Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals “Think”, by Evan Sayet. Originally a stand-up comic, he has worked on many top TV shows in the US and is now among Los Angeles’s most in-demand speakers. He is a political pundit recognized by Dennis Prager as brilliant for his take on the unique power of the Judeo-Christian culture and singled out by Rush Limbaugh for his explanation of why Liberals lie.
I grew up a liberal New York Jew; you don’t get much more liberal than that … I graduated from high school knowing only one thing about politics: that Democrats are good and Republicans are evil.
I tell a story. It’s not a true story, but it helps crystallize my thinking that brought me to become a conservative. I say: Imagine being in a restaurant with an old friend, and you’re catching up, and suddenly he blurts out, “I hate my wife.” You chuckle to yourself because he says it every time you’re together, and you know he doesn’t hate his wife; they’ve been together for 35 years. He loves his daughters, and they’re just like her. No, he doesn’t hate his wife.
So you’re having dinner, and you look out the window and spot his wife, and she’s being beaten up right outside the restaurant. You grab your friend and say, “Come on, let’s help her. Let’s help your wife,” and he says, “Nah, I’m sure she deserves it.” At that moment, it dawns on you: He really does hate his wife.
That’s what 9/11 was to me. For years and years I’d hear my friends from the Left say how evil and horrible and racist and imperialistic and oppressive America is, and I’d chuckle to myself and think, “Oh, they always say that; they love America.” Then on 9/11, we were beaten up, and when I grabbed them by the collar, and I said, “Come on, let’s help her. Let’s help America,” and they said, “Nah, she deserves it.”
At that moment, I realized: They really do hate America. And that began me on what’s now a five-plus-year quest to try to understand the mindset. How could you possibly live in the freest nation in the history of the world and see only oppression? How could you live in the least imperialist power in human history and see us as the ultimate in imperialism? How could you live in the least bigoted nation in human history and, as Joe Biden said, “see racism lurking in every dark shadow”?
Wow, someone is saying how crazy the modern left has become. It’s not just a few isolated characters thinking it.
I assume that just about everybody in this room agrees that the Democrats are wrong on just about every issue. Well, I’m here to propose to you that it’s not “just about” every issue; it’s quite literally every issue. And it’s not just wrong; it’s as wrong as wrong can be; it’s 180 degrees from right; it is diametrically opposed to that which is good, right, and successful.
What I discovered is that this is not an accident. This is part of a philosophy that now dominates the whole of Western Europe and the Democratic Party today. I, like some others, call it Modern Liberalism. The Modern Liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success.
But why is it so? What happened to the left to make them so crazy? We know them personally and they are not generally evil or stupid.
What I discovered is that the Modern Liberal looks back on 50,000 years, 100,000 years of human civilization, and knows only one thing for sure: that none of the ideas that mankind has come up with — none of the religions, none of the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government — have succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime, and injustice. So they’re convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found — can only be found — in the attempt to be right. …
Leftism is is a war on rational thought for that simplistic reason. Discrimination — between good and evil, better and worse — is the great enemy of the modern left. The author elaborates with many examples; it’s quite a good read.
There’s a brilliant book out there called The Closing of the American Mind by Professor Allan Bloom. Professor Bloom was trying to figure out in the 1980s why his students were suddenly so stupid, and what he came to was the realization, the recognition, that they’d been raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I paraphrase this in my own works: “In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.”
I’ll give you an example. At the airports, in order not to discriminate, we have to intentionally make ourselves stupid. We have to pretend we don’t know things we do know, and we have to pretend that the next person who is likely to blow up an airplane is as much the 87-year-old Swedish great-great-grandmother as those four 27-year-old imams newly arrived from Syria screaming “Allahu Akbar!” just before they board the plane. In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate. …
The problem is, of course, that the ability to discriminate, to thoughtfully choose the better of the available options — as in “she’s a discriminating shopper” — is the essence of rational thought; thus, the whole of Western Europe and today’s Democratic Party, dominated as it is by this philosophy, rejects rational thought as a hate crime.
Basically the modern left is saying that all of our culture prior to the last few decades, including the Enlightenment, is a hate crime because it involves discrimination, that rationality is wrong.
The indiscriminateness of the modern left leads them to supporting evil, simply because they oppose rational discriminating people who promote good — because they discriminate!
In a world where you are indiscriminate, where no behavior is to be deemed better or worse than any other, your expectation is that all behavior should lead to equally good outcomes. When, in the real world, different behaviors lead to different outcomes, you and I know why — because we think.
We know why communities that promote teenage promiscuity tend to fail at a greater rate than communities that promote teenage abstinence: Teenage promiscuity and teenage abstinence are not the same behaviors. Teenage abstinence is a better behavior. …
You and I recognize why communities that promote teenage abstinence do better than those that promote teenage promiscuity in their music, in their movies, in the schools. But to the Modern Liberal who cannot make that judgment — must not make that judgment — that would be discriminating.
They have no explanation. Therefore, the only explanation for success has to be that somehow success has cheated. Success, simply by its existence, is proof positive to the Modern Liberal of some kind of chicanery and likely bigotry. Failure, simply by its existence — no other evidence needed, just the fact that it has failed — is enough proof to them that failure has been victimized. …
This argument does explain a lot.
So failure to discriminate results in modern leftism. Believing that “discrimination is always wrong” leads inevitably to the suicidally evil positions of the modern left.
hat-tip Chris
