Leftish Posing Both Elite and Macho Failed It's Stupid To Repeat That Failure

It was about ten years ago, while reading younger people online, that I realized that a lot of what I saw being advocated was political action that repeated what had failed, continually, over the previous thirty or so years.   Considering that in the same time I read many times the definition of a crazy person as someone who continually repeats the same thing expecting different results, it was clear something was wrong.  The left as a bunch of upper and upper middle-class college educated folk, many of whom had financial security but who also had an absurdly romantic view of the previous left, the "new left" and what I guess was the "old left" is not a viable political entity.  If it were the repeated failures of the past forty years would not have happened.  One of the stupidest parts of that failure was the naive faith that, somehow, the truth would win out over lies.  The stupidity, if not insanity of that was proven by how lies in the freest of all free presses won out well over 90 % of the time, hampering even the best of intentions by such Democrats who had managed against the odds to win elections.*  Neither Clinton nor Obama governed as liberals, as many have noted, they governed to the right of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s.   Lies win when lies are permitted and have the magnifying and multiplying effect of the electronic media and the cash of millionaires and billionaires.  That is something that dictators have known since the birth of electronic media with radio and the movies but which our idiotic, mostly Ivy League trained Supreme Court pretends to not know, even the liberals on it.  It was the liberal Warren Court which removed any penalty for the media lying in the Sullivan ruling in 1964, which was followed, unsurprisingly, by the period of right-wing ascendancy.   The typical thinking on this issue, figuring that because Jefferson and Madison and Voltaire said something in the age of quills and gall ink we can't face reality is too stupid to be tolerated any longer.  Lies benefit the rich and powerful, not the underclass or anyone else.

Yet, with that clear history and its manifestation around us in the constant barrage of lying propaganda, especially during election years, media libertarianism is one of the most commonly held delusions of the would-be left, today.   I think it was when I read one of the most popular of the leftish bloggers deriding proposals to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine and community service standards on TV that I realized this was one of the major problems of the allege left as I was finding it online.  With the rise of direct expression by people on the left in large numbers, a lot of the deluded thinking and romantic foolishness became apparent.   In my case, it did have the beneficial effect that I had to look critically at my own assumptions and, more so, habits of thought in these matters.  I'd let my affection for some old lefties blind me to the failure of their ideas and methods and the fact that a lot of their ideas were pretty awful.  You can start with their getting suckered by the communists and anarchists, for a start.

That's a long introduction for this video which was posted yesterday, How To Teach Civics in a Quaker School

It might not have the cheap drama of manning the barricades and playing Paris Commune or, heaven help us, Les Mis, it might not sound attractively violent or nasty or macho but it's not like those things have gotten us anywhere.   The major accomplishment of the "new, new left" in the past decade seems to have been the mighty and angry effort to occupy a few public parks and to vent online.  Which probably turns off more of the real left, the left which is untapped, the people who have a stake in the success of a real left with realistic goals which values making real change in real lives more than it does in issuing a theory and striking a pose.  People who realize that what those idiots who strike those poses do is stupid and nothing that will work and nothing they have to waste their time in because it will be counter productive.

If the Quaker in the video would have misgivings about the first two paragraphs in this piece, I'd remind him that one of the early names of the Quakers was "Friends of Truth". **  If you are a friend of the truth, you can't very well be a friend of lies at the same time.  The truth will make you free, if you and a lot of other people know it.  If they "know" lies, none of us will be free.  The past half century of American history gave that idea the test of time in real life.

* Given that the last nearly liberal president we've had, Carter, won due to a combination of the reaction against the massive corruption and criminality of the Nixon period and the ineptitude of Ford and that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won with a combination of financial crisis caused by the previous Republican adminstrations and weak opponents, the strategy of just waiting for Republicans to go too far or blow up the economy is a rather pathetic capitulation to the corrupted system given us by the Supreme Court.

** All that having been said, it is clear that the phrase “Friends of Truth,” used as a term for the Quakers, dates back at least to 1653.  The earliest attestation I have come across is in a 1653 letter from Margaret Fell to Col. West, published in A Brief Collection of Remarkable Passages and Occurrences Relating to the Birth, Education, Life, Conversion, Travels, Services, and Deep Sufferings of that Ancient, Eminent, and Faithful Servant of the Lord, Margaret Fell; but by her Second Marriage, Margaret Fox (1710) p. 42:

Most part of the Goals [sic] in the North part of England hath some Friends of the Truth in them, as York, Carlisle, Appleby, and Lancaster.

But the single word “Friends” appears just as early, as in the following sentence from a 1653 letter from Gervase Benson to George Fox and James Nayler, reproduced in A.R. Barclay’s Letters, &c of Early Friends (1841) p. 3:

As for the Friends’ enlargement at Kendal, George Taylor, I hope, hath or will give you an account.

Although both terms are quite early, I have not found any clear indication that one of them was understood as a shortened form of the other.