Culture of Deception - Part IV

The Culture of Deception in modern politics has complex roots. It's actually quite simple, but the roots, of understanding where it comes from and why it has become the culture of the left,, are not so easily understood.

We've seen that Marxism and its illegitimate bastard children (Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism etc) are based on deception: the proletariat doesn't understand its own true nature (false consciousness); without a revolutionary vanguard the masses are too stupid and downtrodden to actually do anything; the revolutionary vanguard must deceive most of its followers and the general public about its true nature in order to take power, which is the only thing that matters.

The political situation in the US, of a mainstream party going off the deep end, is the culmination of decades of slow shifting and turning of political culture from a culture of consensus to a culture of deception. I am, perforce, simplifying all of this to make the point: after all, this is a blog and not a doctoral thesis (and I am increasingly seeing blogging as the first draft of oral history, just as the MSM sees itself as the first draft of history).

Deception has become part and parcel of the political process, but really only on one side of the equation. Why?

Let's take a look at a current issue: Alito.

If you take a look at this, you can see that the issues don't really matter to the left here, as manifested in the judicial activist groups that aim to block his nomination.

The key is that the goal of these activists is to make Alito look like SuperBork, but not based on his actual writings and decisions, but rather based on their need to defeat him for their own political interests. These groups have been spectacularly unsuccessful in the last several years, despite massive fundraising efforts, and they must now prove to their constituency that they can actually do today what they did to Bork in 1987.

I was in DC in 1987, and remember listening to the Bork hearings and following it in the Washington Post. Rarely have so many lies been told in pursuit of so little.

But this is just a smalll example of the Culture of Deception as practiced by the left.

Fundamentally, what the Democrats are doing doesn't make sense to the mainstream. In the middle of a war, call for defeat. In the middle of increasing prosperity and economic growth, call for tax increases. In the middle of the greatest freedoms ever experienced, call freedom threatened. When hard choices must be made - social security reform is a must, people, if you don't want the US to end up like Germany - there are instead insistences that everything is ok.

The Democrats have become, fundamentally, the party of negation.

It's because the Democrats that we all knew and loved aren't there any more. They died with Carter and Mondale. The New Democrats began with Bill Clinton: his point was to get elected, come hell or high water. Clinton's moral problems - which would have made him unelectable if he had been a Republican -  were well known to the party before nomination and election: it didn't matter. It didn't matter to the party if he couldn't control his base instincts (a sure indicator in my book for not being able to properly prioritize his life) because he did well in the polls: it didn't matter, in office, if he perjured himself, used the powers of his office to benefit his friends (TravelGate) and was otherwise fairly corrupt: he was a Democratic President, and for the party he could do no wrong. Clinton, the man, has been one of the worst presidents ever.

And this has been devestating for the body politic. On the one hand you've got political operatives who now know that anything goes. On the other hand you've got a populace that is increasingly appalled by politicians' behavior. These two mean nothing less than an increasing alienation between the political process and the populace as a whole.

Which is logical, given the culture of deception on the left. The left doesn't want to get elected and do good things in office: they want to get elected and never give the power back .

This is the core of Democratic rage against President Bush and the Republicans, the core of the hate that boils from people that compare him to Hitler, de-humanize him (McChimpy), who are reduced to abusive language when they talk - nay, rant - of politics. They were in power so long that they think that it is their fundamental right to execute it, to use it, to perpetuate their hold on society.