2 September, 2013

Why did liberals stop being patriotic?

Stalin fought WWII as "The Great Patriotic War"; JFK told people to ask what you could do for your country; The Communist Woody Guthrie wrote "This land is your land". TR rejoiced in battleships and seized slices of the old Spanish empire for America. Friedrich Engels (of Marx & Engels) was a furious German patriot who wanted Germany to seize neighbouring lands. And in Australia Communist poet John Manifold wrote a memorial to an heroic Australian soldier. .... I could go on.

The Left of today, however, are almost unrecognizable as the heirs of the historic Left. They still hate rich people and business and want to control everybody but these days they seem to have a visceral hatred of their own country. America can do nothing right. Far Leftists even condemn Obama.

So why? It's simple. Up until the great postwar surge in affluence, Leftists always saw themselves as the champions of the working class. Working class people up until that time did have often difficult lives, with putting bread on the table a real challenge at times. Things stayed that way for hundreds of years. And Leftists had a solution to all that: Government control of the means of production, socialism, communism.

But the gradual unwinding of the Soviet myth made their solution sound like the crap it was -- while capitalism steadily made almost everyone middle class by the standards of the past. Capitalism rescued the workers and the workers thoroughly enjoyed it. The workers came to live a life not greatly different from the hated middle class.

Leftists had always seen the working class as the real people -- as the backbone of the nation. Eulogizing the nation was to eulogize the working class. The middle and upper classes were seen as being simply parasites on the work of the working class.

So the transformation of the working class left the Left with nothing in the country to admire. Even the workers are complacent and doing well. And now they often vote Republican.

There is still the (non-working and welfare dependent) underclass, of course, but even Leftists find it had to see anything to idealize or hope for in them. Leftists who advocate busing, for instance, make sure that their own kids don't get bused. But the existence of the underclass is still handy. It has the advantage that it enables the old Leftist warcry of "poverty" still to ring out as an explanation of all social ills. It rings out more as a tic than as an attempt at thought but it still fills the speaker with a warm feeling of virtue.

So Leftist hatred now extends to the working class as well as the middle and upper classes. EVERYBODY is complacent, they wail. So they now hate us all and do their best to impose destructive policies (such as Obamacare and Greenie regulations) on the whole country.



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