Defining the Left

In the convention political lexicon of today, the term “moderate leftist” is equivalent to “liberal.” We have not used this designation because part of the agenda of DiscoverTheNetwork is to challenge the use of the word “liberal” in this way, a way that obscures the network of the left. Redistributionism, support for racial preferences, and a complacent acceptance of the existing political monolith on academic faculties are not attitudes that can reasonably be called liberal. They are the product of a successful campaign by leftists to conduct “a long march through the institutions” – to assume the political coloration of liberalism in order to escape accountability for the leftist past and in order to more easily advance their radical agendas in the American mainstream.

The leftist lurch of the Democratic Party, which has set up alarm bells in circles that actually are liberal (e.g., The New Republic) is a by-product of this campaign. Another ambition of the DiscoverTheNetwork website is to unmask the radical agendas of faux liberal organizations and individuals like the misnamed Center for Constitutional Rights. This organization was founded by totalitarian radicals, and has since merged with the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, communist fellow-traveler whose politics are aligned with Castro’s Cuba and Islamic radicals. The convicted terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart is a protégé and icon of the Center, as is Stanley Cohen, the lawyer for Hamas.)

The term “affective leftist” requires some explanation, and I am grateful to my comrade-in-arms Peter Collier for the description that follows. “These are people who are often in positions of influence, the media in particular, who are bien pensant in the extreme. In spite of their social status, they see themselves ‘in opposition’ – a legacy from the 60s when the notion of ‘The System’ as a malign code word for America – was born. They are also involved in post-radical chic, glorifying people who ‘authentically’ represent oppositional ideas in a way they would not have the courage or really even the political inclination to do themselves. To these people, as opposed to serious leftists, political ‘ideas’ are the intellectual equivalent of a fashion statement, always adjusting to meet current trends, always meant as a sort of code to tell the world that they are good people. Obviously, I’m talking here about people like Katie Couric and Robin Williams and almost all of Hollywood. (Some Hollywood people like Sean Penn with his Communist lineage are harder core and should be distinguished from this category; but there aren’t that many of them, and in any case as actors their politics are largely emotion-based as well.) These affective liberals have as their bottom-line definition the fact that they want to feel that they are on the right side rather than any real commitment to a vision (or anti-vision) for the country. They are for ‘freedom’ when it is freedom to kill third-term fetuses or engage in same-sex marriages or stuff blow up their noses; they do not define freedom as having anything to do with captive peoples around the world having the chance to escape the tyrannies that constrain them. They like Fidel because he is a thorn in America’s side and a sort of dime-store existentialist, and they rhapsodize about his spreading of literacy in Cuba without considering the fact that at the same time that he teaches people to read he tortures writers like Armando Valladares whose books he doesn’t like.”