John C. Wright addresses the moral void that is the left.
It’s easy to fall into the mental pattern of believing that the left is simply the flip-side of the right – not its opposite, but rather a philosophical complement, mirroring the right in its positions on various issues but sharing the same overall goals. And that may be true in the case of most ordinary Democrats, vs. leftists, and what I think he is alluding to with his description of what the left used to be (or claim to be) about.
But when you encounter the true believers, such as those who made up the various tentacles of the Colorado Democracy Alliance, you see exactly what Wright describes as the left of today. They champion every movement or idea or person that opposes the good, the just, and the beautiful, and the more corrosive the movement or idea or person, the more strongly they champion it.
Yes, they are liars, brazen and habitual, devoid of intellectual integrity. Yes, they are crass hypocrites, cynically portraying themselves as champions of those they exploit. Yes, they are grownup toddlers, unwilling to take responsibility for their record of failure or accept any criticism or refusal without pitching mouth-foaming tantrums. But those things are secondary to the mindless destructive impulse that underlies their thinking as a whole. What may at one time have been an idealistic radicalism demanding the dismantling of an unjust status quo and its replacement with something better has over a few generations morphed into a nihilistic vandalism aiming to tear down anything positive with no other end in mind. The “hatred of the good for being good”, Ayn Rand’s definition of envy, is a useful measure for seeing this mindset in action – examine who and what leftists exalt, and what and who they revile, and this nihilistic opposition to the philosophic good becomes plain to see.
Yes, leftists are evil – this is not insanity, it’s a morally wrong choice they make and a corrosive state of mind they willingly persist in and promote and enforce. Mr. Wright hits on the symptoms here, but doesn’t go all the way to the root of that evil.
About this part:
Point out any barbaric act by any Jihadist, and the Leftist will say two things: (1) Christians are just as bad, and therefore cannot make the moral judgement that Jihadists have done bad things…
Point number [1] might be confusing to you, like hearing a man over and over saying he can eat the Sun for lunch. It is so far removed from reality that their is no normal explanation for it. It is not the kind of lie one says in order to deceive someone, and certainly no one with an IQ number higher than his shoe size would deceive himself with such a comically unbelievable statement. What does it mean?
My summary of his view here is that this lie is meant to forestall the holocaust they imagine will take place if Christians are allowed to respond to Islamic threats as they intrinsically wish to do. (This worry about Christians’ purported Islamocidal tendencies would seem to contradict his argument that this leftist concern for minorities and tolerance and such is merely a facade, until you recognize this worry is motivated not by the left’s purported humanitarianism inspiring them to protect innocents from a violent intolerance being loosed from its chains but rather a consuming hatred and bigotry towards Christians that inspires them to imagine the possibility of such a thing in the first place.)
What struck me about this part was that he incidentally touches on the Big Lie tactic. Effective lies require some foundation in truth, which in this case is provided by the left’s narrative of ‘historical Christian barbarism’ – exaggerated to wholly inaccurate views of the Crusades, the Reconquista and Inquisition, witch burnings, etc. – long promoted to undermine the prestige of Christianity as a rival social force to the totalitarian collectivism with which leftists seek to replace it. The Big Lie here is indeed not meant to deceive, or to be believed. It is meant to shame their opponents into silence with a moral equivalence so astonishing that it disarms them, or at the very least bogs them down in trying to untie the knots of the dishonest narrative and establish credibility by separating modern Christianity from whatever happened in the past, wasting their time and patience and energy on unproductive efforts that do nothing to repel the leftist attack, let alone advance the cause of the good.