[This piece was published in the 11may22 Union op-ed pages here.]
Your weekly column – ‘The gritty middle way’ - in the 6may22 Union (here) was a thoughtful, well-written piece that I and many of your readers enjoyed reading. By now, most of the newspaper’s readers know that, counter to your protestations, you have become markedly left-of-center in your politics. We have all witnessed the transition over the last few years.
The essay’s great opening – “Humans live in tension between the collective and the individual, neither ant drones nor lonely snow leopards.” – sets the stage for a good discussion of that gritty tension. As you might expect, your words will sound very different to right and left readers who don’t necessarily inhabit the extremes of their respective polar regions.
The discerning reader is jarred a mite when he runs into “the farther right and farther left have uncannily similar root worldviews in common. Just understand that America’s actual risk of living under the thumb of fascist overlords or critical-theorist Marxist mobs amounts to the same fever dream born of indigestion from bogieman stories repeated mostly on blue screens.”
This observation and a couple of others can qualify as a litmus test for an intellectual leftist – they do not see the asymmetries in the ideological foundations of individualism and collectivism. For them, “our yearnings in politics would have us believe that the end of the rainbow, the prize, lies at one pole or the other, sweet relief to be found there.” However, that is not true. Were we to believe polls and voting patterns, we would know the overwhelming share of liberal voters embrace large government collectivism, seeing no natural limits to taxation, regulation, and centralized control – reaching for the undefined but uniformly applied ‘common good’ dominates all political thought. This is the foundation of the ‘fair share’ dictum - from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs – enforced equity über alles.
On the right the conservative, most certainly the conservetarian, sees no desired end in fascist governance. For after all, fascism is the other dominant form of collectivism that also requires a very large autocratic government to implement its principles of social order and economics. This is anathema to the overwhelming share of those on the Right. Perhaps unrealistically, but the mainstream rightwinger’s desiderata are based on a smaller government minimally regulating open markets, staying out of people’s lives, and subsisting on minimum tax revenues. The real political bookends for us are quite different than those apprehended and preached by the Left. An easy proof of this is in the readings of your cited Levin, who describes a leftist society accepted by the Left, and Lakoff, who demonstrates repeatedly that he has no idea what the Right believes and seeks.
What the left-leaner also misses is that his desired social order requires the practice of wholesale altruism to make it work, and populated by perfected Marxists who have always been beyond the pale of human action (see Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’). Historically, all leftwing nostrums to achieve such a glorified state of affairs require an initial phase of large-scale authoritarian social conditioning, wherein some eggs have to be cracked to make the sought for omelet. This road, de rigueur to the intellectual Marxist, is kept hidden from the hoi polloi lest they up and embrace the ever-present siren song of the capitalists.
So, in sum Don, your commentary invites the reader to an admittedly difficult, yet reasonable, and reasoned middle path, avoiding both sides bounded by indistinguishable brambles and thorns. Sadly, as attested by more than two hundred years of history, along with today’s petabytes of data, that is not the real world – it never was. May the conversation continue.
Always with respect and best wishes,
George Rebane
Roe v Wade v Dodd (updated 6may22)
George Rebane
Now DvJ has reduced this down to the first 15 weeks. (more here) And this started the brouhaha that was appealed all the way up to SCOTUS, which, according to the draft, promises to reconsider the whole question of constitutionality and to reinstate federalism by again allowing the several states each to legislate their own abortion laws.
The Left, generally against federalism, hates this and anybody and everybody who wants to restrict a ‘woman’s right’ to an abortion, up to and including a post-partum killing. And for good measure, all progressives want the state to pay for such abortions on demand.
My own take on abortions is included in the 2012 post ‘Abortion and the Two Bodies Problem’.
[4may22 update] There was a gathering of Nevada County’s ignorant and double dummies to protest the SCOTUS draft on Broad Street. (here) It is hard to believe that any of these fellow citizens and neighbors, among whom we must live, know the contents of RvW, Mississippi’s DvJ, or the leaked draft. The depths of their considerable deficits allow them to comfortably demonstrate for democracy while denying the ability of Americans in the several states the ability to vote for the abortion policy that they and their fellow residents support. The facile way they continue to be manipulated by the nation’s leftwing elites recalls Lenin’s definition of ‘useful idiots’.
[6may22 update] Another illustration of the intellectually brain-dead Left is their ongoing charge Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh broke their promise to the Senate that they would honor Roe after being confirmed. There is no evidence whatsoever that they made any such commitments during their hearings, yet the Democrats and their lamestream have now adopted that as their latest Big Lie, adding it to their already historic collection that continues to grow at an increasing pace as the November election approaches. Another one of their 'poetic truths'?
On the lighter side, the photo below was recaptioned by one of our regular readers. He didn’t specify whether the new non-scalable fence is supposed to keep the Republicans in or out.
Posted at 09:14 AM in Culture Comments, Current Affairs, Happenings, Our Country, The Rear View | Permalink | Comments (46)
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