The Left is a Religion

Most think of our western Left as a political movement. I see it as a religion. For tens of millions of Americans, it’s the faith they’ve taken up to replace Christianity, a new pseudo-religion that’s evolved to fill the God-shaped hole in America’s soul. To effect this mass apostasy, the Left co-opted structures from Christianity, warping and perverting them.

Consider:

1) It has its redemptive martyrs, its "victims"--with the added bonus that this time millions gain automatic victim status without doing a thing. They need only be born a minority or identify as LGBT, or even, given radical feminism, just be female.

2) It has an eschatology that Marx and his forebears hijacked from biblical religion and which has been inserted as First Principle into all the left's sub-movements under the rubric "Progress!" History is understood as progressing toward an earthly utopia of diversity and unbounded sexual play. In a radical reversal of Christian teachings on male/female and chastity, it is the sexually disordered who are seen as closest to the sacred in this new religion, heralds of a coming age of pure kink devoid of responsibility or repercussion. The coming utopia will also be socialist in the old sense: "You will own nothing, and you will be happy," as a recent slogan puts it.

3) It has its rites, rituals, in-group symbols: the Protest Rally, the “Pride Parade”, “taking a knee”, identifying clothing and pins, and now even magic amulets (those cloth squares on the faces in the photo above).

4) It has a Dark Realm it struggles against, which we could call: White Daddy. America's Founders, generals, political leaders, inventors, hardheaded businessmen--they did not forge and defend the new nation, making it the success it became, but rather infected it with the curse of their male whiteness, their white maleness. Curse is a religious rather than political concept. We see the peak of this hysteria in recent years in relation to the last president. Trump was loathed not because of his policies but merely because his look, speech manners, and gestures were all suggestive of the Left's archetypal evil: White Daddy. Trump’s very cheerfulness infuriated our leftists, being reminiscent of the businessman who has work to do and enjoys his work, or the father who doesn’t take seriously the political diatribes of his kid just home from college. “OK, honey, whatever you say. Pass the potatoes.” The opposition to Trump was less a political opposition than the visceral loathing of an archetype, a ritual howling against a tribal mask: White Daddy.

5) Finally, cementing its status as religion, the Left requires dogmatic belief in things that are not only unprovable, but radically counterintuitive. The more nonsensical the belief and the louder it’s shouted, the more pious the believer shouting it. “MEN HAVE PERIODS TOO!” “Meat is RACIST!” “Speech is VIOLENCE!” etc., all meant to signal that the leftist in question is both well-catechized in this month's new “revelation” and willing to defend it.

Whereas the Christian professes faith in certain difficult doctrines about Christ--that He is the incarnate Son, that He rose from the dead, that He is the Second Person of the Trinity--the leftist must profess belief in impossible miracles in our everyday reality: men can give birth; a majority white nation that twice elected a black president is also a “white supremacist” nation; the biological being that is not a person a few hours before birth becomes a person upon changing location, etc., etc.

That the Left is in fact a replacement religion, an ersatz religion drawing its power from our spiritual malaise, goes a long way to explaining why it is so hard to fight. For one, as many have noticed, reasoned debate is now useless against leftists. Why? To put it simply, because they have defined “reasoned debate” as characteristic of the culture of White Daddy, and will not lower themselves to such.

Seriously.

Certainly the modern Right has elements of religion too: the Constitution as a nearly sacred document or the reverence for the flag come to mind. But these pale in comparison to what we now see on the Left.

The reason is simple: though many prominent figures on the Right are only nominally religious, the core cultural base of voters remains faithfully Christian. Still holding to the true faith, they needn’t sacralize politics. Believing in God and the redemption promised through His Son, they emphatically do not believe in salvation through politics. They know humanity is fallen, that evil will rear its head no matter what political arrangement is tried. They know sin cannot be legislated or reformed away. Thus they do not believe in promises of utopia here on earth.

This is why the Right is more likely to leave you alone to manage your life according to your own lights, while the Left is eager to micromanage everything you say or do. The Left, having put itself in charge of the Final Salvation of Humanity, must force you to get with the program for salvation to work. And as this salvation involves the whole of the social and material realms, no aspect of your life will be left unaffected. Notice the recent politicization of everything? This is because the Left, being utopian, is totalizing by necessity, like previous totalitarian movements. It seeks to transform all aspects of social reality, from diet, to sexuality, to speech, to entertainment, to child rearing, to anything you can name.

