The Politics of Trash Talk

Obviously, the big deal about Donald Trump is that he's good at trash-talking. You could say that trash-talking is his destiny. More specifically, he has succeeded in saying things that liberals say you are not allowed to say.

Now, if you step back a bit, you could say that politics is all about trash-talking. The trick is to make sure that your trash-talking is considered mainstream and fair, and the other party's trash-talking is sick and wrong.

In other words, politics is all about controlling what other people are not allowed to say.

Strictly speaking, the things you are not allowed to say are heresies, and ought to be confined to questions of religion. But in our day, religion has seeped into politics, so now the heretics are merely dissenting from the conventional political wisdom of the ruling class.

If you look back, it seems that everything is fixed and impossible to change, until it does. You would never have thought that the button-down Fifties would have morphed into the let-it-all-hang-out Sixties, but it did. Yet who would have thought that the kids swept all before them in the Sixties would be humbled by the Silent Majority of the Seventies?

The "political correctness" of the last 20 years has been a brilliant effort, driven by the ideas of the Frankfurt School, to define political and social reality. You are not allowed to say that western culture is the best thing since sliced bread since that is racist and patronizing to other cultures. And you are not allowed to say anything that would offend any client group of the Democratic Party because racism, sexism, or homophobia.

But then along came Donald Trump, and Trump is more than the author of The Art of the Deal; he is master of the art of the insult. That's what he plays on TV.

Normally, politicians are pretty careful about insults, because the worst thing a politician can do is insult a voter. That's why they usually confine their insults to "greedy bankers" and "billionaires," who you can count on one hand, but never "our nurses" or "our teachers," not to mention policemen, firemen and members of the armed forces. That's where the kids went wrong in the Sixties. They might have thought of policemen as "pigs" and Vietnam veterans as "baby killers" but the American people did not.

Up to now, Donald Trump has done wonders with his insults, and kept the eye of the media on him. The question is, of course, whether his poll ratings translate into votes in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. The simple fact is that nobody knows. His core supporters seem to be blue-collar whites that didn't show up in the 2012 election. So the question is: will these non-voters show up at a primary in the middle of winter. Nobody knows.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump decided not to appear at the January 28 FoxNews candidate debate, because FoxNews host Megyn Kelly was biased against him. Was this a masterstroke, showing all the other candidates up as wimps? Or was it a "tell" of weakness? Nobody knows.

I'm reminded of an incident in The Manchurian Candidate. I'm not sure if it appears in the movie, but I know it appears in Richard Condon's book. The stand-in for red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, name of Sen. John Yerkes Iselin, is asked (by his wife, I think) what he does at a Senate hearing when he needs to go to the bathroom. Why, he replies, I just get up and go. Don't do that, she says. Instead, make a scene. Say you are not going to take it any more, and stalk out of the hearing room in a rage.

I suspect that is why the Donald decided to make a scene about the FoxNews debate. I suspect that his campaign people determined that Trump didn't do all that well at the last debate, and might do worse in the next one. So the best thing to do is to fly into a rage and stalk off.

But will it work? We will know in about a month after Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Contra-deBoer: Wrapup

I'm finishing up my analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My eleventh piece was "Human". Now I'm wrapping up with a big picture look at deBoer's vision for the left and what it means for the rest of us.

Let us start by cycling through the headings that deBoer used to outline the left movement that he wanted for 2016. He started with "Materialist," meaning that the movement should be concerned with the "material reality of the present world," and science and so forth. But the left has shown remarkable lack of interest in developments in the social sciences since Marx, starting with the marginal revolution of 1870 that basically ruined the economics of Capital. Why not?

He calls for the movement to be "Anti-capitalist" and takes it for granted that the "moral and practical problems of capitalism cannot be reformed away from within the system." In the first place, the word capitalism is a pejorative cooked up by Marx & Co., and capitalism is not a "system." Nobody knows what it is. Is it the ability of young nobodies like Arkwright and Rockefeller to start enterprises without permission from the great and the good? Or is it the union of credit and government? Nobody knows. It is certainly not a system, in the Newtonian, mechanical sense; it is better to think of it as a chaotic emergent phenomenon, according to modern chaos theory. And to talk of replacing capitalism with a "moral social system" is oppression and domination, flat out. Really? Who gets to decide?

