An article worth reading. It is authored by a well known conservative writer who transitioned from a left-wing radical (like Orwell and many others) into a conservative when he realised that the Utopian ideas of Marxism do in fact become insidious and dangerous to ordinary people as they are put into action:
When I began the project of describing this movement in the
1980s, the emergence of the left as a mainstream force in America’s political
life was fairly recent and inadequately understood.” Its triumph in the 21st
century was demonstrated perfectly by soon-to-be president Barack Obama in
2008, is a good example.
She labels him psychologically disturbed, but Horowitz knows
well enough not to get involved in the hopeless task of proving his innocence,
i.e., his sanity. To judge a dissenter mentally unbalanced is an old Communist
procedure. In Volume VIII of the series, The Left in the University, Horowitz
notes that academics have thoroughly adopted it in their Cold War
historiography, the “consensus” version, in the words of an approving professor
whom Horowitz quotes, starting with the premise that “an exaggerated,
irrational fear of communism…created an atmosphere of persecution and
hysteria.”
It is sometimes difficult to realize how drastic is this
sweeping thesis of conservative irrationality, perhaps because of its long
legacy, running from The Authoritarian Personality (1950), an influential
sociological study led by Theodor Adorno that aligned fascist leanings with
rightwing beliefs, to President Obama’s infamous remark about working-class
whites: “[T]hey get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to
people who aren’t like them or antiimmigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment
as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Many liberal columnists and hosts now take
conservatism-as-pathology as a starting point, and establishment conservatives
haven’t responded effectively. This is another instance in which the Right has
failed to understand how the Left operates, Horowitz believes. In the letter
cited above, we have a leftist friend offering to fathom a renegade’s error by
probing his psyche, an act that could be taken as a mode of sympathy, or at least
as a wider awareness of him than his politics alone.
But that would only repeat a foolish mistake by the Right,
the one, Horowitz writes, whereby “conservatives imprudently accepted the
left’s deceptive claims to be ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive,’ ascribing to it
idealistic intentions.” To take the psychological query at face value is to
miss how it alters the debate, insidiously so, and not in the way conservatives
have come to expect.
For a long time, conservatives have charged leftists with
politicizing everything and everyone, but the diagnostic move does the
opposite. It de-politicizes the conservative. Whatever political opinions he
holds dissipate once we view him as a fragile, deluded ego. Conservatism, then,
is no longer a political outlook which must be opposed by democratic means.
It’s a psychosocial condition, and that’s not something you debate. Instead,
you confine the sufferer.
It doesn’t take much arrogance to sustain that diagnostic
approach when a settled community of liberals reinforces it, and condescension
is their default mode of handling conservatives. Besides, Horowitz notes, a
pleasing selfspoke of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America”
(Volume VII is entitled The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama). President Obama didn’t
look and sound like a ’60s radical—no bad behavior, a bourgeois family life—but
he readily politicized the IRS and other agencies, inserted gender identity
into regulations never intended for it, and was entirely comfortable with
rappers in the White House. There you see the liberal accommodation of the
Left, the same beliefs and goals but with a lighter touch.
https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/radical-prophet/
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