In brief, the Left is not content with human reality as it is; it cannot let human reality alone, because it can do better. This makes the Left toxic. It is toxic both to liberty and to all that is natural and set in humanity.

With the gross overreach shown during the COVID pandemic, with the increased awareness that our public schools are now little more than leftist boot camps, Americans are finally starting to realize just how controlling our Left has become. But how to fight it, now that it's seized so many insititions?

It's my view that the Left has gained such strong hold because we've neglected to call it out for what it is: a new religion, a mass cult that sees your life and your children's lives as raw material to be shaped according to its doctrines.

Tens of millions of sane Americans are in dismay over what the Left is now getting away with. Pinning it down by openly naming it a fanatical cult out to impose imagined realities on the rest of us might help these mostly silenced Americans find their voices. Once they recognize the Left as a mass cult, they will glimpse more effective ways of fighting back.

Starting with: "In America we have freedom of religion. Me, I'm not part of yours."

E.M.

FAKES upon FAKES: Why the Left has Become So Completely Daft

I was chatting with a friend online, S., who wondered: "How has the American left in weird ways gone so far left while in other ways getting almost completely disconnected from the actual working class?"

He was trying to figure Marxism’s role in this shift.

Well, I’d been watching this transformation for years and had an explanation. Following is the answer I gave.

The ONE-TWO PUNCH

Our current left was born (stillborn I’d say) from the convergence of two trends. It helps to see them as a kind of ONE-TWO punch. As follows:

1) In the middle of the 20th century, Marxist thinkers hatched a strategy called "the long march through the institutions". We in America are now seeing something like the belated results.

The "long march" doctrine arose when it did because Marxist intellectuals realized that, contrary to Marx's predictions, the western working class was not organizing itself for revolution, but was rather, in their view, being seduced and misled by the glittering toys of mass culture and the dreamy promises of capitalist ideology.

Their solution? To focus efforts on the main public-facing professions, on a slow takeover of education, media, and other areas of mass influence.

As this takeover would require time, they dubbed it “the long march through the institutions”, with a nod to Chairman Mao. They theorized that once leftists had control of these key institutions, they could use them to forge a true revolutionary consciousness in the masses, and then an actual revolutionary movement.

This "long march" strategy is one of the reasons so many hard-core leftists starting in the post-war period were content to become academics. They could tell themselves they were seeding the ground. The Frankfurt School thinkers, with their Marxist cultural criticism, offered a bridge over which would-be revolutionaries could walk themselves into academia. One could be an edgy "revolutionary" without having to mix much with the actual working class. This latter was a key perk, the Original Hypocrisy on which our current left's Stratospheric Hypocrisy is built.

So, yes, the long march strategy ultimately bore fruit, although a different fruit than originally intended. What happened?

Orthodox Marxism was increasingly debunked. So that in the intervening decades the work of all those "left" professors shifted focus to cultural analysis: Foucault, structuralism, the postmoderns--thinkers in all these movements set their sights on something other than class warfare. By the mid '80s, checking the issue du jour, one saw it was nearly always some form of identity warfare--all the marginalized “victim” groups, whether sexual or racial or whatever. The French intellectual movements of the 1960s had crossed the Atlantic in a big way and infected American universities, and by the '80s the results were unmistakable. No more was the focus on supporting the American working class in general: rather everything was suddenly feminism, African-American studies, post-colonialism, gay and lesbian rights, racism racism racism.

With this shift, the main base of the Democratic Party, the huge number of white working class Americans, itself suddenly became suspect, especially if those white working Americans also happened to be Christian. Though Marxism as an economic philosophy was defunct, identity squabbles based on race or sexual behavior became a new, supposedly "revolutionary" battleground. And note: Though Marxism itself had been left behind, the authoritarian ethos of Marxism was retained. For most of these academic Lenin wanna-be's, classical liberal rules of engagement were suspect. There was, for instance, little worth supporting in our Constitution, with its dangerous protections of free speech and religious liberty. They wanted none of it, because in good Marxist fashion their goal was to direct what people were to say and think. They were going to forge "the Revolution".