The left movement is to be "Antiracist," for racism is "a unique form of injustice... ever-present in modern society." Really? I'd say that racism is universal in pre-modern society, that only became scandalous with modern capitalism. You could certainly say that capitalism first perfected slavery in the sugar plantations and then, with the help of the evangelicals of the 18th century, recoiled from what it had wrought. And then it abolished slavery, and then extended the franchise to the former slaves, and then banned all forms of racial discrimination, so that now we are arguing about the number of black Oscars on the head of a pin. The left played a great role in the fight against racism; now it's time to declare victory and go home.

The left is to be "Feminist," for "gender discrimination is a unique form of injustice that has been ubiquitous in human history." Really? I'd say it goes all the way back to the chimpanzees, in which there is a male hierarchy and a female hierarchy, and all the males outrank all the females. The interesting question is ask is why this domination has become scandalous in the modern era. Why does the First Feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, show up in the 18th century and not a millennium before? I will tell you what I think. I think that female equality could not emerge until the frontiers of war had receded enough so that only a few men were needed to be soldiers. Now that women have emerged into the public square they have started to reshape it to fit a more feminine sensibility, as Georg Simmel prophesied a century ago. For that we need a militant political movement? I think we should let the ladies get on with it, and only interfere when their feminizing agenda starts to attack basic human rights, like the presumption of innocence.

deBoer's left is to be "Anti-nationalist," because the nation state is fundamentally illegitimate. Well, yes. But every state is illegitimate, having been born in war, not in a law court. The question is, what can you come up with that is better than the nation state, which at least expands the human community from the blood kin to the community of language. Right now, in Europe, we are seeing the looming bankruptcy of the elite-inspired supra-national community. So it looks like the nation state is here to stay, for a while.

The left movement is to be "Pacifist." I confess to a special irritation at the left's conceit that it is the Peace faction, and this comes from the left's fundamental ignorance about politics. Politics is violence; government is force. Politics needs an enemy; government needs a war. The left finds its enemies in capitalists and the rich and the white racists and conducts merciless and unremitting war against them. But the left is scandalized by the external wars of nation-state politicians. It takes a special kind of blindness not to see that the left movement and the nation state are in the same war-like game, only with different enemies and different war-fighting techniques.

The left is to be "Liberal," in the sense of recognizing that certain individual rights trump "the pursuit of economic and social equality." Anyway, rights are popular with the people. Well, yes. But maybe rights of every kind, including the right to engage in work and buying and selling and own private property should trump the pursuit of social justice. Just saying, because that was the original meaning of "liberal."

The left movement is to be "Democratic." deBoer means here that the left cannot be a small cadre movement; it must be a mass movement that persuades rather than coerces. I couldn't agree more. The only problem is that a political movement is inherently coercive. It wants to acquire the levers of political power and use them to have its way with the unconvinced. That's why conservatives believe in limited government. We believe that government's force is not very useful for things beyond policing lower-class young men and spanking the foreign ennemi du jour.

deBoer wants the left to be "Realist," understanding that leftist victory is neither impossible nor just around the corner. I'd say that any realist would have to say that the left is a movement looking for a cause. In the 1840s, Marx had a point. The laboring class, instead of starving on the farms and in the workhouses as of old, was surviving, just, by working under fiendish conditions in the satanic mills. There had to be something better than that. But now, 170 years later and 2,000 percent richer, the realist on the left would recognize that the left needs a total reboot.

The left should be "Pessimist." It's a broken world, and the only hope is to make it a little less broken. There is a limit to what political action can achieve. I agree.

In "Human" deBoer more or less admits that the whole left project is a crock. Dehumanization is the mark of capitalism and of the social replacements. What is needed is a world to "empower individuals to direct their productive energies towards tasks that given them meaning and satisfaction." Here's a thought. I don't think that any militant political movement is going to achieve that, because every such movement, like an army, is all about subordinating its members to the organizational goal, the final victory. It is inevitable that a political movement, like an army, grinds up individuals like cannon fodder and leaves them precious little time to self-direct their productive energies to any purpose other than the Cause.

