Andrew Klavan on What Leftism Does to People

Over at PJ Media, Andrew Klavan explains how leftist ideology inevitably makes people awful:

Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.

This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves.

Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil?Leftists call conservatives hateful…

Read the whole thing.

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