"Being leftwing has itself become a sort of religion"

"Religiosity -- something often associated, especially by Europeans, with American conservatism -- is also a staple of the US left," writes Glenn Reynolds in a provocative Guardian essay, identifying a clash between left and right threads of religiosity as "one reason why politics in the US have become so much more bitter over the past couple of decades" and quoting from Michael Kelly's profile of Hillary ("Saint Hillary," we assume, a NYT Mag article we clipped way back when and feverishly underlined and annotated at the time) reprinted in his book Things Worth Fighting For:

The politics of Hillary Rodham Clinton are indeed largely liberal (although, the post election evidence indicates, no more so than those of her husband), but they are of a liberalism derived from religiosity. They combine a generally "progressive" social agenda with a strong dose of moralism . . . They are, rather than primarily the politics of left or right, the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history . . . It is concerned not just with how government should behave, but with how people should. It is the message of the preacher, a role Hillary Rodham Clinton has filled many times delivering guest sermons from the pulpits of United Methodist churches.

"And, actually, the roots of this do-goodism are ultimately in New England Puritanism, which had many characteristics associated with today's left," continues Reynolds:

Among them were a hostility to wealth -- illustrated by sumptuary laws -- a belief that the welfare of the community trumped the rights of individuals (Hillary combined both these aspects in her famous recent statement: "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good"). Puritans favoured dense settlement in towns over spread-out farmers -- they were, in a sense, the first opponents of "sprawl". . . Not all leftwingers in the US are as frankly religious as Hillary Clinton, and many don't even realise that the ideas that they champion have deep religious roots. But even for these people, being leftwing has itself become a sort of religion, with those who disagree viewed as sinister, almost demonic forces, rather than simply as individuals holding different views.

Donald Sensing's essay on why Islamofascism doesn't repel the left -- blogged here -- offers a perhaps complementary explanation of the religious fervor of the modern left, noting a "natural fit" between ideological eschatology and Marxism -- "a godless religion in its own right, really":

So the philosophical and ideological origin of the modern left: Rejecting the idea of a divinely shaped world yet to come, but believing, all evidence to the contrary, that human beings are fundamentally good, most Western ideological eschatologists found a natural fit with Marxism-Leninism: the present order must pass away, and we can build something better on our own. The violent destruction of the present order, if necessary, had a natural fit with Marxism from the beginning.

Speaking of the violent destruction of the present order, you've probably noticed the recent spate of vandalism on the part of Kerry supporters attacking Republican offices and individual private property across the country.  "If this represents the face of the Democrats," writes Captain Ed of Captain's Quarters, "then their earlier accusations that Bush is the new Hitler can only be called a classic case of Freudian projection." Indeed.  Just as the Democrats' relentless Bush Lied™ mantra has been, from the start, a Freudian projection of the repressed self-hatred of the party of Clinton.  Hindrocket of Power Line worries that "Observing today's Democratic Party raises a deadly serious question: Is it inevitable that a party of hate will become a party of violence?"

Comments

[goomp]

Should Kerry become President, a Marxist-Fascist judiciary will recall the days of Hitler's courts, and a dictatorship may well arise as the war against the West intensifies in response to the foolish assumptions of a liberalism that denies human nature.