President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton applaud during the 20th anniversary of the AmeriCorps national service program on the South Lawn of the White House, Sept. 12, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Originally posted on June 28, 2023.
What is Leftism? Dennis Prager challenges readers in American Greatness to try to define it:
Leftism, according to Mr. Prager, is the attempt to “destroy the past—every value and every institution, the good as well as what it regards as the bad.” That’s why, he claims, leftists hate conservatism.
Conservatism seeks to conserve the best from the past. The Left seeks to destroy the past, including the best.
The Russian Revolution took up where the French Revolution left off.
In France, the revolution consciously sought to “destroy every major institution and value of French society—not just the monarchy but God, religion, the legal system, traditional notions of good and evil, the calendar, the old way of telling time, the old weights and measures, and even the names of the days of the week.”
In other words, the past. Just like the Left in contemporary America, the leftists of the French Revolution toppled statues—in their case, the statues of every king of France.
The Russian Revolution, continues Mr. Prager, did the same.
As the Soviet dissident joke went, “In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it’s the past that is always changing.”
Whatever its noble-sounding rhetoric, the Left stands for nothing and therefore builds nothing (other than state power). Aside from state power, it only destroys.
- Leftism in music, art, sculpture, and architecture destroyed everything beautiful and noble that had been created over all the preceding centuries.
- Leftism is destroying the universities, the high schools, and the elementary schools.
- Leftism is destroying science. More and more medical schools, for example, no longer speak of “pregnant women” but of “birthing persons.” The American Medical Association has come out in opposition to listing the sex of newborns on their birth certificates; children, the AMA holds, will eventually decide whether they are male or female, neither or both.
Redefining Moral Categories
- Leftism has substituted class and racial categories for moral ones. Good and evil have been replaced by black and white, male and female, rich and poor.
- Leftism is destroying the ideal of the nuclear family—a married man and woman with children. The Left has made war on “heteronormativity” and has redefined marriage.
- The Left is working to destroy the distinction between a man and a woman.
A Fundamental Transformation
Days before the 2008 election, Barack Obama told a wildly cheering crowd:
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
Destroying everything it touches is not a byproduct of leftism. It’s the aim, Dennis Prager reminds readers.
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