With a h/t to Balloon Juice, Victor Davis Hanson sums up the right's presumptions of leftist thinking around the globe and within the United States about as well as anyone from the right can in The Global Throng. As usual, it's a compelling and comprehensive essay and more than accomplishes everything it sets out to do. But the question it leaves me with is why?
Maybe I'm doomed by one too many college psychology courses back in the day to escape asking that question whenever I am confronted with disparate human thought or endeavor. But even now as a business marketer, what compels people is almost always as, if not more important to me than a specific direction in which people are finally compelled. If I know why people do things or choose certain paths, I at least have a chance of influencing what it is they do, or where it is they go. If I don't have a hint to the always elusive answer for why, I am pretty much left to casting about investing good time and money in an initiative or cause for which I can never be relatively sure of success. That holds significant potential for fiscal disaster in business - it can lead to logjam, bad policy or political suicide in politics.
I've no intention of doing the type of structured analysis which might help me draw higher confidence conclusions as to the why of the left. I'll leave that to better funded right leaning think tanks and professional pundits who, in my opinion, perhaps spend too little in that effort and more and more in simply screeding out our own statements of position: most of those now nearly always accompanied by purportedly sound judgments of the lunar-modulated left and their sometimes seemingly astrologically formulated thinking. See, I can barely keep from doing the entertainment thing myself?
Don't get me wrong. I am not saying I disagree with most conservative thinking, by and large I absolutely do agree with it; though perhaps I'm somewhat more socially moderate or accepting than some of my more radical cohorts on certain issues. But the position I contend here is that we are not really any better at understanding the whys of the left than they are at understanding ours. So it isn't like we really occupy some more noble ground in this fight even if we do honestly feel so entitled because we believe we're objectively if not always politically correct. In my opinion, the above, more than anything, even our positions, helps explain the extreme fractionation in politics today. Praise them as entertainers and exceptional exhalers of our common cause, but Rush and Sean by no means posit real solutions for a body politic bound by our founders creed to the resolution of political disagreement through a common discourse and understanding.
I smile and enjoy right thinking talk as much as the next conservative. One of the more bombastic, Mark Levin, may well be my current favorite. But sometimes the shouting simply grows to become enough. There is no resolution of anything in shouting. The more learned, like a Levin, know that; but they are, after all, in this context mostly just entertainment. Also, I am by no means a Christyesque conservative - assuming that isn't an oxymoron. I don't want to compromise my ideas, ideals and values; I simply want to get to a place where they become so clearly understood and accepted by so many they become the norm. Is that so much to ask? Perhaps. But shouting simply will not get me there.
To be fair, I'm certain there are many, likely even VDH himself who have explored and written upon this subject - and better and more extensively than I can or ever will. But this is my blog - my thoughts, and to be fair to me, I can only read so much, as politics and punditry isn't my life. Understanding the Left and writing about it isn't my business: it's really more of a hobby. I can afford to play a bit loosely with the writing, and as regards understanding them, I can and will simply guess. I believe it's called speculation by the growing punditocracy.
I see left versus right as the contrast between the thinker and the doer, the theoretical dialogist versus a more practical dramatist who lives for ultimate action much more than simply the thought. It's nothing more than a classic confrontation between abstract versus concrete thinking, after all. Look at the left pertinent to this discussion. They are actors of both state and theater and seem more at home in the more vague world of thought than they do in the real world of action. They might make action movies, but even there the more liberal of the bunch are always more prone to chick flicks, if you will. They want to think good things and the doing is simply the by rote activity that sprawls from all that noble scripting and staging be it in politics or art.
But just as in a movie and even more so in the real world, scripting or theorizing never survives the hard reality of action intact. Look at Iraq for example. The left expected what? A pre-screened audience tested war for heaven's sake. The minute the action didn't match the script, obviously some great and non-theatrical tragedy had occurred. That isn't true. The planners and plotters of that war took into account many variables - they produced a script. Could it have been better? We can't know that because that question is purely theoretical with no laboratory to prove or disprove it. Maybe that's why the left is drawn to it so. But the more realistic thinking of the right knew that the script simply wouldn't hold up because, frankly, it never does.
In Hollywood when a movie goes wrong people lose money. In Washington when a war goes unexpectedly, and what war hasn't? people lose their lives. It's a tragedy, for sure. But unexpected? hardly. Only the Left didn't anticipate it because they so infrequently move beyond the world of thought to the one of action. They don't like real blood on their cutting room floor. With thinking one might rightfully define as contextually immature they have never gotten to a point of understanding that this damnable spinning world, so seemingly consistent in its spinning, really never stays on any script besides its own, nor does it pay attention to any humanly demanded cue.
Reality has a life and a drama all its own. And while the statecrafters and stagecrafters of the left might think they somehow create it, they don't. They create illusion, pure and simple because their preferred reality is the amorphous realm of thought as opposed to the more concrete and real world of action. Consequently the political stagecrafters of a liberal Europe create a mostly unrealizable utopia while the more purely theatrical dream crafters of the Hollywood elite create ... entertainment. And it can be wonderful and fun for those purposes. But it hardly serves to predict genuine outcomes of any significant earthly endeavor, let alone something as complex and confounding as a war, or as difficult as globalization.
In summary, the left prefers to think it, perfectly so - and over plot the course at that; while the right lives in the doing, warts and all, generally for no better reason than some things simply seem to beg the doing. And as the context of our world changed so dramatically post 9-11 the vast majority of people discovered within themselves a sense of realism aka common sense that tells them it is now more a time for the doing than it is one for over-thinking. And until that mass perceived sense of need for action and immediacy changes through time or event I see no other short term outcome than for the political star of the right to continue to rise. Now if we could only stop screaming about it so much and get the left to understand it, it might just become a reasonably perfect and surely a quieter world while we continue along the difficult path of simply trying to make it a better one.
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