Stop Dreaming, Start Doubting

The Democrats' convention in Denver was the predictable orgy of self-congratulation, a celebration of "ideas" with no discernable substance, the coronation of the new Black Messiah, and basically an all-around kumbiyah feel-good circle-jerk. What it definitely was not was a celebration, on any level, of the ability of the individual to sail his own ship and determine his own destiny. It was, rather, a capitulation (as if any further capitulation were needed) to the notion that all good comes from society... from the collective... from government, and that individual liberties and initiative are to be viewed with suspicion at best, and more likely with alarm and suppression. The ideas that were glorified in the Democrats' equivalent of Maoist large-character posters were, far from representing "change", rehashes of the same old, dismally-failed garbage that has been cycling around for the last 80-plus years at least. And finally, the premise that the assembled delegates were superior in their judgement to all other Americans, and thus fit to rule, was relentlessly promoted, and without question.

All this was to be expected, of course, since this convention was fated to be, in essence, just like all other Democratic conventions and liberal pow-wows going back at least as far as the Reformation. Now, this is not to say that they did not have some valid points to make in opposition to the current administration, and to the Republicans in general. In fact, if anything their critique of the Busheviks remains on the mild side, probably because they know that they share in the culpability for many of this administration's misdeeds. Besides, to criticize the current administration too severely might start to call into question the legitimacy of the regime overall, and that could never be tolerated, so they have to continue to pull their punches. But in terms of overarching themes, none comes up so often as that of the liberal, socialist utopia, which has been under construction at least since the time of the Progressives (whose name has now been resurrected as a more palatable replacement for "liberals"). You can tell that you're listening to a utopian the minute words like "eliminate" start to fly around. We're not just going to do something to reduce, or ease, things like poverty -- we're going to eliminate it! We're also going to eliminate war, and disease, and "hate", and "unfairness", and "inequality", and the tired triad of "racism, sexism, and homophobia", and inequality of economic outcomes, and hopelessness... and, really, just about anything that any liberal finds bad, aversive, or annoying. This will all be done, of course, by increasing the power and scope of government, and accelerating the process of income redistribution, and turning children into wards of the public schools and their families into "cases" in the social welfare system, and taking away cars, and guns, and Big Macs, etc. etc. etc. So in exchange for the sacrifice of liberty, we get what are called "rights", and in exchange for freedom we get an absurdly narrow band of "choices" and "opportunities".

Now, all of this might have some appeal if it had not already been tried, time and time again, over the last 200-plus years, with a period of acceleration between World War I and circa 1990. And the last time I checked, every one of those utopian dreams had turned into a nightmare -- not for just a few, but for millions. The fact that even China, whose auto-genocide and self-destruction during the Mao era was unprecedented in history, is now capitalist in all but name, does not seem to impress these people. Neither does the fact that Russia, back when it was, along with a few appendages, the USSR, failed to economically dominate the rest of the world, but is now, as a post-communist state, threatening to do just that. It can be truly said that the only successful "communist" societies are only successful to the extent they behave in a non-communist fashion -- and that the same thing applies in the case of "socialism" of the hard-core type. But the problem with things like capitalism, and making money, is that they are more action- than idea-based, and hence have none of the romance -- the cachet -- of the more ideologically pure socialist utopias (alleged) of old. How does Russia's natural gas and oil dominance compare to the New Soviet Man, for example? And how do the Olympics compare to the zeal of the Red Guard? But it's funny how the pragmatists, and the people who understand human nature as it actually is and not as they would like it to be, typically get a better result. Utopian idealism leads to the Gulag and the killing fields -- this has been amply demonstrated to the satisfaction of anyone who is not an abject prisoner of ideas. The premise that human nature can be changed and perfected -- by persuasion (read: propaganda, i.e. public schooling and the media), and, failing that, by force -- has been proven false as often as the premise that altruism can be made man's most dominant motive. The premise that things like family, honor, race, religion and ethnicity are all atavistic holdovers from primitive times and can be easily eliminated as motivators -- that too has been shown to be both cruel and bankrupt. And yet these things are preached, over and over again, in venues like the Democratic convention. They are applauded by a rapt audience, looking for the next messiah to save them from the unwashed hordes of the less-enlightened -- and from themselves as well, I suspect. And we enter on another round of ideology, speculation, tinkering and meddling with all those things which make us most human, and, eventually, failure, after which the sad, sick cycle starts again. And again, this would not be as bad if the promoters of these views were impotent, i.e. if they did not have the means to attempt their implementation. Unfortunately, they have those means -- it's call massive, all-encompassing government, which grows every day closer to totalitarianism... and even that might be tolerated if the results were spectacularly good, but they aren't; they are, most often, spectacularly bad if not downright tragic.