In a video I came across on July 8, Minnesota’s Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar makes it quite clear that her main concern is to “dismantle” the political/economic system of America, a system that prioritizes profit with no concern whatsoever for the intolerable gap between the rich and the poor. The desire to help the less affluent is of course a noble sentiment, a sentiment shared not only by those on the Left but by most “conservatives” who have no problem with programs rooted in such compassion. But what “progressives” refuse to acknowledge is that you cannot simply purchase that state of socio-economic parity so dear to their utopian hearts. The billions we have spent here in Canada on our Indigenous, many of whom continue to live lives of utter squalor, gives evidence to this indisputable fact.
The aforementioned N.Y. Times article by Robert Reich which suggests all people are “morally equal” is but one example of the sort of egalitarian nonsense that has come to infect our culture. It is an assertion which makes the term “morality” utterly meaningless. It is a symptom of the Left’s attempt to literally remove the Inner Life of Man from the historical narrative. It is an agenda, as I have mentioned repeatedly, entrusted to the dual Impostors of Relativism and Determinism. Its intended target is the thinking, autonomous Self, that endlessly diverse and ultimately indefinable phantom that refuses to conform to the arbitrary expectations of the Left.
The Enlightenment architects of our Liberal Democracies saw respect for the Rights of the Individual acting within the Rule of Law as the sine qua non of those democracies. When Omar cites her statistics of inequality, she is in fact categorizing economic entities rather than Thinking, Volitional Human Beings. It’s the superficial way in which Marx saw the world.
In May of 2018, the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker exonerated him of any responsibility for the countless atrocities committed in his name. “Progressives” either don’t understand or refuse to admit that when you put some Utopian Ideal ahead of the well-being of human Individuals, you are by definition committed to incarcerating if not slaughtering a significant number of the latter. With Juncker, several generations of Western “intellectuals” have chosen to brazenly disregard the lessons on human nature implicit in those wonderful collectivist efforts in Soviet Russia and Communist China which were the products of their very own ideology. How is it that these endeavors, apparently rooted in compassion for the plight of the common man, became two of the most oppressive and inhumane regimes in all of history?
Our present Prime Minister has expressed his admiration for the Chinese Communist government and indeed continues to do business with it as a trusted and cherished ally, apparently unfamiliar with its oppression of the Falun Gong, the Uighurs or the citizens of Hong Kong. At the same time Omar, so intent on trashing the traditions responsible for the affluence and relative freedom of the citizens of the U.S., would seem to be unaware of the tyranny, poverty, disease and tribal and religious intolerance tearing apart much of her home continent [she is from Somalia]. One shudders in contemplating the I.Q. of their offspring should these two geniuses ever decide to procreate!
“Progressives” never stop talking about “diversity” but they actually loathe the endlessly diverse qualities and inclinations of our species, factors which inevitably result in the very disparities they so despise. Their disdain for the so-called Rugged Individualism championed by Capitalism is implicit with their disdain for human achievement itself. Omar rants against the “oppressiveness” of the American economic system yet millions born to poverty there have managed to profit from it. Is it a system that can be improved? Of course! But the impulse to dismantle it in favor of one based on Coercive Government Power is rooted in an unconscionable ignorance of the simple givens of the Human Condition, facts relentlessly validated by history itself.
Ironic! Marx saw Religion as an “opiate” for the masses but his own Ideology is the very same.