January 24, 2006
MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOULLESS:
March of the Resenters (Mark Gauvreau Judge, 1/24/2006, American Prospect)
The anti-war, anti-Bush protest march coming to Washington February 4 has nothing to do with politics. [...]Politics entails reason and arguments about things outside ourselves: the safety of all of our people, how best to educate them, what is acceptable expression in the public square -- it is, as Aristotle said, the way of "deciding how to order our lives together." For many protestors, the public good is of very little consequence, otherwise they would not suck resources from the police department and clog up city streets during a time of war. And reason is certainly not high on their list of virtues. These are people who call terrorists freedom fighters and claim George Bush is worse than Hitler.
So what drives them? The great St. Louis University historian James Hitchcock summed it up nicely in an essay, "The Root of American Violence." "What has happened," Hitchcock wrote, "has been the abandonment of politics, or it annihilation, in favor of public and organized forms of therapy. Emphasis is less and less on the general material needs of the citizens, with which the state has some possibility of coping, and more and more on the formerly private, personal, and subjective aspect of lives, which the state is expected, somehow, to respond to in symbolically comforting ways. What the New Left primarily accomplished was to establish a particular style of public discourse which enables emotionally frustrated people to express themselves in cathartic ways."
Some have said that the narrow, irrational emotionalism of the protestors resembles religious fanaticism. This is evident in the work of Roger Scruton, the British philosopher who wrote a marvelous book, The West and the Rest, about terrorism. Like Hitchcock, Scruton makes the point that the anti-American protests are not politics at all -- that they are in fact hostile to politics. Western civilization is composed of communities held together by a political process, he observes. Ironically, it is the existence of this political process that enables us to live without politics:
Having consigned the business of government to defined offices, occupied successively by people who are the servants and not the masters of those who elected them, we can devote ourselves to what really matters -- to the private interests, personal loves, and social customs in which we find satisfaction.
The party of the self vs. the party of society. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 24, 2006 11:54 AM
I have a simpler theory: they are just immature children throwing temper tantrums becasue the world is not as they want it.
Posted by: jd watson![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://brothersjuddblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at January 24, 2006 12:28 PM
JD nailed it.
I came up with a theory a while ago called "The Politcs of Selfishness" (I may have stolen it - I don't remember). People don't want to pay taxes, but they want the government to provide everything. They don't like the military but they want to live in safety. They don't want to have any limits on the "freedom of speech" but they don't want to be exposed to ideas that conflict with their own. And on and on. It basically comes down to "I want everything MY way and I want it NOW and if I don't get it, I'm going to throw a protest with signs and flags and street theater!" It gets tiresome after awhile and starts to remind me of an entire nation of Veruca Salts.
. . . an entire nation of Veruca Salts.
I'm suddenly picturing the Million Veruca March.
"Whadda we want?" -- "OOOMPA-LOOMPAS!" -- "WHen do we want 'em?" -- "NOW!!"
I thought Hayek called socialism "the cosmic aggrandizement of petty resentments." That seems to fit here too.
Posted by: Lisa at January 24, 2006 1:28 PMPick Super Bowl weekend to hold a protest march in Washington. Jeez, these people are so obsessed they don't even have the rudements of basic media savy anymore.
Posted by: John at January 24, 2006 1:57 PMLee Harris' writings about fantasy ideologies appears to apply very nicely here.
Posted by: Jeff at January 24, 2006 2:12 PMThe most intense response I can gin up for these pubescents is indifference.
Posted by: Genecis at January 24, 2006 2:19 PMLee Harris' writings about fantasy ideologies appears to apply very nicely here.
Word to that.
Posted by: Mike Morley at January 24, 2006 3:18 PMThere is another way of lookinmg at teh phenomena.
The left came to power by piggy-backing the unrepeatable phenomena of the already-expiring Roosevelt coalition with reaction to the draft in the Vietnam era.
As this artificial boost petered out, they succumbed to a movement temptation to absorb the energy of unbalanced extremists.
Conservative movement people will recognize this temptation. We wrestled with it in and after the 1964 debacle. We successfully resisted the temptation to let our movement be hijacked by all sorts of extremeists, racists, libertines and other un-American whack-jobs whose only claim to connection with us was that they claimed to be against some of the things which we were against.
The left has not been so wise or so fortunate. Desparate for support, they reached out and were reached out to by all the misfits and malcontents, the dissaffected and aggrieved.
Some of the people and groups had grievances with which we could sympathize; some had ancient, irrepressible grudges against the American people. Some were simply mentally ill. What motivated all of them was the radical, irrational hatred--the ressentiment described in the article--hatred of their neighbors, of their parents, of those of another religion, of humanity, of God Himself.
The counter-progressive language of the left is a rationalization for their last-ditch alliance with our folk-enemies. They prate of doing things for the "worst-off class," of "preferential options," of "reparations." All these things are ways of coping with the reality that history has moved on from them, and that all that remains to them is resentment.
Posted by: Lou Gots at January 24, 2006 10:06 PMthe current bulge of leftists losers will subside over the next 20 years or so, as they lose energy and sink into the herd. and then it will be glorious.
Posted by: toe at January 24, 2006 11:06 PMThe Left kept the power it had assumed in the wake of the Depression because the Boomers were immature in the 60s/70s. As soon as they got jobs and kids the Right resumed power.
Posted by: oj at January 24, 2006 11:32 PMIt was the boomers who, in their infinite narcissism, decided that politics was all about me and how I feel. It's not energy that we will lose, but life itself. There is an old Sicilian saying: "Where there is death, there is hope."
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at January 24, 2006 11:32 PMlou: I have been toying with the idea that what we have seen among the Democrats has been the retrun of the Copperheads.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at January 24, 2006 11:34 PMThe Net is taking care of the leftist Old Media. The universities will become (relatively) moderate when the crop of 60s-era loopies retires.
After that, political discourse will take place on a level field, which means the Left will lose.
Posted by: Tom at January 25, 2006 7:50 AM