In closing, let me say this. Back when the First Feminist was writing, the First Conservative was also making waves. It is salutary to recall how modern, and how right, Edmund Burke was when he made us conscious of the notion of "tradition" and set the stage for dairyman Tevye to sing about it in The Fiddler on the Roof out in the shtetl. Burke was for Catholic emancipation and lost his parliamentary seat in the slave port of Bristol over his views; he was for American independence during the Revolutionary War; he was against colonial oppression and exploitation in the person of Warren Hastings, governor of Bengal; he was against the French Revolution which, he predicted, before the invention of the guillotine, would end in the gallows. It was in The Vindication of the Rights of Man that Wollstonecraft made her reputation with a critique of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. But Burke made a grand defense of self-conscious tradition over the mechanical Rights of Man, that we the living cannot just act as though we are free to reinvent the world for our convenience. We have a contract that we must honor, not just with ourselves, but also with our dead ancestors and with generations yet unborn. Before Burke, everybody just took all that for granted.

And that raises the interesting question why, in deBoer's manifesto, there is no mention of "family" or "parent" or "child." What exactly is the left's plan for the family? Inquiring minds would like to know, beyond the notion of "equal dignity for all gender identities."

Contra-deBoer: Human

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My tenth piece was "Pessimist". Now we look at his last item, "Human."

In his final heading, deBoer looks at some of the flaws in the left project and the need to "leave behind both the dehumanizing system of capitalism and the dehumanizing replacements that too many left movements have invented." Instead the new left would turn over a new leaf.

It would empower individuals to direct their productive energies towards tasks that given them meaning and satisfaction. It would dissolve the grinding alienation and pointlessness of the capitalist workplace. It would reject the crude collectivism of Maoism and Stalinism and the proto-fascism of various left niche groups.

So much for the left's goal. But the means needs to be cleaned up too. No more the "anti-individuality of identity politics." No more naming and shaming, "language policing" and "in-group signaling."

It would remember that compassion is the most basic of left-wing virtues. It would forgive. Its members would treat their enemies better than they are treated in turn. It would tear down the walls the left has erected to prevent us from viewing the moral challenge in the face of the other, even when the other is awful, especially when the other is awful. It would have the courage to be human even as everyone and everything else demanded that it be otherwise.

This is, of course, magnificent. But it means that the whole left project was a mistake.

If we accept that capitalism and its dehumanizing replacements are morally equivalent, then what was the point of the revolutionary left and its political project in the first place? To replace one inhuman system with another?

If we propose to end identity politics then we are talking about ending the second wave Marxism invented by the Frankfurt School. This was the effort to revive the left after Marxists realized that Marx's immiseration prophecy was wrong and that the workers were nationalists before they were socialists. So in the future Marxists would move on from the working class as their project and base their movement on liberating and emancipating historically marginalized groups like non-white races and women. And gays. And now transgenders.

But if the left is now to be all about compassion and loving your enemies then what is left of it as a political project? Politics is violence; it the the belief that things are so unjust that force is needed to rebalance the scales of justice. That is why the left has always been structured as a political army, featuring military discipline and victory as the goal. But if we are now talking about loving our enemies, then what is left of politics?

There's another issue, that of empowering "individuals to direct their productive energies towards tasks that given them meaning and satisfaction." I'm all in favor of this, myself, but I understand, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory, that the self-conscious desire for "meaning and satisfaction" is part of the belief system of creative people, and creative people, although well-represented in the global intellectual elite, are really a rather small minority. Most people just want to get a job, especially a job that might last a lifetime. If they are what I call "subordinate" people they want to shelter under a powerful patron, or if they are "responsible" people they want to live as a responsible person that takes care of himself and his family. The great mass of mankind don't think about "productive energies"; they think about families and friends.

In my view, the result of the creative people adapting society so that it empowers creative people to follow their bliss is the society described by Charles Murray in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. In this society, Murray writes, the educated elite, like residents of Belmont in the Boston area, lives rather well, with satisfying careers and lifetime merger marriages. The middle 40 percent does so-so but there's a lot of family breakdown, and the bottom 35 percent, like residents of Philadelphia's Fishtown, is not doing so good at all; the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. In other words, after a century or more of big government there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, and I doubt if the wise advice of us folks in the creative elite, left or right, is going to fix it.

Having analyzed all this and reached the end of deBoer's "Left materialism for 2016" I'll be back for a final "Wrapup."

Contra-deBoer: Pessimist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My ninth piece was "Realist". Now we look at his "Pessimist."

In Pessimist, Fredrik deBoer surprises us. Here is what he writes, in full.

