We Must Understand that the Left is a Group of Religious Cults

Back in the day the Founders made it clear that their constitutional framework was designed to deal with "faction," the natural and tribal instinct for humans to divide into factions and squabble with each other. Says Jay Cost:

As Madison argued, the purpose of a “well constructed Union” is to “break and control the violence of faction.” Our political system is currently less capable of this than Madison wanted.

Of course this implies that chaps like Madison get to make the rules and have the moral stature to preside over the factions and setting the rules so that their ability to cause damage is reduced to a dull roar.

Madison & Co. were living in the aftermath of the "religious wars" between Protestantism and Catholicism that were suspended by the spirit of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. We could say, I suppose, that the ruling class of the time had developed some sort of a gentleman's agreement that they would not rile up their factions with the nuclear fuel of religious fanaticism, and instead would act together to soften the hard edges of factional conflict.

But then the whole thing blew up in the fanaticism of the French Revolution. This was a new departure, because the New Fanaticism was not strictly religious, a battle between religious sects, but the fanaticism of a secular political faction, the Jacobins, that was battling against:_ what exactly? The ancien régime? the Girondist moderates? You tell me. And, at the height of the Reign of Terror, the Jacobins had turned the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris into a Temple of Reason. So, was the Jacobin terror the eruption of a religious cult devoted to the worship of Reason?

And then, with Marx and Engels a new secular religion was born, Socialism. What has to be understood is that socialism was not then and is not now merely a "faction." It is a religion, whose devotees are committed to bringing heaven on earth with the creation of the society of true equality.

So when former Vice President Joe Biden called Vice President Mike Pence "a good guy," Jay Cost gets to mourn that he was quickly corrected by an LGBT activist, actress Cynthia Nixon, of the TV show Sex and the City.

Of course he was, because the left's various groups are not "factions" in the sense understood by Madison and the founders but secular religious cults. Each of them professes a "true religion" in the sense that Voltaire took apart in his critique of Pascal's Pensées in his Letters on England. Obviously, if the gay movement is a "true religion" then there can be no compromise with a faithful Christian like Mike Pence, the guy famous for never dining with a woman alone.

Or rather, the fact that gay activists treat practical politician Mike Pence as Satan himself tells us that gays are not a political faction but a religious cult.

This point is crucial. If the post-WWII conservative movement has failed, and I think it has, the reason is that it treated the left as an opposing political faction and not a religious movement pursuing a saving truth.

It doesn't end there. In "Pigs on Two Legs Turn on Each Other" Victor Davis Hanson comments on lesbian tennis great Martina Navratilova getting reamed for objecting to transgenders competing in women's sports.

Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes.

That is the way with religious cults. When each is possessed of the saving truth, it stands to reason that the cult next door is flat-out wrong, and should be damned to hell when its error-riddled orthodoxy conflicts with my saving truth.

The reason that the Progressives of a century ago advanced their notion of a "living Constitution" was that the Founders' notion of "faction" as the playground fights of schoolchildren to be judiciously put down by the adults in the room was no longer accepted by the new ruling class.

The ruling class of the Progressive era, like our ruling class today, believed in the ability of politics to bring on a just society, not just to legislate against injustice when and if it reared its ugly head. Politics was not just a necessary evil, but a vehicle for a better society. As William James proposed in his landmark essay announcing the end of war in 1906, we would now need to base our politics on "The Moral Equivalent of War."

Well, Bill old chap, the moral equivalent of war is the mashup of religion and politics. That's what the Thirty Years War was all about, and that is what the Jacobins were all about, and that is what the Bolshevik Revolution was all about. One hundred million dead, old chap.

The fundamental thing that we normals must understand is that the Left is not a political faction. It is a congeries of secular religious sects, for each of whom their secular religious faith is a matter of life and death.

Wouldn't it be fun if the reprobate Donald Trump is the guy to puncture the left's hot-air balloon of secular religious bigotry and hate.