Between the Covington Catholic debacle, the #ExposeChristian schools trend, and the sudden affliction with late-term abortion, the left appears to have struck a bargain with the devil.
But if the left has grown more hateful, intolerant, and radical, that’s only because they’re showing who they really are.
For how long have conservatives, rather impotently, complained about the left’s intolerance?
It’s a reliable and fair complaint. Conservatives have long understood that the left hates them and their views. But the left’s intolerance is manifesting increasingly as a desire to not only suppress free speech, but to banish conservatives and their values from society.
For conservatives, “free speech” is becoming synonymous with their right to exist. Much of the concern on the right about free speech naturally stems from this.
But appealing to “free speech” against an enemy that doesn’t recognize it is an exercise in futility. Leftists often argue that “free speech” rests atop a system of brutalizing hierarchy, and that conservatives who appeal to free speech are simply trying to shut down challenges to that order.
For the right, free speech is a basic principle of liberal society and a bulwark against chaos, but to the left it’s part of a system that needs to be dismantled. Conservatives are in the position of trying to convince an enemy that doesn’t respect them to play by rules that they don’t believe in.
Perhaps conservatives have assumed too much good faith in their adversaries. But the stakes are getting clearer, and they’re grim. There is no reasoning with this monster. It knows what it wants and it will take unscrupulous lengths to get it.
The left does not care about free speech any more than the lives and reputations they are willing to destroy. They are motivated by pure will-to-power to crush anything that opposes their political project, whether an infant, a group of high school kids in red hats, or the Catholic church.
It’s not enough to say that the left is intolerant. The left shows its puritanical streak whenever the pitchforks come out for unsuspecting smirking white males, but the left is also ecstatically, ghoulishly permissive of infanticide.
The left’s aim is to remove anything which imposes constraints on their conception of liberty, which is the false one of freedom from consequences. Abortion is the centerpiece of this project of liberation from constraints, so it’s not surprising that it brings out the worst of the left’s ugliness. It’s too much of a concession for the left to not support infanticide, so they’re for it.
Free-thinking conservatives call the left “collectivist,” but the left’s collectivism is centered on individual desire and the means of satisfying it. Any society with a sense of community is collectivist in some sense. The left’s collectivism, though, undermines the very things that make civilization possible.
The left shows its cultish character when they pounce on wrong-thinking conservatives, but their political project is more eugenic. Many have commented on the connections between abortion, euthanasia, and social Darwinism. More than any other issue, abortion hits on the left’s evolutionist aims.
The leftist “collective” looks more like an unthinking monster guided by the instinct for destruction and a desire to maximize convenience. It looks not to safeguarding life and civilization, but to making life as pleasurable, comfortable, and “free” as possible for individuals detached from any social obligations.
The world the left wants to live in doesn’t resemble any existing or past human civilization. Their ideal regime is a giant utilitarian machine where humans are ones and zeroes to be created and canceled out at a moment’s notice by the administrative state.
The alpha and the omega of this regime are desire and convenience. Whatever feels good is good, whatever is desirable should be indulged, and the consequences can always be undone.
Abortion is the ideological inflection point, the monstrous passage, to this Brave New World. Human life is the ultimate inconvenience and the ultimate constraint, so its value must be done away with, and all the institutions which teach that it has value must be destroyed.
A human life that is inconvenient is not one worth living, or one worth caring for, in the left’s ideal regime. The left wants a world without a future or a past, but simply a numb, timeless present, where there are no consequences, no right or wrong.
In this world, there are no communities, customs, or values, just a pulsating hive-mind of individuals pursuing their every whim and caprice. It’s not something that humans can probably conceive because there has never been anything like it.
If it sounds snooty and paternalistic to look down on this world, then so be it. Humans are better than this. Human beings were meant to care for the young as well as the old, to look after their communities, to preserve their histories and safeguard their future.
The battle over free speech really isn’t about free speech anymore, but a conflict between two civilizations, or, more pointedly, civilization and the monstrous world the left wants to make a reality.
The intolerant left, for all their intolerance, is tolerant of many evil and barbarous things. There seems to be no limit to the depths that they will sink.
When does it stop? It’s hard to imagine there being an end-point, short of the end of civilization.
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