The Left Will Never Succeed While Materialism Hampers It

Since you ask, yes, I really do believe that atheism is the key reason for the failure of the left for the past 45 or so years, or, rather, atheism is one of a small ring of keys which is in the hands of the left, with which the left has damaged itself. There are other, important, reasons for that failure, of course,  but the keys to those are in the hands of our opponents.  The commonly increasingly heard form of obnoxious atheism is part of a complex, mixed with elitism out of touch with the reality of most people, snobbery, disdain for the unattractive great unwashed and the disrespect for most people that led the left that was ascendant in the later 1960s into the political wilderness where it has been lost for longer than the children of Israel were in The Book of Exodus.

After Reverend King went to the mountain top and announced where The Promised Land was, The Beloved Community, the elite left force-marched us all away from it.

That is a rough sketch of things, reality is never so uniform as a diagram, something you might keep in mind as you read this sketch.  Many at that time and even today, especially those who had an experience of pre-war life, could be counted on to keep trying to make real progress.   I certainly wouldn't count the great Senator George McGovern as one of the deluded wanderers groping their way backward, confident that they were headed in the right direction, though he was victimized by then.  What destroyed George McGovern was the establishment media which has been refining its talents for virtual assassination of any possible leader of a real and, most important to prevent, an EFFECTIVE left.   In oh, so many instances, the play left aided and encouraged that political assassination.

Or they stupidly served as a pantomime leftist, presenting an unattractive or absurd or dangerous figure for the media shills of the elite to discredit the real thing with.

Atheists purportedly of the left have played their biggest political role in serving as a tool of that media attack on the left.  The widespread inability of atheists to put a damper on their irresistible urge to insult most people, asserting their intellectual superiority to the vast majority of the population,  has been a boon for the effort to fracture the left and to make even the egalitarian left damaged goods for an effective majority of the population.  As I've pointed out before, since the most successful aspects of the left in living memory, the Civil Rights Movement, the Labor Movement and even many of those with partial or less success, all depended heavily on the support and participation of people on the basis of their religious convictions, the demand that the left suppress religious talk and identity has had the predictable effect of crippling the left.   It has also allowed our opponents to paint the left as the enemy of the religion that even most people on the left believe in.  

That is on top of the shameful spectacle of putative leftists praising some of the most oppressive and homicidal regimes in history, all of them, officially atheist states.   Especially those who praised dictatorships that were moral catastrophes, such as Stalin's and Mao's.   Lauding countries in which the most basic of civil rights were destroyed.  Rights that were asserted, rightly, here as claimed by western Stalinists and Maoists, asserting rights for themselves in the United States that they routinely dismissed as entirely unimportant for those living under their what they presented as closer to an ideal state.   I have every confidence that some of them imagined life in their atheist paradise as wonderful, only not if they weren't members of the oligarchic elites that developed so quickly under the "dictatorship of the proletariat."  Those who weren't total dupes of their heroes and the often cynical would be leaders of "the masses" who ran the piss pot communist and Marxist parties.  

I will mention them again because it is such a fitting symbol of the totally screwed up mess that atheists have made of leftist politics that, after a lifetime of being told that we must keep the memory of the martyred Rosenbergs alive, to endlessly assert their innocence, we now know that the very files kept by the Stalin government show that Julius Rosenberg was a nuclear spy and that, though unmentioned, it is very likely Ethel was also, indeed involved in nuclear espionage for one of the most brutal dictators in history.   If you think that discovering that, after all of those years, wasn't a call to reassess the acceptance of "leftists" that could run that kind of a con job on the real left, you're still duped by it.   The major political effect of the beatification of the Rosenbergs is that it discredited the left.   While they were victims of capital punishment and should never have been murdered by the state, their deaths would have been a fraction of a drop in the bucket of those murdered for no crime at all by the very government he spied for.

The nominal atheist left has long suckered the real left over the red scare and McCarthyim, which are, indeed, blights on post-war American history but which were next to nothing as compared to normal life under Communism.  What those persecuted by the witch hunt here suffered was a mild form of what happened for the entire period of their ideal states, which were actually funding the parties accused of the very thing we now know they were guilty of.  While the red-scare was at its peak here, in the early 1950s, Stalin was mounting one of his frequent campaigns of mass oppression, the infamous "Jewish Doctors Plot" which, it is now believed, was a plan for a systematic pogrom and deportation of Jews to isolate them, perhaps destroy them, in Siberia.  Apparently Stalin and the upper reaches of the Soviet government were planning on the deportation, East, of the Jewish population.  An idea he could have copied from the recently dead Hitler if he wasn't entirely proven capable of generating such amoral ideas, himself.

But here, due to the American government committing wrongs that were a watered down version of what the Soviet government  supported by so many of them, did to people in the Soviet Union and its occupied states, the rest of the left were supposed to ignore that the American communists were insanely doing exactly what the pro-Hitler right did, support one of the most evil, genocidal and oppressive dictatorships in human history.  

It is tragic that the support that the atheist left gave to Stalin and other atheist dictators, robbed us of the ability to point out that, in persecuting domestic communists, using them as an excuse to attack the real left, the right-wing in the United States had betrayed their similarity to those dictatorships.  The American right has come closer to establishing Stalin style dictatorial oppression than the overtly "Marxist" left ever could.   Indeed the confusion of the placement of that pseudo-left on the line of political identification has favored the far right, with whom they have a lot in common, and been a burden for the real left, which has suffered from the association far more than it ever benefited from it.   They knew that we would have a weakness for them due to the wrongs done to them and they have played that weakness to the fullest.  Only, unfortunately, it hurt the real left far more than it hurt the far right.   Consider this, 1980 the very year that Victor Navasky published his brilliant expose of the blacklist, Naming Names, also saw Ronald Reagan elected president of the United States.

No political ideology that denies anyone the absolute reality of the basic moral prerequisites of American liberalism, inherent rights, equality, freedom of thought, the right to the product of their labor, etc. has any business being mistaken as being of the left.  I have gone into the damage that materialism inevitably does to the belief in the absolute reality of those things over and over again.  It is unsurprising that even the fancy, dialectical materialism that Marx formulated in an unreal and ideal form would, in real life application, deny the reality of those things and hollow out any left that it attached itself to like a lamprey eel.  In that I conclude that materialism is the origin of that damage to the left that allowed itself to be used by a parasite that should have been rejected instead of pitied.  Whatever there was to learn from them could have been better gotten from other sources and its articulation in those sources is at least undamaged from being built on the sand foundation of random chance occurrence that materialism provides for it.

A real, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, etc. and genuine left based in the belief that people and life are not the same thing as inert matter has yet to be recovered from the various elites who have made hatred of God the center of their thought. A left that believes that human thought and action, informed by reasoning minds informed by moral reality can produce an effective, beneficial result that materialism can't account for, the very goal of a real left.  Communism is merely one of those pseudo-leftist systems, the elite British form of "socialism" is another that has had a profoundly bad effect on the left.  The real left is there to be rescued,  I think that liberation theology, here Black Liberation Theology, is the current best example of how to proceed.  But we won't do it as long as we are shackled to materialism which will inevitably and always damage a real left and discredit its efforts.