This, in short, is how our professoriat and the media shills who now echo it came to abandon economics as the basis of their progressivism. In the US, this shift in academic focus slowly changed the very idea of what it meant to be "on the left". Class struggle became secondary to sexual/racial politics.

And then this deeply entrenched fake new “leftism” met up with a parallel development occurring in the Democratic Party, as follows.

2) The Democratic Leadership Council, created in the mid-1980s by Bill Clinton and cronies, pushed the party toward an explicit embrace of big business. In my view, the DLC was the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party as a party of working people, though sadly it has taken decades for the American working class to realize just how badly they've been sold out.

The DLC is the origin of what we see today: a Democratic Party just as beholden to Wall Street and corporate CEOs as the old GOP ever was.

But note: When the Democratic Party stopped fighting for working folks in the 1990s, when they abandoned the American working class for the CEOs, they knew they still had to show they were fighting for SOMETHING. They still needed some banner to wave to claim their left-wing cred. Voilà! The banner was there on offer from the children of "the long march through the institutions". The party just needed to pretend it was fighting for the identity dignity of all the new supposed victim groups. Which is what they did.

Note also that doing this would not require Democratic pols to break ranks with Wall Street or the big corporations. They could screw over the mass of the working class (those folks in flyover country) while getting all emotional in their speeches about things like transgender bathroom passes and the “rights” of illegal immigrants.

Party leaders thus found a pseudo-revolutionary movement they could meld with: all the SJW morons that now swarm our academies and publish in rags like Slate and Salon and Vox.

The Democratic Party has thus become a fake left party in the same way that our academic leftists are for the most part fake Marxists. Both have abandoned the bread-and-butter fight for the relative comfort and glitz of identity squabbles. Lady Gaga couldn't be happier.

What happened in 2016 is thus pretty clear. Enough of the American working class, especially the white working class, had finally seen the Democratic scam for what it was. Fortunately, they switched to Trump in protest against both the corruption of the establishment GOP and even more so in protest against the fake leftism of their former party.

That's my quick take on why the American "left" is what it is. Interbreed fake academic Marxists with a fake working class party and you get what we see today: a double-fake movement of screaming little Stalins of all flavors and dyed hair colors. Their mantra stems directly from their academic programming: "You're a racist! You're a homophobe! Down with the patriarchy! Die, bigot! Transphobe! End white supremacy! Racism racism racism!" And this in a country where gays and lesbians can live their lives as they choose, where more women are graduating university than men, and where a white-majority population twice elected a black man as president.

Read the pages of our left-liberal press and these SJW -isms are virtually all that is talked about. You can follow one or another of these rags for a month straight without finding a single article about the struggles of working Americans in general, because, see, too many of those working Americans, being white and churchgoing, are seen as hateful bigots who need to be sent to gulags for ideological training. And that's not a joke. It is to me absolutely believable that these people, if empowered, would set up gulags in which to imprison their identity enemies.

Hopefully hardworking Americans will continue to realize how fake and how toxic this new "left" really is and will keep voting it out of power. At present only a populist right seems capable of meaningfully defeating this pseudo-left.

And so: "the long march through the institutions" and the Democratic Leadership Council. The One-Two Punch that gave us our supremely fake left.

Cheers.

E.M.

My novel A Taipei Mutt is now in print. The Asian capital unmuzzled.

The New "Gaythoritarianism" of the American Left

What can we learn from the American left’s apoplectic reaction to Pope Francis' meeting Kim Davis?

Perhaps nothing; the reaction is entirely predictable. By turns disillusioned, gasping in disbelief, screaming “I TOLD you so!”--the progressive left is now more or less united in writing off Francis as a loser and a bigot and not someone any respectable person could support.

As for those few liberals who still remain sympathetic to Francis--“even after he met with her”--Charles P. Pierce aptly caught their mood in Esquire:

This is, obviously, the dumbest thing this Pope ever has done. It undermines everything he accomplished on his visit here. It undermines his pastoral message, and it diminishes his stature by involving him in a petty American political dispute.

Pierce sees the meeting with Davis as the end of the Pope’s honeymoon with liberal America. Note his particularly obtuse suggestion that it is all so sad--because the Davis case, after all, is just “a petty American political dispute.”

