Ouch. Double Ouch.

This is a first: I link to a left-wing feminist blogger and want to praise her. See this, and do read the comments. Illuminating, to put it mildly.

The left's hysterical hate at Sarah Palin is, as the eponymous Dr. Violet Socks states, more reflective of their outright fear of her. Sarah Palin, according to the mainstream left that populates the blogosphere, may not even exist as an archetype, let alone a real person. It strikes at the very core of much of what passes for thought on the left, a deadly and outrageous challenge to the political orthodoxy of the left, one that justifies doing anything to stop it.

Besides, I know for a fact that the feminists spreading the lies about Palin knew they were spreading lies. Not to tell tales out of school, but: they knew. They were supplied with the correct information, and they chose to lie anyway. Why?

Was it just about electing Obama? Were feminists simply willing to commit any slander necessary to elect the Chosen One? That's a likely explanation, but here again: we're talking about feminists. Feminists doing this — slandering a woman, and doing so in unmistakably sexist terms. After all, caricaturing Palin as a purity queen (Bible Spice, Sexy Puritan) is just the flip side of caricaturing her as a porn queen. As I've said before, it's like the NAACP sponsoring a lynching. The mind boggles.

Indeed.

What I think we are seeing, to a certain extent, is the incoherent rage of the betrayed. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and the conversion of China to a state-supported (and monitored!) capitalism meant that the dream was dead, the wonderful, narcotic opium dream of the modern left was shown to be so completely divorced from reality that even the most true believer cannot keep up the facade.

The left, in all of its manifestations, is sick, if not clinically insane. The way Sarah Palin has been treated reminds me of nothing less than school-yard bullying raised to an art form, totally divorced from any sort of reality, the result of incoherent rage at the betrayal of the idea of a just, egalitarian society where at the end of the day the Party Faithful would be rewarded, striking out with a barely controlled destructive pettiness that unmasks the brute and bully behind the facade.

Merleau-Ponty had it right in his 1947 work on Communism: Humanisme et terreur, essai sur le problème communiste (1947).

In that work - highly recommended, as is Merleau-Ponty in general - he concludes with this line, which needs to be explained:

Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history, and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there remain only dreams and adventures.

Here he means this as the way that Marxism understands itself: by rejecting Marxism, you renounce the claims of Marxism as the only true political philosphy, and that makes you the class enemy.

Hence the vitriol aimed at Sarah Palin: she is simply the class enemy, the one who must be hated, the one who, for those on the left, must be destroyed, removed from all memory, expunged for the ages.

Humanism and Terror indeed.