The Great Reaction to the Newest Idea in Politics

Christopher Chantrill, at the American Thinker today calls out the Left for what it really is about in an article entitled Who Will Tell the Movement Activists To Go Home? Chantrill sums up what he is really talking about here:

See, my idea is that our Big Problem is that the left and all its works are a Great Reaction, a unconscious, instinctive nostalgia for the good old days of slavery, serfdom, conquest, tribalism. That’s why I say that socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-serfdom, democracy is neo-loot-and-plunder, and identity politics is neo-tribalism.

And really, why be surprised? The Germans, particularly Jung, reminded us that we are mostly our unconscious mind and its archetypes. So of course we would have an instinctive hankering for the good old days of unfettered simian instinct.

Chantrill is definitely on to something. I have always wondered why the Left espouses not a new idea, but a very old one. Indeed, the latest and the greatest is the founding of the Constitutional Republic known as the United States of America. Of course, there had been democracies before. They failed. And there had been republics before. Rome started out as a republic. After the dictators (read Caesars) took over, they maintained the outward appearance of the republic, while providing bread and circuses to the masses to keep them mollified.  The Roman idea once the dictators took over was a giant Ponzi scheme in which there was a need to conquer more and more of the world.  Eventually they would have run out of world.  But instead, before they could conquer the world, Rome was brought down by the weight of its own tyranny.

The Founding Fathers had a new and revolutionary idea. A constitutional republic in which all the stakeholders had a say. The people got to vote directly for their representatives in the House.  The States got a say by choosing the Senators.  The President was elected by the electors based on the number of people in each State and who won that State.  The Supreme Court was originally supposed to make rulings on things that were in the domain of the Federal government.  That was a small list.  It was brilliant. But right from the start, the Left was out to get rid of this new idea.

Many don't know this, but the term, "The Left" comes from France, and it was the French revolution that set the Left in motion.  Just as the American revolution was successful, the French revolution was not.  And so it has been ever since. The Left constantly believes that one man can embody the yearnings of an entire people. It's absurd.    But some men will always want power.  The interesting thing is, like so many things in life, the more you want it, the less of it you will have.