The Patriot Post® · In Brief: At the Heart of Our Divisions
Americans are very divided these days, as our Brian Mark Weber wrote Friday. Andrew Klavan noticed, too, and he wrote about why at City-Journal:
We didn’t need a new poll from The University of Virginia Center for Politics and Project Home Fire to tell us that many Democrats see fascists when they look at Republicans and many Republicans see Communists when they look at Democrats. Forty-one percent of Biden voters and 52 percent of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that the time has come to split the country into red and blue states. There is a widespread feeling on both sides that we are not friends but enemies. All this, we could have guessed.
That our divisions have their origins largely on the left has nothing to do with the number of righteous people on either side. It’s simply a question of cultural power. The Left dominates the news industry, Hollywood, the academy, social media, big tech, and the minds of corporate leaders. Leftism commands all the heights that shape our culture, except the besieged and dwindling redoubt of reality.
From those heights of influence, leftists push the ultimate leftist objective: socialism. Klavan calls this system immoral, and he says that since it “can’t be rightly argued for, the leftist shapers of culture peddle hatred and division instead.”
Socialism is immoral because it rests on a benign fantasy that masks a malignant truth. The fantasy is that a nation’s production, distribution, and wealth can be entrusted to a benevolent state dedicated to the common good. There is no such state. There are only people with power. Long centuries of constitutional restraints have schooled these naked apes in the habits of decency. But as the restraints weaken, the habits fall away. Not sometimes — always. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Socialism, which centralizes power, leads to oppression and human misery.
He continues:
Because of socialism’s repeated failures, the supporters of this bad idea are left without arguments. Instead, they have retreated into “critical theory,” insult, and violence. Critical theory, generally speaking, is the dishonest strategy of relentlessly criticizing the flaws and history of freedom and capitalism in the hope that listeners will conclude that solutions must come from a more powerful central government. Insult silences reasoned arguments with name-calling. If you disagree, you’re racist, sexist, phobic, or otherwise hateful and must be shunned and canceled. Violence comes in the form of riots (“mostly peaceful demonstrations,” in corporate media-speak), Maoist street thuggery (“anti-fascism”), and the hobbling of the police, which ensures spiraling crime (“racial justice”).
A culture dominated — monopolized, really — by such leftist malfeasance inspires, elevates, and amplifies the angriest and most obnoxious voices on the right, who then seem to justify the left’s criticisms, insults, and violence. And on we go, the worst of us at each other’s throats, the best of us silenced and sidelined.
The bottom line, Klavan says, is going back to First Principles:
We have been bequeathed … common ground in our founding philosophy: We are each of equal value and each endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — and the purpose of government is to secure those rights, legitimized by the will of the people.
This founding premise rules out centralized power and therefore socialism. Instead, it validates our Constitution, and the history that produced it and which it produced. And it leaves us with much room for discussion among friends.