A functioning, healthy left political movement would understand the fundamental limits on human flourishing. It would acknowledge that tragedy and despair are unalterable aspects of the human condition. It would not posit political struggle as an attempt to create an ideal world but as an attempt to make a broken world a little less broken. It would concede that alienation, loneliness, heartbreak, dissatisfaction, ennui, depression, boredom, anguish, and disappointment can sometimes be ameliorated through political action, but can never be eliminated. It would identify utopia as a dangerous idea. It would know that not getting what you want is something like the default condition of human life. It would always remember that “should” implies “can.” It would face up to the fact that human life is not fair and will never  be fair.

What can one say, except to agree? But this section brings the whole piece into question. If we are just trying to make the world "a little less broken" then how far do we need to go in the direction of economic and social justice? In particular, how much government coercion is justified if the objective is not utopia, but just a little more fairness? For instance, the left has achieved a lot just with cultural naming and shaming, particularly in shaming people into a more inclusive attitude towards people of other races. If that worked so well, how about shaming us into helping others more? Actually, Americans are already just about world champs in charitable giving, and the 1% accounts for about 1/3 of the giving.

If alienation, etc., "can sometimes be ameliorated through political action, but can never be eliminated", what about the reverse proposition? What about the pessimist position that political action can make, and ofgten does make "alienation, loneliness... depression... and disappointment" worse instead of better? In other words, there is plenty of research to indicate that government free stuff makes people miserable, because  if you want to feel good about yourself there is nothing like being a responsible person that works and pulls their weight.

And what about the whole anti-capitalism thing? The capitalist textile revolution created cheap cotton washable textiles for the masses for the first time in history. The capitalist railway revolution allowed the masses to travel on something other than their feet for the first time in history. The illuminating oil revolution allowed the masses to be able to afford artificial lighting in their homes for the first time in history. All in all, according to Deirdre McCloskey, people under the thumb of the capitalists have experienced about a 3,000 percent increase in per-capita income in 200 years. Wouldn't a pessimist say that the chance of meeting or beating that with anything other than capitalism is slim to none? Particularly since capitalism is not a system of capitalist accumulation, as the critics like to imagine, but a process of "zero to one," as PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel puts it. It's the process of coming up with and implementing a new idea that, when capitalized in a startup corporation, is worth billions. No "accumulation", no immiseration of the workers, but something new that provides value to the masses.

It's good to see Fredrik deBoer requiring a little pessimism in his left movement. It's good to see him write that "utopia is a dangerous idea." But I would recommend facing squarely the pessimistic fact that government is always and everywhere force. Even the legal system is a coercion system. It says that if you two guys can't resolve your differences then we judges and juries will impose our judgement on you both, and we will enforce our decision with the power of the state. How much force is enough, and to what extent does the addition of the sweet use of force dissolve any conceit about justice? And really, what is a left movement without its millennarian idea of heaven on earth through the violence of politics?

Here's my idea on pessimism. Pessimism is the root and branch behind the idea of limited government. It just says that there is a limited amount of stuff you can do using force.

Next up: "Human."

Contra-deBoer: Realist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My eighth piece was "Democratic". Now we look at his "Realist."

Fredrik deBoer wants the left to realize that victory is neither just around the corner, nor it is impossible. It should refrain from the two extremes of "triumphalism and fatalism", but start from the fact of the rootedness of "existing power relations." The way forward is going to be hard. But it is not impossible, as the history of left mass movements shows: "progress is possible, even likely," as the "history of labor and socialist victory" proves, and "political change seems impossible until it suddenly seems inevitable." But deBoer doesn't like the politics of word games.

[The left] would be skeptical of the value of symbolic or linguistic achievements. It would place little political importance on altering vocabulary, communication, and similarly symbolic goals. It would not treat popular culture or celebrity as meaningful sites of left-wing practice. It would always define success in material terms, not in representational or symbolic terms.

These, of course, are the words of a Moses rallying the Israelites in the middle of their 40 year wanderings in the wilderness. We will get there, but it won't be easy. Only men of steel -- well, more likely bronze -- and the women that love them will get to the Promised Land. By the way, do you notice the word "socialist" above? It's the first time that deBoer has used the S-word in his Left 2016 piece.

If we are going to be realist, could we please look at the difference between now and the situation in the 1840s when Marx was formulating his scientific socialism? Back then the Irish were dying in their millions in the potato famine, and the Germans were also experiencing a hungry forties of their own. In Britain the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had reversed 250 years of welfare policy and forced the poor into factory work under inhuman conditions in the cities where everyone could see them. It looked like this misery would continue forever unless Something Was Done about it, i.e., socialism.

