Meet the New Left...

Jeffrey A. Tucker, "How the Left Became What It Once Hated"

In the final scenes of the book and film “The Hunger Games,” Katniss Everdeen has the opportunity finally to kill the hated dictator President Snow, but instead, turns her bow on the leader of the rebellion armies, namely President Coin.

The plot twist is remarkable because it adds an element of realistic complexity to the dynamics of power. Katniss has come to realize that the rebels had gradually become the thing that they hated the most. They had begun to crave the very power that they were trying to overthrow.

Indeed, there was no reason to think that the regime under rebel control would be different than the status quo. The emoluments of power would be newly available to a new group of managers. Coin would replace Snow just as Snow had replaced the person before him. What Katniss really wanted was a completely new system of freedom, not just a new public face to the old tyranny.

Her insight is profound here. When hatred becomes focused, boundless, and obsessive, the hater gradually comes to emulate the very thing it opposes. That’s what happened to the rebel armies and to Coin.

So too, this is what Trump Derangement Syndrome has done to the left in this country. It began in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency over Hillary Clinton, who was somehow supposed to win. After that, the single-minded focus of opposition became to grind him and his presidency into the ground and oppose everything about him, including his supporters and even the system that brought him to office.

The bitter irony here is that the left has become the very thing that they warned against. They said Trump was an authoritarian and brutal, a financial racketeer who lived off manipulation. They warned that he would use his personality cult to impose a quasi-dictatorship.

And here we are six years later and what do we see of the left in this country? Especially during the COVID crisis, they embraced censorship, authoritarianism, imposition on bodily autonomy, and attacks on the freedom of association. For a time, the word freedom itself became a bad word to them. People who were merely trying to get schools open or the freedom to run a small business became the object of their loathing, even to the point that the left began to label as fascist those who wanted freedom.

Someone coming of age right now would never have any idea that the left once had some central principles that revolved around themes of freedom. They were free speech, bodily autonomy, peace, small business over large, the poor and middle class over the rich, freedom of expression and art, and opposition to ruling-class manipulation of the system on behalf of the privileged instead of the common good. They were deeply suspicious of the national-security state, corporate elites, and arbitrary uses of executive power. They were against corruption in government.

They were once for human rights and against segregation based on medical compliance. Probably today, no one younger than the age of 25 would believe this, but trust me: These used to be central principles of the left.

So far as I can tell, every single one of these principles has been thrown out. In the COVID crisis, all major lefty journals of opinion pushed mask and vaccine mandates, argued for more statist power to muscle people, favored large businesses over small, crushed the working classes and poor, and even threw out their traditional defense of public schools, which they seemed to want to be closed for longer periods of time.

They rallied around the segregation of whole cities by vaccine status, even though doing so meant excluding nearly half the members of minority populations from access to public accommodations such as restaurants, museums, libraries, and theaters. Not a peep of protest among the center-left! 

They completely disregarded one-time liberal precepts such as a woman’s right to work as millions of married women with kids were thrown out of corporate life to take care of kids. The day cares and schools were closed, so women had no choice about it. The result is that women’s participation in the workforce has been set back 34 years! We’re nowhere near pre-pandemic levels and it’s still falling!

Have you heard even one peep about this problem from the left-wing press? Has The New York Times or Washington Post even covered this? I don’t think so. It’s an absolute scandal and a great measure of just how many principles the left has thrown out in their crazed and maniacal hatred of Trump. They’ve been willing to utterly destroy social and economic life in the single-minded pursuit of killing Trump as the one and only goal. And in pursuit of that goal, they’ve embraced an authoritarian biosecurity state that robs people of personal autonomy.

And let’s not forget the one-time centrality of science in the leftist vision. Since at least the Monkey Trial, American progressives have rallied around science as opposed to religion and faith. But when it came to COVID, they completely threw all science out the window. They would hear nothing as the evidence kept pouring in that COVID was not a threat to kids, that it had an infection fatality ratio that compares to the flu for anyone younger than the age of 75, and that even the overall death rate was 0.2 percent. But instead of dealing with this reality, they screamed panic so that the whole population would fly into fits of rage.

As for the vaccines, even as evidence mounted that they protect against neither infection nor transmission and that the adverse effects are inordinately high even against the target population of the elderly, they still wouldn’t hear it. They’ve pushed these grotesque human rights-destroying mandates and segregations.

Even this wild D.C. obsequious deference to the Ukrainian president from last week has roots in Trump hatred. They spent so long trying to prove that Russia was somehow responsible for Trump’s election in 2016, despite the complete absence of evidence to that effect, that they even came to believe it. So the stupid logic goes this way: Russia equals Trump and therefore anyone who’s against Putin is a friend, no matter the corruption. As a result, even the one-time penchant for favoring peace over war has been tossed out.

So too, the strange lack of interest in the FTX scandal and the targets of this fake company’s “effective altruism” has roots in Trump hatred. The company passed out millions and billions of dollars to nonprofits and candidates that backed the Democrats and various lockdown measures, and all we get now is silence. That’s rooted in the very same corruption: The left has become the very thing they once claimed to hate.

In other words, the left in the United States has adopted all the practices that they once warned that Trump would bring to the United States! I say this too, not as a Trump fan personally at all. I was warning that his presidency would be unhinged as early as 2015 because his ideological impulses departed too far from constitutionalism and Reaganite suspicions of government.

All that said, unhinged hate is a dangerously distorting emotion. The left’s single-minded focus on grinding Trump into the dust has turned the left into the mirror image of their most paranoid worries about him.

At some point, the left in this country is going to have to do a serious self-examination of what it has become. To return to “The Hunger Games,” the pursuit of President Snow has turned the followers of President Coin into what they once claimed to oppose. And this has become so obvious to the public that they’ve even turned against the public, demonizing middle-class values as inherently dangerous and science itself as misinformation worthy of censorship.

Be careful what you hate. Too much focus, too much attention, and too much study will cause the object of your hatred to be the most compelling pedagogue. If you take a close look in the mirror, you won’t recognize yourself anymore. That, in short, is what has become the left in America today.