by T Nelson

Not the Antichrist, Just An Ordinary Lib

recent article somewhere on the Internet said that Barack Obama deliberately threw away America's victories in Iraq and the Afghanistan wars, and then moved on to deliberately mess up in Libya, Egypt, and Syria. The reason, said this article, is not incompetence, but the fact that Obama wants to weaken America. The writer pointed to Obama's twenty years of listening to the America-hating preacher Jeremiah Wright and suggested that it's the logical culmination of a long history of indoctrination, starting with the infiltration of the American Left by Soviet agents.

This has become a popular meme among some conservatives: Obama isn't just your ordinary everyday underqualified affirmative action figure. He is a concentrated dose of Alinskyite antichrist whose goal is to turn America into a Western version of Somalia, except with SUVs and lots of really fat people. He hates America, and his goal, laid out by two academics back in the sixties, is to bankrupt the country deliberately.

The caps-lock brigade may well be right. But on the other hand, it's just as dangerous to overestimate your opponent as it is to underestimate him. There's a simpler explanation: he's just an ordinary, everyday lib, and he's doing what they all want. And that's bad enough.

What is a liberal?

What is a lib? Libs aren't like normal people. They don't think strategically. They're like children. Libs love to lose wars, not so much because they hate America, but because they fancy themselves as representing the underdog, and the underdog is noble, because it always loses. Ergo, surrendering makes your country look noble. Appropriately French sounding, I guess, now that we have John Kerry as our SoS.

Liberalism is all about how others see you. An opinion to a lib is like a Rolex to a yuppie: its purpose is not to give you accurate information, but to impress people. That's why they complain about highways being defaced with billboards, and then deface the back of their own Prius by plastering it with political bumper stickers. To a lib, this is not a contradiction. It is not an eyesore when you agree with what's being said. It's the message, not the medium.

The reason is that that libs are people-oriented, not idea-oriented. In a debate, a people person will attack the opponent, not the opponent's ideas. If name-calling fails, people-oriented debaters try to deny the opponent's right to speak. At the same time, they have a heightened sensitivity to personal offense. These may be reasons why debating and arguing skills are declining among college students today. In earlier times, acquiring good debating skills was considered mandatory for an educated person.

In general, when people use name-calling and emotional appeals in their arguments it is because they know that a rational, fact-based discussion would invariably favor their opponent's position.

In foreign affairs, a good foreign policy is one that consists of gestures designed to convince other powers that the libs are kind, wonderful human beings so the foreign leaders will like them and therefore reciprocate by making meaningless gestures of their own. The more useless and ineffectual the gesture, the better (e.g., Kerry's unbelievable “Unbelievably small” war). Its purpose is not so much to improve the world, but to gain praise (and sometimes win valuable prizes) from fellow libs for being seen wanting to do so.

Egalitarianism

But there's more to it than simple narcissism. If you fight a war and somehow, through no fault of your own, manage to win, perhaps by mistake or because you weren't paying enough attention, someone will accuse you of doing something wrong. It's not that the libs are being unpatriotic. It's because, simply by virtue of having won, you have created inequality. To a lib, inequality is an evil in and of itself, no matter what causes it.

Winning isn't fair, and life, say libs, should always be fair. The only way to achieve that is for there to be no winners or losers, so everyone gets the same result. So if America is stronger, that's automatic inequality. The battlefield must therefore be stacked so the outcome is fair. If we destroy 1000 enemy tanks, it's only fair to allow the enemy to destroy 1000 of our tanks. That way, the enemy's feelings don't get hurt, and they won't be mad at us (which, nine out of ten libs agree, is what causes them to invade other countries and slaughter people).

We see this already in the schools. If one student pulls ahead, he or she must be held back. In sports both sides must win to avoid hurting the feelings of the losers. If someone fails a test of ability, or scores low on an IQ test, that very fact proves the test was biased. No other evidence is necessary. To a lib, it is axiomatic, because if something good happens to one person, it means something bad happened to someone else. It is a zero-sum world, just like in economics, where if one person gets rich it can only be because they stole their wealth from somebody else, and so must give it back in the interests of fairness.

To a conservative this is just plain nuts. But after many years of working with and arguing with libs (and yes, sometimes almost hitting them), I have come to realize that libs really do believe this.

The libs' ideas won't stand up to reality forever. But the nice thing about being a superpower is that you can ignore reality for a long time. It's like being the boss in a company. The boss can make one stupid decision after another, and it's up to the troops, those few who actually know how things work, to clean up the resulting disasters. If the troops are good, the boss can go on thinking that making bad decisions is free from harmful consequences, and he doesn't need to think, to know anything, or to have any particular skill. But sooner or later, the disaster will be too expensive to clean up. That happens to lots of companies, and it's what happened to the British Empire. Today's libs, unaware of how the world works, think their country is indestructible, just as children think their parents will be there forever, so we can afford not to think strategically, and to make bad decisions, and everything will just work out.