Only the misery didn't continue forever; instead, everyone became richer, including the working class. As a racist, sexist, homophobe, I like to believe that the misery retreated because the textile revolution was followed by the railway revolution, followed by the oil revolution, followed by the electric revolution, followed by the auto revolution, followed by the electronic revolution followed by the information revolution. The textile revolution provided cheap cotton clothing for the masses, the railway revolution provided transportation for the masses, the oil revolution provided cheap illuminating oil for the masses, the electric revolution provided cheap urban transportation for the masses, the auto revolution provided personal transportation for the masses. And so on.

A left-winger like Fredrik deBoer would insist that the decline of misery was caused by the worker mass movement and the socialist mass movement. Very well, except that in 1850 "economic and social justice" would have meant equality at a very low level. And what would the economic and social justices have said about the upstart John D. Rockefeller and his standard illuminating oil?

A realist would have to admit that the attempts to create a socialist society have been horrible failures, and indeed the most grotesque tricks on the common people. For the leaders of the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of China, and post-independence India all thought that they were implementing the very latest in western European social and economic technology when they socialized their economically backward states. Reading the manifestos of the ideologically fashionable back in Europe they didn't realize that the socialist ideas were the ideas of a crank, a man who had taken the incomplete ideas of the classical economists and completely missed the point. So they visited untold miseries on their peoples, and compounded the error by resorting to terror (except in India) to force their crank ideas through to success. In other words, they turned the realist hard-slog rhetoric of Fredrik deBoer into brutal reality and utterly immiserated their peoples in a way that was unimaginable to the Educated Youths like Marx and Engels.

Underneath the realist rhetoric in deBoer is a naive faith in politics, as though politics can solve the existential problems of humankind. But politics is violence; it proposes to correct the violence of the "existing power relations" with new, righteous violence that will correct the dominations and oppressions of the old order. But how bad can things be if they have increased per capita income by 3,000 percent in 200 years? How bad can things be when three-fourths of the poor in the US  own a car or truck? When 42 percent own their own home?

When deBoer talks about a "mass movement" and about "victory" he is making my point that politics is violence. For sure, he is not talking about violent insurrection, but he is talking about the intimidation of peaceful protest and naming and shaming. And he is talking about using the power of government to alter the decisions of the market. How do you think that a policy of "economic and social justice" would be implemented? By suggestion? It would be implemented by government functionaries, backed up by government enforcement officers, also known as men with guns.

Fredrick deBoer opposes a symbolic politics of "altering vocabulary, communication, and similarly symbolic goals" because for him a left movement is about material goals. Really, he knows not what he says. The left has made extraordinary progress in recent decades with its program, borrowed from the Frankfurt School, of changing the culture by naming and shaming those that don't talk leftist. And politics is downstream from culture. If there is one thing that conservatives fear it is that the left has won over their children in the culture wars. And once you have won the culture, what else is there?

Next up: "Pessimist."

Contra-deBoer: Democratic

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My seventh piece was "Liberal". Now we look at his "Democratic."

Fredrik deBoer recognizes that one of the problems of the left today is what political professionals like to call "messaging."

A functioning, healthy left political movement would identify building a mass movement by appealing to the unconvinced as its most central, most essential goal. It would identify obscurantism, factionalism, purity signaling, and other behaviors that limit the potential numbers of the movement as counterproductive. It would limit the use of specialized vocabulary and other forms of in-group signaling. It would constantly consider how its practices and discourses actually grow or fail to grow the ranks of the movement. 

Principles, he writes, are important, but they shouldn't exclude "vast swaths" of the population from understanding the movement because that limits its size. He is arguing that a mass movement should appeal to the masses.

The movement would use voting systems for decision-making, and would provide for minority voices and dissent. But it would avoid "flat" and anti-hierarchical organization; they have failed the left. The movement "would recognize the basic, beautiful radicalism of voting and democracy and defend it against the tyranny of structurelessness."

Note that by "Democratic" deBoer is not talking about how the successful left movement will govern. He is talking about how the left movement governs itself and is obviously reflecting conventional wisdom emerging on the left that their ideal of a government of consensus collectivism doesn't work for their political movement. The movement must have leadership, and while voting is important and democratic the movement should not get carried away by an excess of egalitarianism.

