Leftism has been around for a while. The French Revolution and the teachings of Marx did much to place its nonsense to world scene. But in America it really didn't take off until the 1960s. Here the ideological old guard found a spoiled generation of thrill seekers hungering for some meaning in their lives and they were all too eager and ready to provide them with an Ersatz religion. The 1950s saw unprecedented prosperity and the rise of materialism with its attendant softening of spiritual discipline.
The youth of the 1960s were thus hungering for a deeper spiritual meaning in life to counter the emptiness of materialistic suburbia. They sought to acquire this meaning with all too easy means. Drugs, for example, especially LSD and Marijuana, gave them a small taste of momentary euphoria. Sexual license, aka "free love," promised to give young people the ecstasy of intimacy without the burden of commitment.
Having rebelled against the sexual mores of their parents and rightfully rebelling against their parent's crass materialism left the 1960s youth as easy pray for the ideological left. They sought to channel the rebellion into their socialist causes. They made heroes of the likes of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh and they enlisted in the ranks of the Democratic Party which veered ever more left away from the center.
Great social welfare programs were conceived, Medicare, Medicaid, LBJ's War on Poverty, etc.
But the animus for much of this was really based on feelings. It feels good to care for the poor and the sick. It also felt good to have sex and use drugs. And so a whole generation began to subscribe more or less to the motto that was shouted from the rooftops at the time: "If it feels good, do it!"
It is natural that a philosophy of life based on feelings should fill the spiritual void left by the abandonment of more traditional systems of values such as that based on the Judeo-Christian laws enshrined in the 10 commandments. Nature abhors a vacuum.
I have to credit Dennis Prager with having first made me aware of this fact that leftism is really a religion that is based on feelings. But, being dependent upon your feelings to tell if something is right or not does not prove effective in cultivating certain virtues such as fortitude or bravery. Fortitude is developed by sticking to your sound principles in the face of opposition. Feelings are not sound in this way, because it often doesn't feel good to stick to principles. It is far easier to just shrug one's shoulder and mutter something about "to each his own," live and let live, and simply turn one's back when manifest evil appears. Thus, the left preaches tolerance above all else, but when you ask them if intolerance should be tolerated you get nothing but blank stares and silence. They embrace subjective relativism and don't want to be judgmental. Judging other's behavior makes us uncomfortable, it doesn't feel good. And so we seek refuge in a cowardly philosophy that pretends that all values and beliefs are somehow equal and therefore to be tolerated.
I wrote about a man today who lived around 500 years ago and knew precisely what it meant to stand his ground on principle, even at the cost of his life: Thomas More. He was truly a man for all seasons who spoke truth to power and said no to political correctness even though it cost him his life.
Such fortitude and bravery is very rare nowadays. Instead we are surrounded by cowards who always seem to seek the easy way out. Take our hapless president, Barack Obama. Instead of trying to do the hard work of reaching across the aisle and finding sound bipartisan solutions to the most pressing economic problems of 2009 and 2010, nameless the problem of unemployment, he chose instead the easy partisan route of working with his Democratic compatriots to foist on the rest of America a mammoth health care overhaul involving one sixth of the economy. That was the easy thing to do because he had a Democratic majority in the Senate and House. He could run rough shod over all the GOP opposition. Piece of cake.
In contrast to Thomas More, Barack Obama is a manifest coward. But he is the perfect expression of the mindset that grew out of the sixties. He gamed the system with affirmative action and like a silver tongued devil talked his way into office without any qualifications or any real experience as a leader or even as a worker. All talk, no substance. A consummate phony, our Charlatan-in-Chief. And, of course, he has a large cadre of cowardly leftists at his disposal in the media who will gladly and giddily embrace "hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil" and look the other way as this charlatan tramples on the US Constitution.
See also the blog Universal Christian.
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