The hard left are the new comedy right
They’ve went so far left they are now a caricature of the hard right they hate.
In the last decade or so the left have lurched ever further leftward and show no signs of slowing down.
We live in an era where normal centrist policies like secure borders and rejecting socialism are condemned as right-wing extremism.
Many leaders embrace hard-left ideas as if they are normal and not radical fringe positions.
Examples are everywhere.
Support for suicidal energy policies based on magical thinking is commonplace. This is not just championed by the media and politicians, but virtually every large organization has some kind of climate policy, no matter how distant they are from such concerns.
We witness initiatives that accelerate the decline in law and order, including novel ideas about rehabilitation and the recidivism of criminals. These don’t work and put the public at risk. Yet the police, the courts and even the prison service seem entranced by them.
Condemnation of western culture and heritage is widespread, especially from people in positions of authority or prominence. This includes sweeping dismissals of our history as somehow uniquely worthy of contempt.
Much of this is underpinned with sentimental ideas about ethnicity, gender, childhood and even public health. No contrary evidence seems to penetrate the cluster of utopian fantasies bringing about serious decline.
Magical thinking is now enshrined in politics and considered unchallengeable dogma for many.
None of this is limited to institutions or those parroting fashionable nonsense just to get on in life. These destructive views are sincerely held by many individuals.
Social media generates countless examples of everyday leftists posting extreme comments that reflect this same drift into delusion.
Trump derangement syndrome is especially commonplace. Many are unhinged in their hatred for President Trump which has little basis in reality.
We are told he will target blacks or enslave women. He is perceived as a dictator intent on establishing a fascist state despite staying within the law and enacting policies he promised during his campaign.
The response to the recent murder of Charlie Kirk reflected the same phenomenon. Seemingly normal people demonstrating they lack compassion, insight or even common sense. Many cheered on his death. They celebrated that a gun supporter was shot in front of his own children.
Similarly, the response on the left objecting to the deportation of illegal immigrants is detached from reality. Many have taken to the streets as well as social media and advertised their dangerous commitment to open borders, a suicidal philosophy that will cause widespread social unrest.
Attempts to discuss, debate or remonstrate with pro-immigration fanatics seem doomed as the goal appears to be the destruction of our way of life.
Whenever we witness social media postings from the left’s rank and file, the defining feature is typically emotional dysregulation, an observation we also make when we see them interviewed at their endless protest marches where they often appear perpetually unhappy and indifferent to argument or reason.
Troubling behaviours
Today’s left demonstrate a consistent set of troubling behaviours. They are authoritarian and routinely endorse policies most view as excessive, draconian and even totalitarian.
Cancellation, doxxing, the social ruin of opponents, online regulation and the prosecution of hate speech crimes are key examples, as if they alone get to decide what we can read or see.
They are intolerant of positions that deviate from their own which they perceive as enlightened. Everything seems to be saturated with emotion. They are easily triggered. Debate itself is rejected, the rationale for which is reflected in the irrational slogan: words are violence.
But perhaps most troubling of all is the condemnation of entire groups. Being white, and especially an intersectional bingo combination like successful white heterosexual men, means instant dismissal. Your views do not count.
Given serious power it would mean much more than this. They cheer as white men lose their place in the West. They laugh when this is noticed. Humiliation is never far beneath the surface.
Life is unpleasant under the progressive left. We sense we are living in someone else’s dystopian hellscape.
Their zeal is relentless, driven by resentment. That’s why it feels so draining.
We are hectored by activists and social agitators about our racism, sexism and abuse of the planet, none of which is real or even relevant to our lives. Even if it were, it is the way these things are wielded as weapons to beat people into submission. They are used as leverage. Everything is nagging.
No one lives up to the expectations of the progressive left. They revel in the opportunity to condemn others as they always believe they have the moral high ground.
These are people with a lust for power. Their drive is control of everything.
Plans are forever being drawn up to tackle the ills of society for the purposes of managing the rest of us. We must improve equality, race relations and help the special groups they favour. We must tear it all down and build it again, except this time with women and gays and brown people at the helm.
