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After a speech in Romania last week, I was asked a question by a young member of the audience that, remarkably, I don’t remember ever having been asked: What is leftism?
The question seems so simple and so basic to understanding contemporary life that you would think it would be posed frequently — and if it weren’t, the reason would be that almost anyone who cares about society would already know how to answer it. But the question is rarely posed, and few know how to answer it.
“What is leftism?” is not at all the same as “What is liberalism?” Leftism and liberalism share almost no values. Indeed, perhaps the greatest tragedy of America today is that liberals do not vote their values. Leftists vote their values, and conservatives vote their values. But liberals vote for left-wing values, almost none of which they hold.
To cite but two examples: Liberals do not believe in racial segregation, whereas the left does: all-black dorms, all-black graduation exercises, different standards for blacks, etc. And liberals do not believe that males who say they are females should be allowed to compete in women’s sports; only leftists do.
If you ask people, “What is leftism?” most will respond by listing left-wing positions, not by defining it. People confuse identifying left-wing positions with knowing what leftism is. But naming left-wing positions is not the same as defining leftism.
To be fair, many people, including conservatives, cannot define conservatism either. In fact, the inability of millions of American conservatives to define conservatism is a major reason so many conservative parents don’t have conservative children. (See my two-part column, “Explaining Conservatism”)
Ironically, if conservatives had not defined conservatism but had only defined leftism, that alone would have ensured that many of their children would never have embraced left-wing views. The moment you understand leftism, almost everything that is happening in and to America at the present time becomes clear. And the moment that becomes clear, most people reject the Left.
What, then, is leftism?
Leftism is the attempt to destroy the past — every value and every institution, the good as well as what it regards as the bad.
That is why leftists, by definition, hate conservatism. Conservatism seeks to conserve the best from the past. The Left seeks to destroy the past, including the best.
The first of the modern left-wing revolutions, the French Revolution, quite consciously sought to destroy every major institution and value of French society — not just the monarchy but God, religion, the legal system, traditional notions of good and evil, the calendar, the old way of telling time, the old weights and measures, and even the names of the days of the week. In other words, the past. Just like the Left in contemporary America, the leftists of the French Revolution toppled statues — in their case, the statues of every king of France.
The next major left-wing revolution, the Russian, did the same. As the Soviet dissident joke went, “In the Soviet Union the future is known; it’s the past which is always changing.”
Now you can begin to understand leftism.
In a very real sense, today’s leftism began in the 1960s with the infamous clarion call, “Never trust anyone over 30.” That phrase meant nothing less than “value nothing from the past.” Precisely what all leftism has been about — from France under its revolutionaries to Russia under the Bolsheviks to China under Mao to America under the Left.
That is why, as I have said almost every day on my radio show for years, “The Left destroys everything it touches.”
Whatever its noble-sounding rhetoric, the Left stands for nothing and therefore builds nothing (other than state power). Aside from state power, it only destroys.
Leftism in music, art, sculpture, and architecture destroyed everything beautiful and noble that had been created over all the preceding centuries.
It is destroying the universities, the high schools, and the elementary schools.
It is destroying science. More and more medical schools, for example, no longer speak of “pregnant women” but of “birthing persons.” The American Medical Association has come out in opposition to listing the sex of newborns on their birth certificates; children, the AMA holds, will eventually decide whether they are male or female, neither or both.
Like the French revolutionaries, it has redefined moral categories. It has substituted class and racial categories for moral ones. Good and evil have been replaced by black and white, male and female, rich and poor.
It is destroying the ideal of the nuclear family — a married man and woman with children. The Left has made war on “heteronormativity” and has redefined marriage.
And most telling — even the French Revolution did not conceive of this break with the past — the Left is working to destroy the distinction between man and woman.
Days before the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Barack Obama told a wildly cheering crowd, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
That’s all the Left does: fundamentally transform. Destroying everything it touches is not a byproduct of leftism. It is its aim.
Mindsets change when assumptions held to be true are undeniably and irrefutably proven false; and then there’s no going back to the old thinking – provided you take the time consciously to think:
Cogito ergo sum ergo cogito.
The act of defining anew to change a mindset requires an individual to be self critical, not going with the flow, not simply adjusting to a situation that, if you were really honest with yourself, you don’t like and don’t want to be a part of. It’s confronting a nagging feeling of discomfort, that something’s not right.
And you ask yourself: Am I a part of this? Is this a part of me? From what/where/how did I learn these false assumptions? Why am I accepting them?
The danger of false assumptions is that you will be manipulated because of them. You will never realize your purpose in your life; if you pursue only the purpose of others, how will you experience true satisfaction and feel inspired in the pursuit of your own purpose?
Defining, comparing and contrasting leftism, conservatism and liberalism
certainly stirs up the sediment of false assumptions.
But because leftism is lethal, here’s a comment:
I maintain the mindset that the goal of leftism is not the destruction of all institutions. Leftism’s destruction of American institutions is necessary to accomplish the goal of annihilating the Jewish people in Israel and around the world. You’ve got to knock out the institutions, the moral constraints and foundations,first, before going in for the kill.
The leftism’s US foreign policy is clearly and vehemently anti-the-existence-of-Israel. It is designed for this goal. No enemy, ancient and modern, has succeeded in wiping us out. Our current enemy, leftism, believes it can. This is leftism’s true obsession, its raison d’etre.
Marxism? Really? False assumptions.
Dr. Prager, I would like to know why you spoke in Romania, to whom and what you spoke about that prompted the question you discuss in your article.
I look forward to your reply!
Dennis Prager is an impressive intellectual, but it is my understanding that he never earned a doctorate.
I believe that’s correct, though it in no way diminishes his scholarly accomplishments.
