Bookworm's blog posts often get much longer than is customary for our medium. As is the case with anybody whose output in whatever they do is prolific, some of these extended essays are better than others.
(And I guess I should note that I've had a real problem with her taking a genuine shine to Donald Trump, going beyond applauding his good moves, which any conservative does, and saying that Trump's brashness and unfiltered mouth have actually grown on her. That said, I still find her a voice in our national
scream fest conversation that merits heeding on many things. She's one of those pundits whose fondness for the Very Stable genius has not completely skewed her judgement.)
A couple of days, she wrote
a post that is downright important.
Have you ever wondered why lefties would champion Muslims? What's up with Linda Sarsour leading the Women's March, for instance?
So has she:
One of the fascinating things about the world in which we live is the alliance between Leftists and Muslims. At first glance, it seems as if they have nothing in common. Leftists tout women’s rights; Muslims tout women’s burqas. Leftists tout LGBTQ rights; Muslims tout homosexual hangings. Leftists purport to hate slavery; Muslims have slavery as a core doctrine. Leftists hate rape; Muslims have rape as another core doctrine.
Given these profound differences, one way to account for the Leftist/Muslim alliance today is to look to the old Arab adage stating “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” (Or, as Aristotle said first, “a common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.”) Both the Left and Islam are united in a fight against Western civilization. And significantly, the thing they are fighting against most fiercely is what lies at the core of Western civilization: The value of the individual.
Here’s the thing: Despite their superficial differences, Leftists and Muslims have something very profound in common, which is that both are completely totalitarian ideologies. Each envisions complete control over all people around the world. Individualism is anathema to them. It is this common vision that binds them in the short term. In the long term, of course, each assumes that its ideology will be victorious and that, like the Borg, the winning ideology (whether Islam or Leftism) will either assimilate or destroy the losing ideology (whether Leftism or Islam).
Oh, I almost forgot. There’s another thing that binds them and that is their abiding hatred for Jews. (They hate other religions too, don’t get me wrong, as we can see from the murderous purge of Christians across the Muslim world as well as the
softer effort to purge Christians in America. But there’s something about the Jews….)
I have a theory about this Jew hatred. Judaism was the first ideology to identify individual worth, something that Jews wrote down in the Bible and that Christianity, which is Judaism’s ideological progeny, brought to the greater world. From first to last– that is, from God creating man in his own image to Christ recognizing the worth of each individual — the Judeo-Christian tradition is about the individual.
The Judeo-Christian belief system is about freedom of conscience, not mindless subordination to a tyrannical God, set of gods, or earthly dictator. It’s about moral values, not frantically thrashing about to find some way to appease mortal or immortal despots, whether with human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, or meaningless rituals divorced from morality and human worth. It’s also about recognizing God in others, whether in the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, both of which require that we treat other humans with the dignity we want for ourselves.
Everything the Bible demands is antithetical to both Leftism and Islam. Those faiths (for Leftism is a faith) divide the world into those with power and those without. They see people as either masters or slaves. They see individuals as beings who have no free will but, instead, as beings to be endlessly manipulated for some greater good that always, somehow, coincides perfectly with the masters’ needs.
For those in thrall to totalitarian ideologies, there is no enemy greater than the man who says, “I am me” — not “I am us,” or “We are you,” or “I am you,” or “Tell me what to do,” but “I am me. I am a person created in God’s image. I have free will. I have a moral compass that it is imperative upon me to follow because of my personal relationship with God, to whom I am ultimately answerable.” In a totalitarian world, the person who insists on his individualism and moral worth is the ultimate threat.
She then goes on to explore why the object of this religious hatred that is shared by leftists and Muslims is Judaism and not Christianity. It's interesting, and part of what she concludes is that Jews who go leftist and secular can be some of the worst haters of individual sovereignty.
This Bookworm post resonates with
another essay I read this morning, by Deana Chadwell at
The American Thinker, entitled "The Left vs. Life in General." Chadwell says that the "triune purpose for America" absolutely drives Leftists up the wall.
