{"id":2184,"date":"2020-07-25T12:28:30","date_gmt":"2020-07-25T16:28:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=2184"},"modified":"2020-07-25T12:28:30","modified_gmt":"2020-07-25T16:28:30","slug":"lessons-for-politics-from-our-childhood-on-fear-bullying-and-the-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2020\/07\/lessons-for-politics-from-our-childhood-on-fear-bullying-and-the-left.html","title":{"rendered":"Lessons for Politics from our Childhood: On Fear, Bullying, and the Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fear.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

The most primal and universal of emotions, it is preposterous to think that there are any of us who are immune to it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s at least as preposterous to think that politics, <\/em>the activity of adjusting and continually readjusting human institutions so as to facilitate peaceful co-existence between a society\u2019s members, can somehow lay beyond fear\u2019s reach.<\/p>\n

As Thomas Hobbes correctly recognized, politics are fundamentally grounded upon fear, the fear of violence, specifically the violent death that likely awaits human beings where there is no government.<\/p>\n

Yet, particularly once people become adults, they do indeed think, or at least act and speak as if they think, that fear in no way accounts for their conduct.\u00a0 And nowhere is this more the case than within the context of contemporary political discourse.<\/p>\n

Unquestionably, the rampant hypocrisy, flagrant contradictions, glaring inconsistencies, and blatant double standards that are the daily fare of the left, though admittedly necessary for the advancement of their material, ideological, and electoral interests, are best accounted for in terms of the advancement of their psychological <\/em>interests.<\/p>\n

This, I believe, is key.\u00a0 When a person\u2019s incoherence proves intractable, and when intellectual and moral justifications collapse before they even take flight, it is to the psyches of those making them that our desire for intelligibility drives us.<\/p>\n

Simply put, behind the moral exhibitionism (and all of the ways in which this has expressed itself), those on the left (including the so-called \u201ccenter<\/em>-left\u201d) are at bottom motivated to do what they do because of their raw fears.<\/p>\n

That this is true is gotten readily enough once we decide to view the world\u2014i.e. people, including ourselves\u2014as we viewed it when we were children and adolescents, before we permitted ourselves to be deluded by the seductive rhetoric and virtue-signaling of the actors in the arena we call \u201cpolitics.\u201d<\/p>\n

As children, we learn that some of our peers\u2014bullies\u2014succeed in the pursuit of their ends by way of subjecting other kids to violence (including threats of violence).\u00a0\u00a0 We also learn of some other things: We learn either that most of those kids who are not directly or personally victimized by the bully implicitly endorse the bullying by acquiescing, via silence, in the suffering of the bully\u2019s victims. \u00a0Or they may assist the bully by allying with him, by going along-to-get along, for fear of becoming one of the bully\u2019s victims themselves.<\/p>\n

Bullies, we learn early on, are typically treated with infinitely more sympathy than is meted out to his victims, and certainly much more so than is elicited from the quieter and \u201cnerdier\u201d kids.<\/p>\n

The reason for all of this kids have no difficulty discerning:\u00a0 It is fear.<\/p>\n

Bullies provoke, and have every intention of provoking, fear.\u00a0 They set out to dominate their environment through fear.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s left, as recent events as clearly as any have verified with all of the force of a body blow, is comprised of bullies.\u00a0 The left seeks to dominate its <\/em>environment\u2014Western civilization generally, America specifically\u2014through the perpetual threat of violence.<\/p>\n

The violence needn\u2019t always be overt (although it increasingly is).\u00a0 The so-called \u201cCancel Culture\u201d itself is an inherently coercive phenomenon, for by design it exists to visit upon its targets, not a literal, physical death, necessarily, but certainly a social one.<\/p>\n

Persuasion or coercion: Outside of disengagement, these are our only two alternatives.\u00a0 Coercion, though, is a species of violence.\u00a0 The left, by and large, has made it abundantly clear as to the alternative to which they most sympathize.<\/p>\n

Can there be any question that many who identify, even moderately, with the left do so largely from fear?\u00a0 Conservatives and libertarians concede this whenever they remark about how \u201cthe Revolution eventually eats its own,\u201d or when they observe that \u201cno one is safe from the Cancel Culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

The left is an ever-tenuous coalition of demographic collectives united by their ideological rhetoric, their use of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for delivery on their laundry list of grievances, and\u2014as I have argued in past articles\u2014fear<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The arrogance; hyper-emotionality; ignorance; and immunity to facts, logic, and reason\u2014these are all the function of fear, the fear of reckoning with the world as it truly is, including their own subconscious (or maybe not so subconscious) fears.<\/p>\n

Neither the Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters nor anyone else, least of all members of the black and white middle and upper classes who routinely signal their \u201cWokeness\u201d by decrying \u201cpolice brutality\u201d and \u201csystemic racism,\u201d genuinely fear either the police or any other white \u201coppressors,\u201d for the facts, which are all but self-evident to honest observers, spare not a moment to put these fictions out to pasture.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s relatively rare for people to face that which they truly <\/em>fear.\u00a0 Real fear is felt <\/em>throughout a person\u2019s body.\u00a0 <\/em>The object that provokes that <\/em>experience is one that most (but definitely not all) people would prefer not to think about at all, much less reckon with in person.<\/p>\n