There’s the rub right there, the crux of liberals' odd misreading of Francis. The assumption that gay marriage is “just, like, so obvious”; that of course a man as progressive as Francis must see this; that any individual, such as Davis, who’d risk legal repercussions for refusing to go along with the gay agenda is just being “petty”.

I myself don’t think Davis has conducted her conscientious objection very wisely. But I do think she counts as a conscientious objector. And from the Pope’s words during his visit it’s pretty clear (pace Pierce) he doesn’t consider struggles over religious liberty, or individuals with the guts to wage them, at all “petty”. In any case, I don't think the Davis meeting was or is important on the Pope's visit agenda. It is one short encounter among many.

Still, after the news hit, I stopped by at the “progressive left” DailyKos community to see which way the wind was blowing. As if I couldn't guess. It was the usual righteous fury one sees in that crowd whenever anyone disagrees with one of the Holy Gender Tenets.

The meeting with Davis proved that Francis was obviously, as one person put it, “just another misguided, anti-gay bigot who pretends to be loving and compassionate”. Another instructed as follows: “Add poison to an otherwise nutritious soup, and all of it is poisoned.” A third waxed poetic: “All I can say now is, hypocrisy, thy name is Francis!” And on it went.

Yes, there were some mentions of the good that Francis had done on climate change, but in general the mood was: Bigot. Hypocrite. Fool. Fake.

Francis’ radicalism on so many issues supposedly so dear to this American left would no longer influence the Kos majority. No, if you don't dance to the LGBT movement's every new tune, you don’t get a pass with this crowd.

I commented as follows:

Listen to you all. “I’ve no more use for this Pope." "This Pope is slimy." Etc., etc.

Really?

At present Pope Francis is probably the world's most consequent voice calling for serious action on global warming. He's a trenchant critic of unfettered capitalism and outspoken supporter of the dignity of workers and of unions--to the point that he sets the Fox crowd and the Limbaughs into shivers of rage.

But the fact that his thinking (as is very likely the case) doesn't line up with yours on same-sex marriage means you've all suddenly "no use" for his stance or voice.

"No use" for Francis' stance on climate change? For his stance on free-market madness? For his stance on militarism?

Again you show that sad old trait of yours. Any figure who doesn't check all the same boxes you've come to check in your own historically specific cultural setting, any person who doesn't see eye to eye with American progressive liberals on EVERYTHING, especially those things related to sex or gender, is necessarily "slimy" or of "no use".

What kind of mature politics is that? It is cultural imperialism is what it is.

You think the Pope is being hypocritical?

The Pope's remark "Who am I to judge?" came at the end of the following statement spoken of a gay or lesbian person: "If someone is trying to live a holy life and seeking God, who am I to judge him?"

Why would progressives assume that the whole first part of that sentence was irrelevant to the Pope's meaning and why would they read into the last five words something like: "Though I'm the leader of the Catholic Church, I'm utterly against its teachings on sexual ethics."

It is very likely Pope Francis does not consider same-sex marriage to be marriage. It is very likely that when he refers to "attacks on the family", he is thinking in part of things like the Obergefell decision. (For the record, during his tenure in Argentina he did express support for something like civil unions for non-heterosexual couples. Which makes him more liberal than most in his church.)

So assuming that Francis does not acknowledge same-sex marriage, and recognizing the importance of religious liberty and the right of conscientious objection in his vision (how many of you, by the way, believe in conscientious objection? or perhaps you only believe in it when the objector agrees with you on all sex/gender/marriage-related issues?)--assuming this, why would it be hypocrisy on his part to meet with Kim Davis? Has she advocated jailing gays and lesbians? Has she picketed funerals with "God Hates Fags" signs? No, she has taken the one step of refusing to allow her name on licenses for same-sex marriages. As a purely negative action, a refusal to act, it's actually a pretty classic conscientious objection stance: "I won't bow to or sign my name to or perform such-and-such an action required by," etc., etc.

So I would think, in Francis' book, Davis' case would count as a valid instance conscientious objection. How not?

Yes, I also have some doubts that the story is legit. But if Francis did in fact meet with her, it wouldn't shock me--as it seems to have shocked so many of you. Is it because so many of you can't imagine there exist people who might agree with you on A, B, and C, but not on D? Is it because that's just too much of a stretch for your "progressive left" cultural imagination?