God not only gave us each life, but He also gave us free will –- liberty. It is necessary that we have untrammeled volition so that we can be free to choose Him. It is also necessary so that we can each become “all [we] can become,” as Harrison Bergeron so tragically declared in the Kurt Vonnegut story. Along with life and liberty, God has given each of us amazing gifts, and freedom is necessary for us to realize our potential.
We know from Thomas Maslow’s work that we can’t reach our inbred capabilities -– he called it self-realization –- until our basic animal necessities are met. If we’re starving, or trying to sleep out in the cold, or fighting off an illness, we can’t be painting masterpieces. We have many rock-bottom needs in order to just survive at an animal level, but a society must be able to provide the structure for us to rise above that or our humanity dies. It isn’t enough for our society to give us food, clothing, and shelter –- prisons do that. Human beings are designed to hunt for happiness.
Happiness and the pursuit thereof is the last of the triune purpose for America. But what is happiness? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago beautifully explained for us in his classic Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience. He defined happiness as the state of being when we are so involved in what we are doing that time evaporates –- it flows right past us and when we finally stop doing whatever we were engrossed in, we wonder where the time went. We’ve lost track of ourselves, of distractions and moved into a state of “optimal experience.”
After 20 years of following his subjects –- they each had a small meter with them that allowed them to record those moments when they were feeling happy –-Csikszentmihalyi discovered that in spite of all of us wanting the weekend to get here quickly, his subjects most often recorded happiness when they were working. Work –- meaningful work -- makes us happy. Not welfare. Not free stuff. Not rest. Not play. Work. People in Venezuela right now are not only lacking the basic necessities of survival, but they have no opportunity for fulfilling work.
Note that our American dream is not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness, which confirms what Csikszentmihalyi found. We want to go after it; we know it can’t just be handed to us. Some part of our souls needs the struggle. I don’t have to sit here and write this, but I want to; doing so pleases my innermost being. Our president doesn’t have to work. He could just be lolling around his gold-plated penthouse, but he’s working 20-hour days, struggling against horrifying odds, because it is in him to do so.
But the new left is not at all interested in our individual need for fulfillment. The left is not really even aware of the rest of us as human. We are merely the eggs for their omelet and an omelet doesn’t present each egg separately –- they’re all whipped up together, one indistinguishable from the rest, and all of them very dead.
These “Justice Democrats” are after beating us all into an homogenized, manageable mass all in the name of equality -– which is ridiculous on its face since none of us is like the other -– and these folks like to tout “social justice” and at the same time encourage every kind of immorality and injustice imaginable. They appear to be on the side of pedophilia, of human trafficking, of terrorism. They appear to be playing fast and loose with immigration and campaign finance laws. They are willing to falsify votes in a dozen different ways and they don’t mind being complicit in America’s slavery 2.0 -- illegal immigration. Immorality is their second god.
But their biggest idol is the environment -- Mother Earth, Gaia -- their mighty goddess, a goddess so fragile that she’ll self-combust if cattle don’t stop digesting and they believe that all of us –- not them -- but all of us should be sacrificed at its altar. Life be damned. Liberty be damned. The pursuit of happiness has no place in this budding dystopia. Earth only has room for the power-hungry to wallow in their useless, miserable might.
The totalitarian impulse ultimately leads to madness, of course, because the power-hungry totalitarian wants to exempt herself from the obliteration of individual sovereignty. You have to have that in order to enjoy the dictatorial perch from which you control the rest of humanity. But someone is always going to be hot to gobble up your sovereignty and replace you on that perch. Hence,
this kind of eat-their-own development:
Saira Rao, a "Justice Democrat" who ran for office in Colorado (and lost), has been active in supporting Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) following an outcry over clearly anti-Semitic statements Omar made last week at an event for progressive activists. Tuesday night, she weighed in on the debate over whether House Democrats should adopt a measure condemning anti-Semitism by comparing Pelosi to infamous white supremacist David Duke.
"Iam going to unfollow anyone who posts anything positive about Nancy Pelosi," Rao tweeted. "Nancy Pelosi is a white feminist. White feminists are white supremacists. Nancy Pelosi is a white supremacist. And if you idolize Nancy Pelosi, you may as well declare allegiance to David Duke."
So to sign up for the Leftist project is to seal one's fate: eventually getting trampled into dust.
