Michael Shellenberger, who to his complete and total credit has published damning takedowns of the left’s inherent hypocrisy and corruption in works such as San Fransicko, published an article on Wednesday titled “Progressives Will Be Horrified When They Wake Up To What They’ve Done.”
The subheadline of that piece said, “The sterilization of children, the killing of mentally ill addicts, the decimation of education, and more, will haunt the Left.”
Many conservatives think this way, that our poor, misguided leftist friends, who may or may not have endorsed the aforementioned barbarities with the best of intentions, merely require the right revelation, the right sequence of carefully constructed arguments and cold, hard facts, to abandon the false god of leftism. These conservatives cling to the idea that even hardcore leftists can be reasoned with, that the marketplace of ideas merely has to work its magic to convert these wayward sheep back to the old civility of yore.
The thing is, the left won’t wake up. There will be no mass conversion event when all the trans activists, corrupt bureaucrats, and Antifa thugs suddenly snap out of it and rejoin the more sane ranks of American society.
That’s not how pathological leftism works, and to believe that it does is a dangerous fantasy. Concepts like remorse and atonement do not exist in the leftist mindset. For themselves, at least. Remorse and atonement are instead reserved for the real oppressors, namely straight white men and the capitalist system they propagate.
In reality, leftists possess an entire toolbox of methods to avoid any sort of reckoning. They’ll aggressively downplay previous abuses and assure the public that, though previous iterations of wokeness may have gotten a bit out of hand, they merely want “health care” and spout some version of “real socialism has never been tried.” This is already the favorite tactic of the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
They’ll conveniently forget any of it ever happened, and they’ll aggressively gaslight Americans into believing that it never happened, too. Through their control over institutions like the media and academia, they can memory-hole practically whatever they want, just as they’ve already done with scandals like Russiagate and with the worst excesses of the Covid era.
Finally, they’ll convince themselves that rather than a string of necessary evils required to defeat the reviled conservative oppressors, their atrocities were a positive good — finally liberating America and ushering in an age of left-wing utopia.
The citizens of the former Soviet Union didn’t “wake up” to all the horrors of their regime. They still deny the Holodomor, the abortion rate remains extremely high, and the government has offered little in the way of an acknowledgment or apology for the brutal gulag system. The Soviet Union didn’t fall because the Soviet citizenry woke up one day and suddenly regretted all the terrible things that had been committed in the name of the communist regime. They finally turned against the Soviet system once its intrusiveness and incompetence became too inconvenient in daily life, but there was no grand self-reflection. You can look at every communist, socialist, or “democratic socialist” regime of the last century, and you’ll see this exact same pattern.
Like the Soviets, some (emphasis on some) of the leftists of today will only begin to turn against leftism (if at all) once it starts to negatively affect them personally, but they’ll never grapple with the historic horrors wrought by their movement. Because the horror is the point.
All of the pain and misery inflicted by leftists, to them, is righteous punishment for a decadent and corrupt capitalist system, and any collateral damage inflicted on normal people is either a) excusable on the grounds that it was necessary to bring down the system as a whole or b) actually the fault of the capitalist system that they’re trying to bring down. Junkies aren’t becoming ever more addicted to drugs because they loosen drug laws and hand out free needles; it’s because the oppressive capitalist hierarchy causes such psychological trauma on the proletariat that they have to turn to hard drugs just to cope. Once the leftist utopia is achieved, people will only use hard drugs for fun, and responsibly.
Many more leftists can’t, or won’t, turn their backs on their twisted ideology. It brings far too many rewards. It allows them to inflict their own neuroses on others, or it fills their bank accounts far too effectively to just abandon. In short, it gives them what they’ve always wanted and feel that they deserve: power over others.
If you think AOC, Gavin Newsom, Anthony Fauci, or any of the millions of deranged followers who habitually call for the death or imprisonment of their political enemies will ever sit in a congressional hearing or on TV and sincerely recant their previously held dogmas, then their lies work all too well on you.
It may well haunt them at the ballot box for the next few election cycles, but if you’ve been paying attention for more than a few seconds, you’ll well know that in politics memories run short as a rule. Especially when one party is filling the country with foreigners who don’t know or care about that side’s previous crimes and when that party utilizes the ever-bloated largesse of the government to hand out money and favors to its supporters. The current polling on the midterms seems to indicate that large portions of the electorate have not woken up to the left’s misdeeds, so why should we expect the true believers to wake up?
The hard truth is that many leftists are too far gone. They’ll never awake from the madness that has possessed them. They’ll lie, equivocate, and simply ignore all the relevant facts rather than own up to their own disastrous mistakes. They have to be crushed and driven out of public life, and their poisonous ideology must be quarantined from the general populace. Because leftism is a disease, of the mind and the heart.