Why does that matter? Many great thinkers do (did) not earn a Ph.D. Conversely, many Ph.D. grads are fools and idiots.
Common sense and moral values are not automatically granted with a Ph.D.
Prager is defining leftist as nihilism. Not bad but not quite a definition. Leftists are totalitarian collectivists nominally committed to an egalitarian society. They are levelers who want “equity”, i.e. equal outcome.
As levelers they want to destroy the good, achievement, etc. They claim to only want to raise “those in pain” but destroying the productive leaves no one to fix problems. They prefer everyone to suffer rather than some rise higher. This explains their nihilism. (I’ll say more later.)
What can you expect from Dennis Prager he has a second-rate mind and he’s as dishonest as Rodney Stark.
Your jealousy is obvious and you never miss a chance to show that jealousy. Perhaps you should look in the mirror.
He has a following that respect him. He has written books that sell. He is on the radio. He has his video series, widely watched.
What do you have? It is you that has a second-rate mind
“Prager has a second-rate mind”? That’s rich coming from a dude who equates Christianity with “altruism.” It’s also an admission of your jealousy and ignorance.
Ever hear of the Reformation? The Doctrine of Salvation by Faith Alone? Sola Fide? Ephesians 2:8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.
Jesus did all the “good works” for us on the cross. If Christianity is nothing but “altruism” – doing good works – Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was for nothing, and no one could ever do enough good works.
Just stop. We’re not impressed with your mind or your endless scribblings.
Ultimately, the Dennis Pragers and Rodney Starks are more detrimental and destructive of freedom, liberty, and capitalism than any Leftist nihilist because they make the Leftist nihilism possible.
To argue that freedom, liberty, and capitalism come from God and the Bible is to concede that you have no rational argument against the Left. That in reason and reality there is nothing that can or should stop the Leftist nihilism.
Freedom, liberty, the pursuit of personal happiness on Earth, in other words the American way of life, in other words Laissez-Faire Capitalism, are in fact and reality not mystical, supernatural, religious values but thoroughly SECULAR, RATIONAL, and SELFISH values.
Why do men need freedom, liberty, and personal, individual, self-interested happiness? In order to live and flourish on Earth, not to die and go to God’s Magical Paradise.
Unless and until Dennis Prager has the intelligence, honesty, philosophical consistency, and courage to face and accept that fact of reality and argue for the American way of life from the provable and demonstrable facts of reality alone, he and his ilk will be the most effective enemies of the American way of life.
Somehow I think Prager doesn’t give a fig about your opinion of him.
Basically you use your jealousy and hatred of him to denigrate Judaism and Christianity and plug your own worthless “religion”. How’s that going for you?
Hey how about another silly paragraph about Lutheranism. That’s always good for a laugh.
Basing everything on reason makes robots out of humans, as well as turning a heterosexual man’s love life with a woman into a most unpleasant experience for both partners. This outcome is no better than the tranformation of humans into the giant colony of collectivized insects walking on their hind quarters and wearing clothes that leftism/tech appears to desire. To put it another way, it can be said that presently there is mostly yin and very little yang in Western civilization. Reversing this sad state of affairs will not improve the situation, but just make it different.
Basing values on reason means basing values on reality not on conformity to others as such.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be in love with a drama queen, which is precisely the kind of woman you get who is the puppet of her emotions unguided by reason. That, to me, is an unpleasant experience, not the calm, thinking, woman.
There is a time to be passionate, when your reason has correctly judged that the circumstances are right for passion. Passion guided by reason isn’t disastrous. Unguided by reason, passion leads to disaster.
“An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection—to the conceptual identification of your inner states—you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception . . . .
In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?” – Ayn Rand
1. I feel God’s love 2. because of his boundless grace and mercy. Happy?
Unlike you we are not machines. Also I can’t imagine a drama queen being in love with a dried up prune like you.
BTW, Prager is still popular. You are not.
Excellent column. The Left does build some things, however. Namely ruin and misery.
Thank you, Dennis. This is one of your best columns. And they’re all excellent.
Being a leftist isn’t just about the values you “hold”; it’s about the values you defend and support … by voting, money and signing petitions whether you agree with them or not. That’s not a tragedy. That’s moral depravity; they very substance of leftism. that’s what “liberals” do and that makes them leftists.
This collapse of traditional liberalism happened decades ago. The late Fulton J. Sheen described it thus:
“The liberal of the last generation invoked liberalism to free economic activity from state control; the liberal of today invokes liberalism to extend state control over the economic order. The old liberal was a defender of Capitalism; the new liberal is reacting against Capitalism and wants some form of collectivism or state control.”
“Liberal and Reactionary” by Venerable Fulton J. Sheen March 23, 1941
Note the date: 1941
Well, Denny, a LOT said here! Every facet is correct! Though you missed the most vital word again! LEFTISM very simply means COMMUNISM! As does everything you wrote about.
Nothing new under the sun.
Aside from the Jacobins, you can reply to that question that Leftism, simply stated, is Communism and/or Fascism.
American Constitutional Conservatism can never be “far right” nor totalitarian Socialism of Nazism/Fascism. Conservatism is the preservation of the US Constitution, American history, language, culture, the traditional family, moral civil society, equality, individual freedoms, law and order, capitalism, prosperity and sovereignty.
Leftism is “fluid:” CNFWM+
Communism
Nazism
Fascism
Wokeism
Marxism
+
Socialism, Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Totalitarian collectivists,
Green Party,
Progressivism,
Globalism,
Statism, Administrative Statism,
Nihilism,
Deep State,
Big Government Tyranny
Left-wingism, at its core, is a neurotic inability to advocate in one’s own interest.