the leftist mentality: a beginning...

It's after lunch and Ralph is nine. Out on the schoolyard, Ralph is constantly picked on. The teachers at the school don't really pay attention (mind you this is all taking place say in the 1960's through late 1980's) and Ralph can't quite seem to get them to understand that he getting his ass handed to him on a daily basis. Ralph's father reacts by trying to teach Ralph to defend himself, to at least put up a fight against the group of older boys who terrorize pretty much everyone on the playground. Ralph though doesn't seem to catch on to the idea of self-defense. Then one day a new teacher arrives who promptly upon seeing the older boys duct-tape Ralph upside down to a tree by his feet gives them all the harshest punishment possible--whatever the punishment would have been for something like that in this timeframe. Perhaps the timeframe is larger, but people born during this timeframe are all of voting age and thus consequently, all members of the body politic. All will become apparent.
So they boys are punished and Ralph finally sees the potential that authority has to exert force upon others--now, this is not to say that it's not tragic that Ralph was getting his ass handed to him or that the school administration did nothing to stop it or monitor the playground, however, at a certain point, even a nine year old must assume responsibility for their actions. Had Ralph even tried to fight back his social stock among the rest of the children would have gone up immensely, and sometimes all it takes is a little bit of public pressure to keep bully's from doing their worst. Instead, Ralph stood and just took whatever they dished out. Now imagine you are Ralph and you have just seen a government official, a representative of the state so to speak (even though you, as Ralph are only vaguely aware of this because you're 9, but you know that teachers have a great deal of authority, you have just witnessed a teacher handing out the harshest punishment possible and that's really all the proof you need) doing what you could not, punishing those who were punishing you.
It only starts there though. Realizing that there are agencies, organization, and institutions that can coerce people only means that you have to understand how to manipulate those agencies. Surely you as Ralph have realized that the punishment the older boys received because of YOU will only make them wish to retaliate with all the more intensity. So now you're stuck? How to assure you're safety? You can't fight them yourself, and you are only safe in the presence of the teacher...only safe in the presence of the teacher...perhaps we could help the teacher after school...wait it out until the older boys give up or she punishes them again. And now we've really hit the solid truth: letting other people take care of your problem binds you to them and they to you. It works both ways you see. The teacher, acting only out of belief that all children should be free from such oppression and violence, now realizes that she is Ralph's protector and to abandon him is to leave him at the mercy of the older boys. Ralph, bound to her because he cannot imagine facing those tyrants again, and he starts blaming them for his shame and cowardice instead of assuming responsibility himself. And the two of them ever more dependent of each other in order to define themselves. And so it goes, the leftist mentality is born.
The Leftist Mentality is not the permanent name of a condition that has apparently affected a substantial portion of the population. How substantial we can only estimate, but I would say anywhere from 15% to perhaps as many as 30% of this country has succumbed to a series of intellectual fallacies and in doing so they have become hypocrits and incapable of even modest personal objectivity-Entrenched Infertile Reactionary Elitists is perhaps a better name. No, because that spells out Eire and I'm not soiling the named of Ireland for these hacks. I'll get back to the name and then get back to you. The story about Ralph is only an illustration of how such a person might conduct themselves at an early age--what would we call them? Goody-two shoes perhaps? Humorless? Taddle-tales? The point though is that they prefer to use the authority of adults and teachers (the government of children) rather than build their own authority through action. And this continues throughout life...Ralph is now sixteen and he's actively involved in Student Government, where he has just managed to get the school to agree to a recycling program, not a bad idea, only he wants everyone to be forced to recycle. In other words if a student observes someone not recycling and they report it, that person should receive some kind of punishment--if it's a student, detention perhaps, a teacher, some pay is docked. The Student Government rejects that part of it, but Ralph still thinks this is the best way to go about it. And he then runs for President the next year and is soundly defeated. This only makes him more bitter. "I should have won because I would have been the best SG President ever," he moans. Then Ralph decides that he must understand more about this process of politics and so he begins a journey and he doesn't get very far. He reads Plato but skips Aristotle, deciding that Plato had pretty much figured it out and that only those who believe in the Republic are worth reading and he searches them out. As he scans the centuries nothing really catches his eye until he gets to the nineteenth century and a little fellow named Marx and another fellow named Engels and then it all falls into pieces. And then Ralph steps onto the boat to Neverland and never gets off. He spends the rest of his life a bitter man who finds joy in nothing and "activism" in everything. But his "activism" is not advocating any kind of change, but a rigorous maintenance and strengthening of the status quo. He doesn't see that he is the reactionary, that his attitude is one of venom and inconsiderate behavior and statements that are meant only as jabs and not as genuine conversation. And he will spend his life in an opaque myopic haze, angry and never really understanding why because none of the theories that he has read or discussed in his 'activist' seminars or party conventions or subgroup meetings seem to explain why the rest of the world keeps going. How can those idiots in red-state America let themselves be brainwashed by Hannity and Limbaugh and G Gordon Liddy and Glenn Beck and those stupid annoying blogs challenging the real journalists...HOW DARE THEY CHALLENGE MY STATUS...how dare the Left not see that they are the reactionary Luddites who are now, ironically "standing athwart history yelling stop!", that they are the ones who are fighting for the entrenched, for the privleged, for the system, that they are fighting for the system.
And it's then I realized why I always felt like a rebel and why I never felt any discordance between my "conservatism" and my innate desire to end the current system, to in the popular vernacular of about thirty years ago, to fight the man, because as I knew at an early age, the man is and remains the Left and there still remains a great deal of serious mind-to-mind combat to go, the universities must be cleared out, public education privatized, the second and third newspapers taken on and held to account, and perhaps the largest possibility for blogs ever: using the Freedom of Information Act to hold the government at large accountable for every dollar spent and every instance of inefficiency. Just imagine what the guys at Powerline could do every federal agency if they got their hands on their books. And all the while Ralph still thinks he is the revolutionary, that he's the progressive. No, sorry Ralph. The conservative movement has successfully transformed itself into the newest incarnation of America's long history of populist reforms and progressive inclinations to help make life better for all Americans and doing so as best we can. Just remember though, this is only a beginning in an attempt to understand today's reactionary movement. Next time, we'll talk about why reactionaries tend to cluster in cities, beyond of course the obvious THE CITIES ARE CONTROLLED BY THE PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS and why they stay in the cities when it's so much better out here in the suburbs. This is Ripley, signing off.