Still the Best Hope

Dennis Prager

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062097811
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Processus politique

Conservative radio host and syndicated columnist Dennis Prager provides a bold, sweeping look at the future of civilization with Still theBest Hope, and offers a strong, cogent argument for why basic American values must triumph in a dangerously uncertain world. Humanity stands at a crossroads, and the only alternatives to the "American Trinity" of liberty, natural rights, and the melting-pot ideal of national unity are Islamic totalitarianism, European democratic socialism, capitalist dictatorship, or global chaos if we should fail. America is Still theBest Hope, as this eminently sensible, profoundly inspiring volume so powerfully proves.

Part I

LEFTISM

1

What Is Leftism?

A Secular Religion

LEFTISM IS BOTH A WAY of understanding the world and a value system. It is, in fact, a form of religion, albeit a secular one. Many of its adherents believe in it with the same passion as religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in their respective religions. They direct their lives by it, and more than a few have been willing to die—and many have killed—for various Leftist ideologies. In much of the world outside the Muslim world, Leftism is the dominant ideology. It influences the values and actions of nearly as many people as does Christianity or any other religion. It even influences many believing Christians and Jews. For these reasons Left, Leftist, and Leftism are capitalized in this book.

One example of the religious nature of Leftism was the term adopted by Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady of the United States—“the politics of meaning.” The term was highly meaningful to the Left, but meaningless to conservatives. The reason is that conservatives do not look to government and politics for meaning. They look to their own lives—their families, their work, their friends, their hobbies, and most of all, their God-based religions. But with the collapse of God-based religion on much of the Left, Leftist religion has filled the meaning void. For the Left since Marx, utopia is to be created here and now, on earth. Politics becomes the vehicle to achieving this and therefore politics provides much more meaning to Leftists than to those on the Right. For the Left, politics is the way to transform the world; for conservatives, politics is primarily the way to stop the Left from doing so. The former is much more fulfilling than the latter.

THIS IS NOT APPARENT—
EVEN TO MANY WHO HOLD LEFTIST BELIEFS

Unlike those who hold Christian beliefs and call themselves Christian, or those who hold Muslim beliefs and call themselves Muslim, many people who hold Leftist values do not call themselves “Leftist,” and do not even think of themselves as such.

This is also true of organizations. While virtually every Christian or Muslim or Jewish organization identifies itself in that way, virtually no Left-wing organization includes the word Leftist in its name. In America, a list of leading Leftist organizations would include groups as diverse as the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, the National Organization for Women, and the National Council of Churches. Not one of their names even hints at a Leftist orientation and if asked, many of their members would deny that these organizations are Leftist.

The great majority of the world’s labor unions are Leftist institutions.

The great majority of liberal arts colleges and universities in the Western world are Leftist. The social science departments of Western universities are essentially Left-wing seminaries. Just as the purpose of Christian seminaries is to produce committed Christians, the primary purpose of most Western universities is, consciously or not, to produce committed secular Leftists. The major difference between them is that Christian seminaries declare their purpose, and Western universities do not.

The great majority of the world’s news media are on the Left.

And, just as significant, there are so many Leftists in other institutions that those institutions become de facto Leftist even when they are ostensibly committed to other ideals. An example would be Western religious institutions that come to be dominated by Leftists. The Anglican Church in Britain and many mainstream Protestant churches in the United States have Leftist values that are indistinguishable from those of other Left-wing institutions. However, because no one calls the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) the “Leftist Presbyterian Church U.S.A.,” it is not immediately identified as a Left-wing institution.^* Likewise, there is no mainstream Leftist position that the leadership and many rabbis of the Reform movement of Judaism do not hold, but the institution is called Reform Judaism, not Leftist Judaism, and most Left-wing rabbis in Reform Judaism would be insulted if they were described as having Leftism-rather Judaism-based values.^*

If asked how they would identify themselves socially or politically (and usually only if asked), Leftists will call themselves “progressive,” “open-minded,” “liberal,” “feminist,” “environmentalist,” “enlightened,” or any combination of these, but relatively few will label themselves “Leftist.” Many people with primarily Left-wing views think of themselves as “centrists.” And that is understandable. Because almost none of these institutions, from the universities to the world’s mainstream news media, calls itself Leftist and because the views of the university and of the news media are the only views to which the average person with Left-wing views is ever seriously exposed, it makes perfect sense that many people on the Left would consider themselves—and Left-wing views—to be centrist.

No Official Creed or Scripture

Another obstacle to identifying Leftism is that, unlike traditional religions, Leftism has no official creed or scriptures. If you want to know what Judaism is, you can read the Torah, the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and rabbinic literature. If you ask a Christian what Christianity is, a Protestant will refer you to the Old and New Testaments and a Catholic will refer you to the Bible and to Church teachings. Muslims likewise will refer to their holy works beginning with the Koran and the Hadith.

But even though there are hundreds of thousands of Left-wing books and an innumerable number of essays and articles written from a Leftist perspective, there are no official Leftist scriptures. At one time, perhaps, one would have pointed to the works of Marx and Engels, but no longer.

Unlike the beliefs of traditional religions, Leftism’s beliefs must often be inferred. One knows that a Christian is one who affirms belief in the Christian Trinity. But it is not nearly as easy to label people Leftist as it is to label them Christian. The dogmas to which virtually all Christians assent are listed or easily identified by asking virtually any Christian clergyman. But the dogmas of Leftism are not listed and there is no official Leftist clergy.

Nevertheless it would be absurd to deny that there is such a thing as Leftism.

