Rusted Sky

Rather long-winded, but if you've got an hour or two (which I don't really have right now) you might find it interesting...

DEFINING LEFTISM

What appears below is an attempt to analyse most aspects of Leftist political thinking and display the psychological and sociological roots of such thinking in an historical context.

The intellectual poverty of the Left shows itself very clearly in their lack of ideas. The only way that they can ever think of for bringing about their desired utopias is the brutishly simply one of FORCING people to behave in the "right" way, by way of legislation in democatic societies or on pain of death in Communist societies.

We have an excellent example of such brainlessness in a recent article which argues that the U.S. Left needs to become more socialist. The article consists of nothing but one long wail about the injustices of the world and simply ASSERTS that socialism is the answer -- with no supportive reasoning at all about HOW socialism might fix things -- which is all the more remarkable given the known FAILURES of socialism to fix anything.

And another counterfactual assertion above is that capitalism will increase poverty. Since capitalism is provably the the best and surest way of increasing wealth, the statement is deliberately wrongheaded. And it is of course the advanced capitalist societies that have done most to clean up their environment and prevent further degradation of it. You have to be devoid of all knowledge and understanding of how the world actually works (and has worked) to spout the nonsense that our brainless socialist does.

Just to REALLY ruin the party, however, let it be noted that the ONLY adult general population survey I know of that obtained both IQ scores and a record of political attitudes was Martin's study (which I helped write up for the academic journals). And that study showed that it was LEFTISTS who were most likely to be dumb. The correlation in the general population between anti-authority attitudes (which Leftists pride themselves on) and low IQ was quite substantial as such correlations go. So survey research shows that it is in fact Leftist attitudes that are associated with stupidity!

ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM: AN INDICATOR OF PATHOLOGY

Further interest attaches to the way in which this distinction is made, since the anti-rational-authoritarian is shown to possess many of the attributes, both as regards social position and personality characteristics, which were supposed by Adorno et al. to characterise the pro-irrational-authoritarian. It might now be argued that the concept of authoritarianism has been overgeneralised and that what is of prime importance is whether the authority to which one defers has or has not claims to rational support. Rejecting the right kind and accepting the wrong kind of authority appear to be equally indicative of social and personal inadequacy.

In this connection the relationships with intelligence would seem to be illuminating. Agreement with pro-authoritarian (F-scale items) and agreement with anti-authoritarian items (Rudin negative) are both negatively related to intelligence, leaving us with what appears to be almost a truism; people of low intelligence are likely to accept irrational authority and reject rational authority, i.e. to fail in discrimination between what is rational and what is not.

Another illustration of the quite foul depths to which the equality doctrine can sink is the repeated claim by Leftists of "moral equivalence" between very disparate people and groups. For instance, at the height of the Cold War, Leftists would routinely claim that Communist regimes and the economically successful "Western" democracies such as the United States were morally equivalent -- that neither was more blameworthy or praiseworthy than the other. When President Reagan called a spade a spade and described the USSR as an "evil empire", this was regarded as shocking and ignorant by US liberals. How anybody can see any equivalence between systems that murder millions without trial because of their suspected political views (as Stalin did in the USSR and Pol Pot did in "Kampuchea") and countries that either have no death penalty at all or agonize over every such penalty that they inflict (even when the penalty is for the most heinous crimes) defies imagination. Such "moral imbecility" is startlingly reminiscent of the psychopath and the role of psychopathy in Leftism will therefore be taken up later.

J.