Their bleak manifesto is writ large across Western society.
Nothing is good enough. We must do more. We must dig deeper. We must sacrifice it all for a common good defined by the permanently unhappy.
The left are difficult to live with.
Enter stage right
The steep decline of the left reminds me of the computer game, Pacman. A player can exit the screen on the left and the avatar emerges back onscreen from the right.
Our real-life pacmen are no better. They have wandered so far left they have come out the other side and represent the left’s own caricature of the right.
They most resemble the “far-right extremists” no one can ever find. Thin skinned, intolerant of others, obsessive and controlling, judging people by group membership and driven by hatred. Everything is emotional, with detached, analytical judgments absent from their repertoire. The result is often barely concealed threats of punishment with all the emotional volatility this implies. And yet they imagine themselves the vanguard of a fairer tomorrow.
These are dangerous people.
They possess minimal self-awareness. They are a product of insecurity, mental distortion and echo chambers.
Consequently, the left lack the feedback mechanisms to correct course when things go awry. Hence the extreme stances, the drama when sensible suggestions are made that run counter to their fantasies. The overreactions to criticism. And the hive mind. They seem to all think alike. Arch-conformists who look to others for direction but imagine themselves clear-sighted mavericks.
These deficits are the reason they are drifting ever further leftward because there is nothing that penetrates their thinkbubbles enough to stop them.
It is too emotionally satisfying to rage about the absence of female equality or climate justice to bother with realistic counterarguments against these positions which would require an assessment of cold hard reality.
That is probably why we cannot debate our way out of this as Charlie Kirk’s recent murder demonstrated.
Voting just makes them worse since they do not accept what the majority decide. Like so many traditional constraints, democracy is useful only in as much as it provides cover for the exercise of power.
We are therefore exhausting conventional approaches and I think more and more sense this. All the while anyone in the centre or centre-right is seen as an extremist by people who have embraced actual extreme positions
I am not sure what the solution is. Maybe there isn’t one.
To survive we may have to revisit our adherence to fair mindedness as our cultural enemies bulldoze their way through every pillar in society we rely on and only pay lip service to standards of behaviour others are expected to uphold.
When they are shooting the debaters and aggressively dismiss rational discussion, where do we go to resolve our differences?
Leave a comment below if you have any suggestions.
I've watched this descent from the early 70s. I know that sounds pompous or something but I am an observer. I am also a card carrying Boomer but I chose not to take on the hippie low road path. Then, in the mid to late seventies I noted the rise of feminism from the original intent - equal rights for women - to the inevitable never enough process that declared women are not just equal but better than men. Now where are the rabid feminists when men are taking over women's sports? Not a peep. Because they are like a snake that eats it own tail.
So, watching all this unfold for the last half century, writing about it for 38 - I conclude that we are at war with dark principalities. The best causes are always hijacked by those who have little god complexes. In fact, it is a type of god replacement. So, I call this - when anything goes, everything does. How do we reverse this? Maybe we can't this time. Maybe this is the final era of The Great Delusion.
If we can sort things out enough so that we can have a stable society going forward, I think one thing that will be necessary is a cultural condemnation of naïveté (outside of children). Honestly, right now I feel like we adore or even fetishize people with “good intentions”, the sort of person who’s doing good work (whatever that may be: church, charity work, activism, etc.), especially if their all in and making sacrifices for it. It probably comes from being a high trust society, but whatever the origin, we’ve really gotta learn to be cynical about people’s motivations. Otherwise, anything we build is just going to get co-opted for someone else’s purposes, and quickly, too.
Second note: one of the things that makes following current events stressful for me is how closely the left’s behavior resembles that of my mentally ill, abusive mother: blatant double standards, totally unaccountable, quick to accuse, threats, etc., ad nauseam. Her politics are basically a painfully reductive version of 90s boomer conservatism. The resemblance is so close that my husband has joked about buying her a box of blue hair dye for Christmas!