XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, can.politics, alt.politics.liberalism
XPost: alt.politics.democrats, alt.politics.usa.republican
Why the Left Is Consumed With Hate
Lacking worthy menaces to fight, it is driven to find a replacement for racism. Failing this, what is left?
Even before President Trump's election, hatred had begun to emerge on the American left-counterintuitively, as an assertion of guilelessness and moral superiority. At the Women's March in Washington the weekend after Mr. Trump's inauguration, the pop star Madonna said, "I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House." Here hatred was a vanity, a braggadocio meant to signal her innocence of the sort of evil that, in her mind, the White House represented. (She later said the comment was "taken wildly out of context.")
For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self- congratulatory lifestyle. "America was never that great," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said. For radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of identity, a display of racial pride.
For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left-Rep. Maxine Waters comes to mind-are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself.
How did the American left-conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world-become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. That acceptance changed America forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy.
The genius of the left in the '60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. Thus the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. This is how the left put itself in charge of America's moral legitimacy. The left, not the right-not conservatism-would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.
This bestowed enormous political and cultural power on the American left, and led to the greatest array of government-sponsored social programs in history-at an expense, by some estimates, of more than $22 trillion. But for the left to wield this power, there had to be a great menace to fight against-a tenacious menace that kept America uncertain of its legitimacy, afraid for its good name.
This amounted to a formula for power: The greater the menace to the nation's moral legitimacy, the more power redounded to the left. And the '60s handed the left a laundry list of menaces to be defeated. If racism was necessarily at the top of the list, it was quickly followed by a litany of bigotries ending in "ism" and "phobia."
The left had important achievements. It did rescue America from an unsustainable moral illegitimacy. It also established the great menace of racism as America's most intolerable disgrace. But the left's success has plunged it into its greatest crisis since the '60s. The Achilles' heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power. Think of all the things it can ask for in the name of fighting menaces like "systemic racism" and "structural inequality." But what happens when the evils that menace us begin to fade, and then keep fading?
It is undeniable that America has achieved since the '60s one of the greatest moral evolutions ever. That is a profound problem for the left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left's unspoken terror is that racism is no longer menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left today-the source of its angst and hatefulness-is its own encroaching obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of racial menace.
A single white-on-black shooting in Ferguson, Mo., four years ago resulted in a prolonged media blitz and the involvement of the president of the United States. In that same four-year period, thousands of black-on-black shootings took place in Chicago, hometown of the then-president, yet they inspired very little media coverage and no serious presidential commentary.
White-on-black shootings evoke America's history of racism and so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community. They evoke only despair. And the left gets power from fighting white evil, not black despair.
Today's left lacks worthy menaces to fight. It is driven to find a replacement for racism, some sweeping historical wrongdoing that morally empowers those who oppose it. (Climate change?) Failing this, only hatred is left.
Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing. So it has become a weapon of choice. The left has used hate to transform President Trump into a symbol of the new racism, not a flawed president but a systemic evil. And he must be opposed as one opposes racism, with a scorched- earth absolutism.
For Martin Luther King Jr., hatred was not necessary as a means to power. The actual details of oppression were enough. Power came to him because he rejected hate as a method of resisting menace. He called on blacks not to be defined by what menaced them. Today, because menace provides moral empowerment, blacks and their ostensible allies indulge in it. The menace of black victimization becomes the unarguable truth of the black identity. And here we are again, forever victims.
Yet the left is still stalked by obsolescence. There is simply not enough menace to service its demands for power. The voices that speak for the left have never been less convincing. It is hard for people to see the menace that drives millionaire football players to kneel before the flag. And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused-welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on.
For the American left today, the indulgence in hate is a death rattle.
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White Liberals More Likely To Have A Mental Health Condition
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/22/white-liberals-more-likely- have-mental-health-cond/
Apr 22, 2021 - Sixty-two percent of Whites who classify themselves as "very liberal" or "liberal" have been told by a doctor they have a mental health condition, as compared to 26% of conservatives and...
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White Liberals More Likely to Have Mental Health Problems... - Newsmax
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/white-liberals-mental-health- study/2021/04/20/id/1018293/
The Pew Study, Which The Washington Free Beacon notes was published last year but only gained attention in a recent article, showed that white liberals of all ages were more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health condition than moderates or conservatives, with the disparity particularly pronounced among those aged 18-29, according to evie...
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Study: Young White Liberals More Likely to Have Mental Health Problems
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/04/22/study-young-white-liberals- more-likely-to-have-mental-health-problems/
Apr 22, 2021 - When sex and age were factors, 56.3 percent of white women between the ages of 18 and 29 and who labeled themselves as "liberal," said they had been given a mental health diagnosis, compared to 27.3 percent of conservatives in the same categories and 28.4 percent of moderates:
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62% of "liberal" or very "liberal" whites have a mental health condition
https://www.independentsentinel.com/62-of-liberal-or-very-liberal-whites-have- a-mental-health-condition/
According to a Pew Research Center survey, 62% percent of Whites who classify themselves as "very liberal" or "liberal" has been told by a doctor they have a mental health condition. Only 26% of conservatives and 20% of moderates have been told they have such a condition, the study found.
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Pew Study: White Liberals Disproportionately Suffer From Mental Illness...
https://wibc.com/108211/pew-study-white-liberals-disproportionately-suffer- from-mental-illness/
White women, ages 18-29, who identified as liberal were given a mental health diagnosis from medical professionals at a rate of 56.3%, as compared to 28.4% in moderates and 27.3% in conservatives. Zach Goldberg, a Ph.D. candidate in political science, consolidated the study's info in a set of visuals and posted them to a thread on Twitter.
SCIENCE: White Libs More Likely To Have Mental Health Problems
https://freebeacon.com/politics/white-libs-mental-health/
Within this demographic, 34 percent of liberals reported having mental health problems, compared with 22 percent of moderates and 16 percent of conservatives. Zach Goldberg, the doctoral...
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White Liberals Twice as Likely to be Diagnosed with Psychological Problems
https://www.hennessysview.com/p/psychologic-disorders-white-liberals
Nearly 1 in 2 (45.9%) of white liberals have been diagnosed with mental health disorders. White liberals of all ages are more than twice as likely as conservatives of any age to suffer from mental health disorders. White liberals are almost twice as likely as non-white liberals to be diagnosed with mental health problems.
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6 Reasons Why Liberalism IS A Mental Disorder (LOL) - The Political Insider
https://thepoliticalinsider.com/6-reasons-why-liberalism-can-be-considered-a- mental-disorder/
In 2005, Michael Savage famously wrote a book titled, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, the subject of which is self-explanatory. Additionally, Dr. Lyle Rossiter, a board-certified clinical psychologist, wrote a book in which he diagnosed the ideology of the left as a tangible mental illness.
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Personality Traits, Mental Illness, and Ideology
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody- else/202103/personality-traits-mental-illness-and-ideology
specifically, surveys on the " big five " traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience have found that people identifying as politically...
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Study claims over 50% of liberal women under 30 have mental health...
https://theliberal.ie/study-claims-over-50-of-liberal-women-under-30-have- mental-health-issues-men-and-women-with-liberal-views-more-likely-to-be- mentally-unwell/
Study claims over 50% of liberal women under 30 have mental health issues, men and women with liberal views more likely to be mentally unwell April 24, 2021 - 12:01 Gerard Clarke Irish News
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