On the other hand deBoer is also concerned about getting the word out. He obviously feels that the left is hampered by its in-group jargon that doesn't communicate enthusiasm to potential recruits to the movement. Principles shouldn't get in the way of building the movement. In this deBoer is just like any sauntering politician and understands that the voters are not interested in ideas. They want a strong leader who will get them what they want. Or they want the government to keep its hands off their paycheck.

For someone like me, who is not a leftist, all this is rather encouraging. It tells me that the left finds itself tangled in its traces. On the one hand, of course, it believes in a militant political movement that will march and protest until it replaces the current unjust regime. In other words, it believes in a military top-down organization in which people are expected to fight and die for the cause. On the other hand it believes in a perfect cooperative and collective society free of all state coercion and domination and hegemonic structure where everyone is equal, everyone is consulted, and everyone matters. This is what the Marxists call an "internal contradiction." In the Hegelian dialectic "being" and "nothing," although opposites, are identical and resolve themselves, as I understand it, in "becoming." That's easy for Hegel to say, but how does the left resolve the problem of being at once a political movement, which must be focused and disciplined, and also a collective of peace and justice in perfect equality? As Candidate Obama once said, that is above my pay grade.

But I would be really interested in how "democratic" the left movement would propose to be after it had acquired power. None of the "so-called Communist" regimes of the last century seem to have done a good job on the democratic front.

Next up: "Realist."

Contra-deBoer: Liberal

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My sixth piece was "Pacifist". Now we look at his "Liberal."

Fredrik deBoer understands that "the guarantee of certain individual rights is not contrary to the pursuit of social equality and social justice but rather an essential element of that pursuit." Recognizing that "basic human and political rights" are "immensely popular" a left movement must speak the language of liberalism.

It would not concede the language of personal freedom and political liberty to conservatism, but would insist that only economic egalitarianism can truly result in real freedom, and would work to achieve that freedom for all people in all places. 

In addition, of course, the left movement would champion individual "self-definition, including in the spheres of sexual identity, gender identity, and consensual sexual practice." It would recognize how left movements are protected from McCarthyism by individual rights and how the abuse of human rights in "so-called Communist" governments damaged the cause of anti-capitalism.

It would understand that a robust, functional left social movement would be strong enough to live alongside those who disagree with it, and would have no need of silencing them. It would move confidently in the knowledge that its core beliefs will eventually win because they are correct, and so feel no particular desire to silence those who dissent from those beliefs.

This piece is rather revealing. I read it as saying that, hey, even though we lefties don't really believe in individual rights, because collectivism, we must advocate them, and even, maybe, practice them, because individual rights are so popular, and we must not give the conservatives a club with which to beat us. But then deBoer proposes the Orwellian notion that "only economic egalitarianism can truly result in real freedom." No it doesn't. Economic egalitarianism can only work under coercion. The only person with real freedom under economic egalitarianism is the guy that does not work. Everyone else is working under the direction of the collective.

Notice the tentative nature of the last quote above, that the left ought to be "strong enough to live alongside those who disagree with it", because after all the left's beliefs will win because they are correct. I agree, but I understand that deBoer's tentative tone reflects the truth that the left has never let non-believers live alongside them unsilenced. From Marx to Lenin to Castro to Chávez to today's campus protesters, the left has never entertained the idea that opposing beliefs are to be endured, not for a moment. Always and everywhere, every leftist is engaged in the tactics of silencing the opposition. It might be naming and shaming with the accusations of racism and sexism. It might be the accusation of hate speech. It might be the marginalization and removal of a troublesome faculty colleague. It might be the "entryism" of the social justice warrior. It might be the use of confession and the suspension of the presumption of innocence in the investigation of sexual harrassment. It might be the torture of innocents during a purge. The left never leaves anyone alone.

But why is this? Why does the left not believe in live and let live? The answer is simple. The central faith of all left movements is the faith in politics, the use of government power to reverse injustice. It is a faith that is doomed to failure, because politics is violence, and government is force. A leftist cannot leave anyone alone, not for a moment, because the movement is everything. Thus, as one conservative blogger has written: "You will be made to care."

It has long been a commonplace in conservative circles that any leftist support for free speech is merely tactical, necessary until the day of revolution. It must be considered a virtue in Fredik deBoer that he allows this truth to leak through in his support for Liberalism and "certain individual rights."

Next up: "Democratic."