Questions I Wish I Knew The Answer To. Pharisees Of The Pseudo-Left

I remember way, way back during my senior year in college, when I was thinking of grad schools one of my non-music profs who went there recommended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, his alma mater.  Knowing my political inclinations he tried to sell me on it as "the Berkeley of the mid-west".  You know, good ol' Robert La Follette* and all that.  I didn't take that route.  Which I have never had a seconds regret about.   I knew, of course, that Madison, Wisconsin had a vocal "left" though that was largely due to it being the home of The Progressive magazine, famous more for its attention grabbing stunt of publishing how to build an a-bomb instructions than for breaking much news.  I was a subscriber and remained one for many years, though it was the first of the lefty magazines I dropped as I became disillusioned with them.  Not because I saw them as too far left, I saw them as a liability for the real left, a promoter of futile ballot-box poison, often on extremely unimportant issues.   

In Matthew 23:23 Jesus said:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.  

For once in the King James Version because I like the way it puts it. 

The secular left has done pretty much the same thing, tithing mint and cumin in regard to court cases against manger scenes and idolatrous slogans on money that, if they offend anyone, should offend those who rightly see it as making a golden calf out of every bill and coin it appears on. That is what I've been talking about when I point out the cost of carrying water for atheists and misidentifying their obsessions with de-religionizing public life which is, among other things, massively unpopular and which has had an inordinate cost to the real left, the passing of  which we could well date to the day The Reverend Martin Luther King jr was assassinated.   

I might include a point that even one of the most prominent liberal politicians of the 1980s once criticized, carrying on as if support for the porn industry and the commercialization of bodies under the sex industry, prostitution and for-view prostitution, was a liberal position when the truth is it was contrary to the values of any real left but one of pseudo-lefty libertarianism.  I'd already started being skeptical of the First Amendment absolutism of the futilitarian left and having that pointed out only encouraged me in that thinking. 

Looking at the struggle in Wisconsin to overthrow the Republican-fascist rule sponsored by domestic billionaire fascists, I have wondered how much the influence of the Progressive magazine crowd and such Madison based groups as The Freedom from Religion Foundation, Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is what really has had to be overcome to convince people to vote for Democrats in that state.   I am certain there has been some cost to Democrats in Wisconsin from their publicity stunts and whatever influence they have with the putative progressive vote in that state.  Lots of people on what is potentially that voting left will buy their bilge as the real right way to be a liberal, certainly a lefty and that pressure will be brought to bear on a Democratic politician trying to eke out a win.  My biggest question is how much a Democratic politician will lose by supporting their positions as to what such a voting bloc can actually turn out in numbers of votes.  And whether or not, just in terms of raw vote numbers it will produce as to what it will cost you.  And, since there is another side, how Republican-fascists will use any hostility to such an interest group to get out their vote.  

You can easily turn that into a series of equations, something I once did as a thought experiment.  I doubt any candidate has ever done it like that but they have to try to guess which fringe issues they need to be associated with or to publicly distance themselves from and what that will mean for their prospects of doing what the whole point of it is, WINNING ELECTIONS, TAKING THE OFFICE AND USING IT TO MAKE LAWS TO MAKE LIFE BETTER FOR EVERYONE.   

My guess is that with the organized and funded voice of fanatical atheism in Wisconsin, any Wisconsin Democrat will have to make a hard decision before they allow themselves to be associated with some of their more irresponsible stunts and demands.   I'm sure they'll have to wonder how dangerous it is for their electoral prospects to either be seen to be with them or to reject them.  It's not the only special interest group that politicians have to make those judgements about but I'll bet you it's one of the least productive in terms of actual votes and electoral success and one of the most costly to Democrats.  

I wish I knew the answers to those questions, I wish real numbers could be put into the variables involved in making those decisions are.  Most of all I wish that liberals would wise up and realize that atheism is not a liberal position, it never was and there was never any reason for us to take on the burden of them and their petty demands.  As I pointed out the other day, lots of them, I would guess at bottom, most of them are libertarians, not liberals.   If we could dump 'em, I wouldn't have ever started writing about them.  They're not that interesting.  Not as compared to equality, justice and the realities of how you can have self-government by an enformed electorate. 

*  I know of one media lefty who advocated writing in La Follette's name on the ballot as a "protest" vote in 1980, the election that brought us Reagan.   I had enormous affection for the guy but that affection took a huge hit from that bit of broadcast stupidity.  

Note:  I do have a lot of respect for any Democrat who runs for office, even a relatively minor local or state office and having worked on some campaigns, I know they are forced to try to guess how much they will lose over some finge issues and fringe issues successfully sold to gullible liberals as some worthy cause generally couched in the language of lofty principle when it's really just them wanting their own way over something unimportant.   I think "secularism" really atheism as such a series of issues has been instrumental in the electoral successes OF REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS.