Why the Left Won't Budge on Anything

This from a long-time reader with my comments in blue:

 

Really enjoy your site . . . .

 

From north of the border, I'm watching the abortion chaos and the Machiavellian machinations of court document leakers. 

 

Since having a child, I have come to the admittedly not the most logically airtight position on the matter: if a "fetus" exhibits "human" behaviours, it is in fact a baby and not a "clump of cells." After witnessing ultrasounds, and reading about thumb sucking, laughing, and other quintessentially human and very recognizable behaviours -- say, around 17-18 weeks -- that's the line I draw. It's a timeframe which, while not exact, is a demarcation point after which I'd find any termination so-called, ugly, ghoulish, and morally indefensible.  

 

I ran this by a few people I know on the left, thinking I could perhaps find common ground. And no, I didn't. They won't concede any territory. And my position is the European one for the most part. And that means your left has not only caught up to that continent, but in some ways has eclipsed it in its lunacy. 

 

As far as I can tell, they won't budge on anything. And therefore, by extension, there will be no principles the left and right can agree on (hell, that's basically the situation now). Plus, by controlling all facets of the education system, that won't change. 

 

Right you are: the Left won't budge on anything. This is because they see politics as a form of warfare.  Too many conservatives, however, still see politics as gentlemanly debate under an umbrella of shared assumptions, values, and principles.  This puts conservatives at a disadvantage as I explain in an eponymous Substack article. In my contribution to Dissident Philosophers, I put it like this:

 

For the culturally Marxist Left, politics is not a process of bargaining and accommodation based on mutually accepted norms between parties with common interests and a desire to coexist peacefully. Failing to appreciate that leftists embrace what could be called the converse Clausewitz principle—namely, that politics is war conducted by other means—puts classical liberals and conservatives at a disadvantage. They cannot bring themselves to believe that their political opponents are enemies who will do anything to win and are impervious to charges of “double standards” and “hypocrisy.” These conservatives allow their virtues to hobble them in their fight with enemies who reject conservative values but use them Alinsky-style against conservatives (as Saul Alinsky says, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."

 

Conservatives are at a second disadvantage in that they are political part-timers who understand that the political is a limited sphere, whereas leftists are full-time agitators beholden to the totalitarian conceit that the political exhausts the real. The left is totalitarian in that “to realize its agenda the left must invade and dominate the sphere of private life.” (Horowitz, David, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Dallas: Spence Publishing, 1999, 88.) And this they do increasingly. (William F. Vallicella, "From Democrat to Dissident," in  Dissident Philosophers : Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, edited by T. Allan Hillman, and Tully Borland, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021, pp. 261-277

 

Augusto del Noce speaks of a new totalitarianism:

 

Unlike Stalinism or Hitlerism, its main characteristic is not that of being a political movement that aims at world domination. It is marked, instead, by a quest to bring about the disintegration (dissoluzione) of one part of the world (in the case at hand, Europe). Nevertheless, the word totalitarianism is still appropriate because the essential features remain the same: the individual is extinguished and the idea of politics is subsumed within the idea of war, even in peace time. This means that all forms of criticism must be 'prevented' -- whenever they are addressed at 'real power' -- because, instead of advancing real arguments, supposedly they reflect or conceal the conservatism or reactionary spirit of a 'repressed psychology' . . . . ("Toward a New Totalitarianism" in The Crisis of Modernity, tr. Carlo Lancellotti, McGill-Queen's UP, 2014, p. 87

 

Del Noce goes on to speak of a "denial of the universality of reason." This is why the new totalitarians do not respond rationally to arguments, but resort to shadow banning, deplatforming, shout-downs, and other forms of cancellation.  To these people it is all power at bottom, and all reasoning is a sham rationalizing of  underlying racial and class interests.