What the Left Believes

TWO IRRECONCILABLE VISIONS

Most Americans want to believe that liberal America and conservative America can be united. That was a major allure of the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. But the unhappy fact is that there are two Americas, and they are not a rich one and a poor one; economic status plays little role in this division. Rather, there is a conservative America and a liberal America.

The reason people in America believe (more so than in Europe, which is used to deep ideological divisions) in the possibility of unity between Left and Right is that they think the two have essentially the same vision for America—that Right and Left share the same ends—and therefore really differ only in their ways to achieve that vision. That is not the case. Right and Left differ in their visions of America, not just in having different roads.

• The Left wants America to look as much like Western European countries as possible. The Left wants Europe’s quasi pacifism, cradle-to-grave social democracy, socioeconomic egalitarianism, and secularism in America. The Right shares none of those goals. It regards pacifism as an accessory to evil; the cradle-to-grave welfare state as economically and morally untenable; socioeconomic egalitarianism as subversive of liberty; and secularism as undermining both ultimate meaning and objective morality.
• The Left wants America not only to have a secular government, but to be a secular society as well. The Left argues that if people want to be religious, they should do so at home and in their houses of prayer, but not to inject their religious values into society.^* The Right wants America to continue to be what it has always been—a God-centered (Judeo-Christian) society with a secular government that is not indifferent to God and religion.
• The Left wants Americans to identify as citizens of the world; it fears nationalism, especially of the American variety. This distrust of nationalism has been true for the European Left since World War I, and for the American Left since World War II. The Right, on the other hand, first identifies as citizens of America, and celebrates American (and other countries’) nationalism.
• The Left therefore regards the notion of American exceptionalism as an expression of chauvinism and conceit. It often views European and world opinion as better than America as arbiters of what is good. The Right, on the other hand, has a low opinion of the United Nations and of world opinion as moral compasses. It sees both as having a much poorer record in identifying and confronting evil than America has.
• The Left is ambivalent about, and often hostile to, overt displays of American patriotism. That is why, for example, one is far more likely to find American flags displayed in conservative neighborhoods on national holidays than in liberal neighborhoods such as Santa Monica, California; Manhattan; and San Francisco.
• The Left subscribes more to the French Revolution, whose guiding principles were “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” The Right subscribes to the American Revolution’s formula, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The French/European notion of equality (which goes far beyond the American belief that all people are created equal) is not mentioned. The Right rejects the French Revolution and does not hold Western Europe as a model. The Left does.
• The Left envisions an egalitarian society; the Right does not. The Left values equality of economic status above other societal values—most important, above liberty. This is what propels the Left to advocate laws that would compel employers to pay women the same wages they pay men not only for the same job but for “comparable” jobs. This Left-wing emphasis on egalitarianism is what led the United Nations World Health Organization to rank health care in the United States and in Cuba as essentially tied—because the United Nations values equality, and in America, while the poor get far superior health care to almost anyone in Cuba, there is nevertheless less equality in health care than in Cuba, where almost no one (except Communist Party leaders) has decent health care.
• The Left wants a world—and therefore an America—devoid of nuclear weapons. The Right wants America to have the most advanced nuclear (and other) weapons in the world. The Right trusts American might more than it does universal disarmament as a vehicle to world peace.
• The Left wants, as Barack Obama repeatedly stated when running for president, to “fundamentally transform” America. Conservatives want America improved, not fundamentally transformed.
• For these and other reasons, calls for a unity among Americans that transcends Left and Right are either naive or disingenuous. America will be united only when the great majority affirm either Left-wing or conservative values.

1. MATERIALIST EXPLANATIONS FOR HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Whether or not an individual who espouses Left-wing ideas considers himself a Marxist—and few have since the fall of the Soviet Union—Left-wing ideas are predicated on Marx’s materialist understanding of life. In popular jargon, “materialism” means an excessive love of material things. But philosophically, “materialism” means that only matter is real; there is no reality beyond the material world.

This in turn means:

No Reality Other Than the Material

Nothing non-material is real. Love, for example, is ultimately chemistry, since the mind is nothing more than the physiological activities of the brain. So, too, free will does not exist—all our decisions are determined by our genes and our environment. And, therefore, God and religious beliefs are nonsense—frequently dangerous nonsense.

Religion Is Opposed Because It Prevents Revolution

From Marx on, the Left has fought against religion because it is non-materialist and because Leftists have understood that so long as people were religious, they would not engage in what the Left considers the necessary revolution to better their material lives. Religion teaches people how to accommodate to their material condition—precisely by relegating the material world to a lower rung than other spheres of life, such as the spiritual, the moral, and the intellectual.

Economics Explains Most Human Behavior

The Left does not view actions that Judeo-Christian society has labeled “good” and “evil” as the products of people’s moral values and self-control but as the products of material equality or inequality. Thus the Left ascribes most violent crime to poverty, not to the violent criminal’s defective character or defective value system.

2. MATERIAL INEQUALITY IS THE GREAT EVIL

The Left’s great fight is with material inequality, not with evil as normally understood. Thus, the Left has always been less interested in fighting tyranny than in fighting inequality. That is why Leftist dictators—from Lenin to Mao to Pol Pot to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez—have had so much support from Leftists around the world. Many of these dictators were mass murderers, but to much of the world’s Left it was more important that they opposed material inequality (and America).

This explains the Left’s relative disinterest in creating wealth. The enormous and unsustainable debts facing the individual American states and the United States as a country from 2009 on have disturbed the American Right far more than the American Left. The same has been true for nearly all the European countries saddled with unsustainable debt. The reason is that the Left is not nearly as interested in creating wealth as it is in erasing inequality.

3. THE STATE IS THE VEHICLE TO UTOPIA

End all these social and economic inequalities and you will have created a beautiful w...