As myself a Catholic on the left, I admire Francis all the more for the way he screws up the expectations of both the American left and right. And it isn't any wonder. American left and right are both growing to be about equally bigoted and deranged.

I knew I’d mostly be attacked for this comment, and I was. After all: Who was I, “a Catholic”, to be calling anyone a bigot? How “ironic”. Etc.

But what does all this reveal about the current American left? I’d have to put it bluntly: They’re not so much left-wing in any traditional sense as they are obsessed with sexual identity politics. In my comment I mention the need to check “all” the boxes they do, A to Z. But of the boxes one must check to be heard in this crowd, that marked "LGBTQ, etc." is by far the most important. How has it come to this?

A pathological Gay Fundamentalism has taken over the American left. And of course, since we’re dealing here with a fundamentalism, it is no longer by any means enough to respect LGBT people or defend their rights. No, one must agree to recognize the validity of every new right they might demand. One must, first of all, acknowledge that "gay marriage" is an obvious right; that a household centered on a gay or lesbian couple is a perfectly healthy environment for raising children; and that those who refuse to recognize such marriages or the wisdom of gay parenting deserve to have their careers destroyed and be sued out of house and home. But in addition to walking and talking the new marriage orthodoxy, cobbled together just last Tuesday, one must also express delight in LGBT people’s vanguard role in other central social arenas. Because, don’t you know, it is LGBT people who are leading the charge to reform our schools, to police our speech, to correct our outmoded ideas of sex and gender. For who is it if not gays and lesbians who’ve taught us that great and eternal human truth, namely: Male and female sexuality have no inherent relation to male and female biology. Where have we learned this important truth if not from the our new authorities on sexuality, our LGBT brothers and sisters? Yes, thanks to gays and lesbians, now everyone can--and should!--bend any such supposed relations between biology and sexuality as much out of shape as possible. For only then will the "patriarchal ideology" that made these false relations be broken. Only then will one be free to be "oneself"! Which is . . . whatever one demands oneself to be.

Disagree with these fundamental truths and you are a “bigot”. And in this crowd, a bigot is the worst thing you can be.

On the left myself in many things, I cry bullshit to all this. I’m sickened by the cultural demagoguery that has hijacked our political life. These Gay Fundamentalists have been the main attraction for more than a decade now, and they think they own the place. They must be stopped, but with the youth almost entirely under their sway, and with the few sane adults in the room cowed into silence, how is this to be done?

The basic truths are clear. But is anything accomplished by simply stating basic truths in a culture that’s given up on the idea that the universe and humanity even have truth?

Trying to communicate with these people, one finally has the exasperated feeling one might get trying to explain to an especially dumb geometry class that they can’t draw four-sided triangles, even if they wanted to.

And so, yes: Boys will be boys and girls will be girls. That exceptions exist does not mean this paradigm is somehow wrong; it means only that these exceptions aren’t part of the norm to which the vast majority fit. And sorry, but that's just the definition of norm.

A just society gives space to and doesn’t persecute the exceptions. A sick society fetishizes the exceptions and uses them to destroy the norm. A sick society lets the exceptions remake the whole culture in their own image.

This is what is happening in our society now; our public spaces, our speech codes, our education system. Gay Pride has morphed into Gay Arrogance. The media and fashion industry cheer in perverse glee at the newness of it all, if only because “newness” is the very definition of media and fashion. And the American public, or at least those who take their cues from media and fashion, don’t want to feel left behind.

Thus a new Gay Fundamentalism is given carte blanche to impose its agenda on our schools, our legal system, all central institutions. Anyone who dares oppose this agenda will be fined, run out of business, jailed. The new gay commissars know what is right, they are watching, and woe to you if you don't bow to their wisdom.

We must have the courage to call out this fundamentalism. If we don't, it will not stop until it has ferreted out every pocket of sanity. You think things are ugly now? They will only get uglier. And so: We must dissent loudly and clearly. We must begin by calling this movement what it is--an illiberal gay fundamentalism, a gaythoritarianism that has abrogated to itself rights it doesn't have. We must use labels like these, and we must make them stick.

Eric Mader

Anne Widdecombe got it precisely right in this 2012 speech: