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October 27, 2009
Townhall: Democrats' Policies Based on Dogma, Hopes, Dreams, not Reality
Topics: Political News and commentariesIt's as good an explanation as I've seen so far. It explains away the illogical, irrational, anti-free market, anti-freedom, policies of the current Democratic Congress and the White House. How else would one rationally explain the Democrats' belief that the government taking over another one-sixth of the American economy is a good thing?
Denis Prager writes:
[...] The answer is religion.Read it all ...Given the huge economic failures that the left itself attributes to Medicare and Medicaid and given the economic collapse or near collapse of these systems in other countries, the left's prescriptions can only be explained in one way: The left has made its views a form of religion.
Most individuals on the left are not religious, but virtually all people, secular and religious, liberal and conservative, yearn to believe in dogma, i.e., absolute beliefs that transcend reason. For people on the left in Europe, the United States and elsewhere, belief in the state -- the notion that the state can do a better job at helping people and making a good society -- is one such dogma. This applies especially to educating the young and to health care.
Examples of left-wing dogmas that transcend reason are as numerous as any religion's catechism. One example is the belief that men and women, boys and girls, are basically the same, that the vast majority of characteristics we ascribe to male and female natures are in fact socially induced. This irrational dogma was virtually universally believed and taught by the left-wing faculty when I attended college, and remains so today.
Another is the belief that manmade carbon dioxide emissions are heating the world to the point of imminent worldwide catastrophe, including island nations disappearing underwater, mass starvation, inundation of the world's major coastal areas and much more. The fact that the world has been getting colder for the last eight years is as irrelevant to most people on the left as the absence of archaeological evidence for the biblical exodus is irrelevant to believing Jews and Christians.
[...] Dogma explains why it is useless to point out to the left how the left has economically crippled California, once the most prosperous, most adventurous, most successful "country" in the world (it has an economy that would make it about the seventh largest country in the world). Likewise, it does not matter to blacks what Democrats have done to their cities. As they watch their cities crumble, they will once again vote overwhelmingly for the party that oversaw this destruction.
None of these facts matters because religious-like dogmas are not derived from facts.
In addition to dogma, the left relies for its policies on "hope," which it often substitutes for analysis. People on the left rarely vote based on reality. They vote based on "hope." That's why the word "hope" is so much more significant to the left than to the right. The last two Democratic presidents ran as candidates of "hope." The right doesn't have "hope" candidates because conservatives don't live on hope. They live in reality, meaning that people are not born basically good; that investing men and women with great state power leads inevitably to abuse of that power; that people stop innovating if they are taxed too highly; and that a perfect health care system is understood to be impossible.
Prager goes on to say that having a realistic understanding of the limitations of human beings, he stands in awe of what he already sees -- the unique American achievement of affluence, liberty, decency, opportunity and medical innovations, which is all being squandered for the sake of left-wing dogma, left-wing hopes and left-wing dreams. I can't help but agree with him, and wonder how much longer America is going to tolerate basing its future on the irrational, illogical, tried-before-and-failed, left-wing dogma, hopes and dreams, and will the nation awake in time to be able to recover in our life-time.
Posted by Richard at October 27, 2009 7:09 AM
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