Equality as the libs define it no longer means giving everyone an equal opportunity. It means meddling with the economy and making rules to guarantee the same result for everyone, regardless of effort or ability. This is sometimes called radical egalitarianism.

Here is what Wikipedia says about radical egalitarianism:

Radical Egalitarianism is a political theory associated with the ideas of optimistic tendencies, the suggestions that Americans must work in a multiracial society, and that citizens must use activism and social reform within the current institutions.

This is why, children, you must never rely on Wikipedia as a source of accurate information. As a definition, it's about as wrong as you can possibly get.

Flaws in egalitarianism

Unfortunately for the rest of us, the only way to achieve the kind of equality the libs want is to have absolute control of everything everyone does. So, are libs totalitarians in disguise? Perhaps not by design, but in practice that is the only way to achieve their goal. Libs will be outraged at the suggestion, and for sure they have never thought about it, but libs will never be happy until free thinking humans are replaced by mindless, regimented, marching clones like you see in the sci-fi movies.

The failures of Obama and his fellow leftists are directly traceable to their belief in egalitarianism, which holds that in every interaction among people, the result must be fair: there should be no winners or losers. The goal here is to do away with envy and greed, and this is its main selling point.

To justify this, egalitarianism holds not just that all persons are to be treated as if they are equal, but that all persons really are equal. A five minute walk down the street will convince you that this is false. People have different abilities. Some are good at math. Others are physically strong. Science has shown that these differences are biologically inherent, and in large part genetically programmed. Thus, if nothing else, egalitarianism is a tribute to mankind's ability to believe something that makes them feel idealistic, in the face of overwhelming evidence of its falsehood.

Since egalitarianism is based on a false belief, most of the problems with egalitarianism are the result of its inevitable conflict with the real world.

1. It is based on the belief that all outcomes should be equal. The only way this could happen would be if people were inherently identical, i.e. a blank slate, in terms of native ability. Since this is demonstrably false, egalitarianism necessarily leads to racist policies. Historically, governments that have adopted egalitarianism have had to resort to mass murder in their attempts to make it work.
2. It leads to totalitarianism, because even if people were inherently identical clones of each other, random chance would lead to differences in outcome. The only way to prevent that is by force.
3. It is also anti-intellectualistic, because a few seconds of honest reflection would cause its adherents to fall away like dead leaves.

Because egalitarian ideology is contrary to empirical reality, it is threatened by independent thinkers, who must therefore be suppressed or controlled. As far back as 1910 the socialist Robert Rives La Monte expressed it this way:

“An hour or two of productive labor will keep our savants in the pink of physical condition for their intellectual labors, and their experiences of real, practical life will make their studies far more fruitful for humanity. ” [from Men versus the Man , p. 89]

This statement may seem innocuous. Everyone benefits from exercise, right? But that's not what La Monte really means. He means that “savants” should be forced to do physical labor. That paragraph is chilling today in the light of the history of the gulags and the Khmer Rouge, in which millions of intellectuals and dissidents were worked to death in labor camps by their communist rulers.

Indeed, the Khmer Rouge showed us the end result of egalitarianism put into practice. Those bleached, endless piles of skulls are all that remains of the Cambodian school teachers, professors, doctors, intellectuals, writers, property owners, businessmen, and the physically attractive: the human beings who give a society a culture and a destiny. The ones who dared to be different. The ultimate goal of egalitarianism is to do away with all differences among people, one way or the other. Egalitarianism sounds nice, but it's ultimately a death cult.

Albert Einstein wouldn't have survived long in an egalitarian society. Neither would Miley Cyrus. If libs succeed in remaking the world, the only ones who would survive are mindless drones. There would be no room for creativity or dissent, just millions of rules that dictate every aspect of your life.

That's not to say the libs are like the Khmer Rouge. For one thing, unlike the Khmer Rouge, libs are deathly afraid of guns, and for that we should all be grateful. There are other differences as well. But the point is that egalitarianism is not the nice-sounding cause its name would imply. It has led to some of the worst crimes in history. Libs are probably not even thinking where their ideology leads. To them, it's all about having the middle-class virtues of just being a nice person and speaking nice-sounding platitudes: equality, social justice, fairness, and so forth. The fact that it means poverty, mediocrity, and slavery is just a side benefit. But libs are in denial, and will probably remain in denial until it's too late.

Believing in these nice-sounding causes like egalitarianism and social justice just because their names sound nice is a way of imagining that the world is as we wish it to be. That is what makes the libs so dangerous. Where the libs are headed is less a slippery slope than a sheer cliff. And, hand in hand, unthinkingly, singing Kumbaya as we go, they may drag the rest of us off the edge with them.