to beat current Republicans.

    But “liberal” is, incidentally, too mild a word for King’s politics: Insofar as he was interested in politics,  he was a man of the Left all the way. Some people have attempted to freeze King in time, to make his March on Washington speech (“I Have a Dream”) the entirety of his political thought. But if you follow the trajectory of King’s career through 1968, you see that he was moving rapidly leftward in the closing years of his life, and there is no telling how far left he might have ultimately gone, were it not for the assassination.

    The problem, of course, is that the success of the civil rights movement in 1964-65 unleashed social and political forces that had been little anticipated by many of King’s supporters. I once interviewed someone who had been an SNCC activist during the Atlanta sit-ins and she pointed — as have many others — to the seizure of SNCC leadership by Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown as the moment where the movement went tragically off-course. By 1966, these young radicals were threatening to make MLK an irrelevant moderate, and MLK was thus forced leftward himself in order to maintain any influence at all.

    The irony is that, once King was assassinated, the radicals claimed ownership of King’s legacy as an excuse to justify their own agenda.

  16. rosalie
    August 28th, 2011 @ 7:56 pm

    I know that Reagan was very witty, but he definitely hit it out of the ball park with that remark.  And his son is a shining example of that too.

  17. ThePaganTemple
    August 28th, 2011 @ 8:45 pm

    That’s very true, and it wasn’t only black radicals, it was the white radicals, as well as white liberals who jumped to claim his legacy. Case in point, Robert F. Kennedy, who spoke a glowing tribute to King at his funeral, even though five years prior to that he was involved with the FBI in spying on him to the point of engaging in electronic eavesdropping and surveillance. That was one issue where Kennedy and Hoover were not at odds.

    But even though King may not himself have been of the Far Left, he was definitely a leftist. He was a Pacifist for one thing, an opponent of the Vietnam War, and a supporter of the Unions. He was trying to build a movement that crossed racial lines, and if he had lived I have no doubt he would have been just another Jesse Jackson at heart.

  18. Anonymous
    August 28th, 2011 @ 9:53 pm

    I never said conservative, I said Republican.

    And liberal or not, he was fighting a very real evil, not just maneuvering for the next election cycle. Do not let that point get lost, as the left would like it to do.  They very much want to maintain the lie that there has been no racial progress in this country.”He was trying to build a movement that crossed racial lines, and if he had lived I have no doubt he would have been just another Jesse Jackson at heart.”Actually, the King operation had very little use for “TV Jesse” as they called him, given that his main contribution was hogging the camera while others were doing the real work.  His parading around wearing his bloody shirt after the assassination was a fitting punctuation to his career with the Kings.

  19. rosalie
    August 28th, 2011 @ 10:48 pm

    One year would be like ten years for them.  Sort of like Hollywood marriages.   Those phonies are all talk. 

  20. ThePaganTemple
    August 28th, 2011 @ 11:23 pm

    @richard_mcenroe Problem is, I have never seen any real evidence he was a Republican, and if he was, he was the kind of of Republican that wouldn’t go over to well with most people here. Also, you’re missing my main point anyway. You’re judging him according to his life, which is fine. I don’t take anything away from him (other than things he never deserved to begin with). My point is, had he lived, on up to today, he would in all likelihood be just another African American activist. He might have had more of a crossover appeal than Jackson or Sharpton, but I guarantee you that you would not be seeing him the way you are now, nor would anybody else. Including probably himself.

  21. BLBeamer
    August 29th, 2011 @ 1:17 am

    Oh, boy is Kazin screwed now.  He let slip that not only does the Tea Party have a point, but he agrees that Obama’s stimulus didn’t work.  Despite his impeccable commie bona fides, if you listen carefully, you can hear Kazin’s name being scratched off all the “invite” lists to all the good parties in DC.

  22. Anonymous
    August 29th, 2011 @ 1:35 am

    The left thinks that American exceptionalism is an exceptionalism of exceptional oppression, exceptional destruction and exceptional bloodthirst:

    “The myth of the self-made man that emerged in the 19th century wasn’t entirely a myth. There were people who came to America and did very well for themselves. They had to do things like kill Native Americans and destroy the land in the process, but they made better lives for their families.”

    Do you suppose this sort of thinking is part of the reason Americans don’t open their arms for the left?

    http://www.rightklik.net/2011/08/why-america-doesnt-embrace-left.html

    Speaking of triptychs, embrace this:
    http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mav1XRFkZSc/Tlnao19Zs8I/AAAAAAAADSc/bLwfO0K6Ke8/s400/pics.png