So, rather than confront one\u2019s worst nightmare, and rather, then, to feel like a coward, a certain type of person\u2014like the kind of leftist to which we\u2019re referring\u2014would prefer to distract him or herself<\/em> by conjuring up the proverbial windmill, a strawman, a bogeyman against which to rail.<\/p>\n

Like any other bully, the leftist targets those whom he or she <\/em>perceives as being weaker than him or herself. <\/em><\/p>\n

Consider:<\/p>\n

If the unjust killing of blacks really mattered to those shouting from the rooftops that \u201cBlack Lives Matter,\u201d then we should expect for these blacks, whites, and others to make this noise in precisely those neighborhoods where blacks, including women and children<\/em>, are most victimized: black <\/em>neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

Specifically, the black lower class and underclass communities, the \u2018Hood<\/em>,\u2019 should be the epicenter of all BLM rallies and ruckus.<\/p>\n

However, this is a sight that we never see.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 It\u2019s not just because the astronomical and often ruthless nature of black criminality and violence \u201cdoesn\u2019t fit the narrative,\u201d as more sane commentators correctly note.\u00a0 It\u2019s also, and most fundamentally, because these self-styled crusaders for \u201cblack lives\u201d fear\u2014they dread\u2014<\/em>those black lives that are disproportionately responsible for murder and mayhem in America, and almost exclusively responsible for the maiming and murder of other black men, women, and, yes, children.<\/p>\n

Black and white elites, those politicians, academics, pundits, athletes, and entertainers who are fond of tweeting the need to support \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d\u2014you know, those who seek to get as far away from the Ghetto as soon as they have the opportunity to do so\u2014never so much as mention the black gangbangers and other criminals who routinely prey upon the otherwise law-abiding black inhabitants in their communities.\u00a0 Much less would these frauds ever even dream of confronting the predators.<\/p>\n

But if BLM, Antifa, and their multiracial, middle-class and elite supporters did not <\/em>fear black criminals like it claims <\/em>to fear blue officers, and if they were really concerned about the unjust victimization of blacks, then we should expect to see them getting into the faces of Bloods, Crips, and other black gangbangers like they get into the faces of police officers.<\/p>\n

The very thought is laughable.\u00a0 We know why, and, in the last analysis, it has nothing to at all to do with \u201cthe Narrative.\u201d Let\u2019s keep it real: These Social Justice Warriors are painfully aware of the stone cold fact that, if they were lucky<\/em>, they would have their asses turned inside out and handed to them before they even knew what hit them. If they weren\u2019t so lucky, then, well, they may not ever know what hit them\u2014or know anything else ever again.<\/p>\n

Unlike the police, who BLM and company, despite their lies to the contrary, accept as a given will exercise considerable restraint, the black gangbanger, they are equally aware, will show no mercy.<\/p>\n

Thus, they distract themselves from the object of their real fear and decide instead to shadow box against a fake enemy.<\/p>\n

It is as well the brown <\/em>gangbanger, the Hispanic outlaw, that the BLM crowd fears, for if black lives mattered as much to the latter as it claims, then we\u2019d expect to see it enter the Barrio, for many of said barrios in places like Los Angeles, say, have become so at the cost of the ejection, the bloody<\/em> ejection, of blacks.\u00a0 Such is the rapidity and ruthless efficiency with which Hispanic gang members have divested once black areas of their original inhabitants that even such dubious, leftist organizations as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) referred to their efforts as \u201cethnic cleansing.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the ADL, its leaders too are motivated by fear, but not fear of the \u201cwhite supremacists\u201d\u2014i.e. the conservative Christians and Jews<\/em> upon whom they focus\u2014but the increasing number of black and Muslim purveyors of violence against Jews upon whom they choose not <\/em>to focus. \u00a0Again, this is because the white conservatives, they realize, do not pose any kind of threat to them, while those like, say, the Black Israelites and others who are neither white nor conservative won\u2019t be in the slightest deterred from beating and killing them by the charge of anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

We could continue, and we will, in future essays.<\/p>\n

Bullies, we learned as kids, will not bully those against whom bullying does not work.\u00a0 It won\u2019t work against other bullies.<\/p>\n

There is, though, another lesson from our childhood that it is crucial for conservatives to recall: On occasion, at least, some kids, not necessarily bullies themselves, will <\/em>stand up to bullies and back them down.<\/p>\n

This has happened all throughout the country since the BLM\/Antifa riots erupted, and it happened in the midst of those riots as patriots from coast-to-coast and at the grassroots-level resolved to exercise their rights to assembly and arms to immunize their communities against the ravages of the Mob.<\/p>\n

And it is happening now as Americans set an all-time high in the month of June for gun sales. Minus modern technology and the small town demonstrations of predominantly \u201cKarens\u201d atoning for their \u201cWhite Privilege,\u201d suburban and rural America would never have even known of \u201cthe civil unrest\u201d that rattled cities around the country.\u00a0 But its residents do <\/em>know.\u00a0 And no political-racial orthodoxy is going to prevent them from taking care of business if the Woken so much as think about spreading their nonsense beyond their own safe places.<\/p>\n

The Social Justice Warriors know this. <\/em>\u00a0Again, this fear, the same fear of dying a violent death that haunts most people, explains why they select the targets that they do.<\/p>\n

Millions of Americans (as can be seen just in the gun sales alone) are now recalling the lessons of their childhood and connecting them to contemporary politics. More conservative commentators need to do the same.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fear.\u00a0 The most primal and universal of emotions, it is preposterous to think that there are any of us who are immune to it. 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