Not long ago I met a very impressive and unusual 20-year-old man. Having already imbibed great literary works and philosophical material as most of his age-mates do social-media dross, he is what the average 50-year-old philosophy professor would be if he actually, well, understood philosophy (i.e., that it is “a search for Truth”). He said something very interesting, too, when our conversation turned to politics.
He warned that if the Democrats ever gained enough power, they would kill “us” (meaning, their political opponents).
Is this paranoia? Bias? Well, more and more people are talking about the dangers of the so-called Left. One commentator, incredulous at recent events, asks, “What explains the utter heartlessness of the Democrat party as currently constituted?”
Writer Patricia McCarthy opens talking about the recent Chicago murder of 18-year-old college freshman Sheridan Gorman by an illegal alien. Addressing the Democrats’ response, she wrote Thursday:
This was yet another murder of a young American woman, one of many, at the hands of known violent illegal migrants who came into the country during the Biden administration, arrested over and over again, released onto the streets again and again to re-commit crime after crime with impunity.
Curiously, (not really), not one Democrat will comment on her murder. [Illinois Governor J.B.] Pritzker blamed President Trump even though he is one of the Democrat governors who has refused to cooperate with ICE.
… Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson refused the opportunity to apologize to Gorman’s family. Alderman Maria Hadden posted a video essentially blaming the victim for “startling” the man with a gun!
… This level of pitilessness is impossible to explain without concluding that the party of the American left today is brutally Marxist. They embrace everything and anything that is against American traditional values. They truly hate those of us who love this nation. Their plan, if they regain power, is going to be all about retribution, not the American people. They are vowing to criminalize President Trump and everyone in his cabinet, any lawyer who dared to represent him. They have vowed to further impose communism with an Islamic patina on the United States.
One has only to listen to Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut to see how far gone his party is.
He is on the record averring for his party that “The people we care about most are illegal migrants.”
They have made that abundantly clear now for years. They supported Biden’s wide open border that ushered in twenty million migrants from all over the world. They wanted them, need them, to win and retain power.
The Nature of the Thing
This behavior by upper-echelon Democrats isn’t hard to understand, however, upon grasping a certain reality. It was expressed well, too, by Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, and concerns seeing things “naked” or “as they really are.”
“What is this [person or thing], fundamentally?” we should ask, to paraphrase his work Meditations. “What is its nature and substance, its reason for being? What is it doing in the world?”
As for Democrats, McCarthy twice mentioned one word encapsulating Democratic politicians’ general “reason for being”: power.
Now, virtually all of us can relate to “typical” human urges, such as those for food, money, or sex. Virtually all of us have them, after all (just hopefully not to a disordered degree). We also can usually understand how someone can crave drugs or alcohol.
But just as someone can lust after food, money, or sex, so can he equally intensely lust after power. The average person doesn’t experience this desire, however. And unlike with drugs and alcohol, he doesn’t hear incessant stories about people getting treatment for it.
Most people are thus perhaps unlikely to detect the power-lust problem in others. (Man generally projects his own mindset onto them.)
Yet not surprisingly, politics attracts power-mongers the way Wall Street attracts money-mongers. This isn’t to say politicians can’t or don’t have other motivations (e.g., ideological ones). Human nature isn’t simple, but complex. It’s just that in the aggregate, power lust overrides other considerations.
Rational — Within Its Context
Understanding that high-level Democrats prioritize power makes their behavior entirely logical. They, for example,
- favor illegals and immigrants over legacy Americans because the former support them. And their far-left base hates traditional Americans enough that they support the Democratic politicians in this;
- wink and nod at violent left-wing protests (i.e., BLM/Antifa) because they destabilize the administrations of those whose power they desire; and
- won’t visibly and notably condemn illegal-alien criminality because their Democratic base could construe this as betraying the cause.
This said, Republican politicians are largely driven by power motivations, too. One difference is that they’re catering to a different group: the extant more patriotic, more traditional Americans. Yet there’s another, deeper difference: morality.
Downstream and Upstream Things
It’s hard grasping this if, as so many do, one dismisses what’s at issue as “just politics.” But what is “politics”?
It would be ridiculous thinking that preferring chocolate ice cream over vanilla reflects a person’s character. Matters of taste are just that. But is that all politics is?
Or is it better described as a manifestation of cultural, spiritual, philosophical, and moral differences in public life?
The late Andrew Breitbart’s famous observation goes, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Yet culture itself is downstream from even deeper realms: spirituality and philosophy and what they shape, morality. (It’s no coincidence that once-pagan, now-officially-atheist China has far different politics than the Christianity-influenced United States.)
This being so, however, that politics is downstream from all these realms would appear to have a corollary. To wit:
Parties with different politics are downstream from different cultures — and different spirituality, philosophy, and morality.
The great rank-and-file issue chasms between our two major parties bear witness to this. Abortion, “transgenderism,” racial identity politics, immigration enforcement, gun control, and crime fighting are just some examples.
HVPs vs. LVPs
But are Republicans really more moral than Democrats, on balance? When wallowing in moral relativism — moral nihilism in disguise — this becomes an irrelevant question. After all, there is then no objective yardstick for making such judgments.
It’s a different matter, however, upon recognizing Truth and the “ingredients in the morality jar”: the virtues (aka good moral habits). A comprehensive list: Faith, Courage, Hope, Honesty, Charity, Fortitude, Justice, Temperance, Prudence, Chastity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, Forgiveness, Humility, and Love. When using this (correct) yardstick, it’s apparent that, as I wrote here, leftists are low-virtue people (LVP). And conservatives, though not perfect, are higher-virtue people (HVP).
Even leftists have acknowledged this … in so many words. Just consider an admission by vote-fraudster and Democratic operative Scott Foval. Referencing Republicans, he said on hidden video in 2016:
There is a level of adherence to rules on the other side that only when you’re at the very highest level, do you get over.
Also reflecting LVP status, consider the vile rhetoric leftists often spew. There was the Senator Bernie Sanders campaign worker heard talking in 2020 about wanting to murder his political opponents. There also were the online leftists talking about wanting to kill a cute little six-year-old in 2012. Why? He was featured in an anti-Barack Obama video. And these are just two of innumerable examples.
Bad Ideas Can Kill
Unfortunately, I can’t do this issue justice here (word-count issues). But I illustrated this phenomenon more in-depth in “Violence, Inc.: A Leftist Enterprise” and “The Bloody Left: The Dark History of Untrue Believers.”
Suffice it to say, though, that our LVPs are lacking in virtues relevant here. That is, Charity, Justice, Patience, Kindness, Forgiveness, Humility, and Love. Also consider their de facto atheism, with its corollary that humans are mere organic robots comprising chemicals and water. Is it any surprise they aren’t exactly a pro-life bunch?
From the French revolutionaries, Soviets, and Maoists to the Cambodian Khmer Rouge and beyond, leftists have historically stained the ground red. Would you bet your life they’d be different upon achieving absolute power in America today? If you haven’t yet drawn a conclusion on this, well, that might be the only way you’ll find out.
