9-11 was terrible for America. But it’s been devastating for liberals.
by Dennis Prager
For all its tragedy, at least one good thing came out of 9-11. It exposed the Left’s incapacity to deal with evil.
A defining characteristic—not merely an unfortunate aspect—of the Left is its inability to recognize evil and its opposition to confronting it.
To cite two major examples, the Left—including, from the mid-1960s, liberals—found it impossible to label the Soviet Union “evil.” That is easily documented by reading all the liberal editorials that condemned President Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Anyone with a functioning moral compass knew that this was an entirely accurate description of the Soviet Union, yet the liberal/Left excoriated Reagan for describing the obvious.
Regarding Communism, over time the liberal Left not only ceased calling the Soviet Union or Communist China “evil,” it did what all those who deny evil do—came to regard as the villains those who labeled evil, in this case Communism, as evil. From the 1960s onward, the vast majority of the Left reserved its vitriol not for the mass murderers in Beijing, Moscow, Hanoi, Phnom Penh and Pyongyang but for the Americans (and a handful of other Westerners) who opposed the Communists. It was not that liberals became pro-Communist; rather they abandoned liberal anti-Communism and joined the Left in becoming anti-anti-Communist.
A major source of leftist anger at America, especially the America of George W. Bush, is that this America confronts evil. It is a rule of life from elementary school on that those who do not fight the bully generally loathe the few who do. Those who fight bullies, as America does, force all those who think of themselves as good people to look into the mirror. And then one has four choices: join the bully fighter; don’t join but at least admire the bully fighter; deem oneself inadequate for not joining the bully fighter; or denounce the bully fighter as the aggressor. The latter is the dominant leftist attitude.
The second major example of leftist inability to label evil as such concerns domestic violent criminals. The Left inverts moral reality and condemns America’s domestic bully fighters, the police departments of the country, as the guilty party when they arrest and sometimes shoot muggers and murderers.
According to the Left, violent crime in America is caused primarily by America’s endemic racism and by poverty. The latter has been the Left’s explanation since Karl Marx: Economics determines behavior; poverty causes crime. Even a rare liberal supporter of the war in Iraq, the foreign affairs columnist of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, frequently ascribes Islamic terror to the youth unemployment rate in the Muslim world.
Virtually the entire Left’s inability to label as thugs the minority rioters during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles was another example. Instead of condemning the looters, arsonists and even murderers, the Left condemned the Los Angeles Police Department and the Simi Valley jury that acquitted the police who had beaten King, a career criminal who had led police on a high-speed chase through populated neighborhoods and resisted them when apprehended.
This brings us to 9-11. The Left was faced with a terrible dilemma. Whereas it was easy for the Left to label Timothy McVeigh evil since he came from the fringe Right, the Left has had a much harder time labeling Islamic terrorists as such.
For one thing, from early on, many liberal and Left (the two labels are now virtually indistinguishable—after all, the New York Times always describes The Nation, a Left, even far Left, magazine, as “liberal”) commentators thought that the most important question about 9-11 was not how to fight Islamic fanaticism or why a doctrine of death had come to permeate significant parts of the Muslim world, but “What has America done to cause them to hate us so much?”
Again, the Left finds the bullied to be the genesis of the problem, not the bully: What has America done to earn such hatred? There is virtually no liberal academic, commentator, clergyman or politician who will say that the problem of Islamic terror is overwhelmingly within the Islamic world. It is rather, America’s (and, needless to say, Israel’s) fault that tens of millions of Muslims venerate mass murder.
Likewise there is virtually no liberal academic, commentator, clergyman or politician who will say that the problem of black crime in America is primarily due to moral values issues within parts of the black community(
My comment--Same with white and hispanic communities). Rather it is American society’s fault.
The greatest weakness of the Left is this inability to recognize evil and its simultaneous hatred of those who do fight evil (such as America, Israel, and Tony Blair’s Britain).
Why won’t the Left label and confront evil?
The reasons are not only psychological (fear of confrontation, fear of fighting, fear of dying, loathing of authority figures whether parental or divine, etc.). They are ideological. The Left has different values from the rest of us.
One such difference is the Left’s greater hatred of inequality than of evil. Leftists are not as troubled by evil as by social inequality. For the Left, the world revolves around economics. The Left began with Marx and others who explained the world in terms of economics and loathed, more than anything else, economic inequality. The real battle in the world, for Marx and the millions who believe in his theories, is not between good and evil. That view of the world is dismissed as a religious, and therefore primitive, preoccupation. Hence the Left’s constant putdown of those who see the world as pitted in an epic struggle between good and evil as “viewing everything in black and white” or “Manichaeism.”
For the Left the epic battle is, rather, between rich and the poor; bourgeoisie and proletariat, bosses and workers, corporations and society. And the greatest evil is not cruelty or dictatorship or even totalitarianism but rather poverty.
That is one reason the Left constantly maintains that America is in Iraq “for oil” or,even more hallucinatory, to personally enrich George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and companies such as Halliburton. They see the world through an economic prism. It is a prism that profoundly distorts reality. But its worst feature is that it is essentially amoral; it is oblivious to the question of good versus of evil.
That is a reason that few on the Left can even acknowledge that the people we are fighting in Iraq are evil. I have asked opponents of the war on my radio show and in my syndicated column whether they are prepared to at least acknowledge that those we are fighting are evil. After all, these people blow up fellow Muslims at prayer, bomb Iraqi nursing homes, target weddings with explosives, slaughter human beings like sheep in the name of religion and wish to institute a religious totalitarian state in which, among other things, women and gays (groups to whom the Left gives particularly passionate verbal support) will be treated like subhumans. How can a leftist not call these people evil? But almost none can.
For those who regard economics as the measure of good and evil, regarding our enemy in Iraq as evil is next to impossible.
The other pertinent difference that separates the Left from the rest of us is the Left’s infatuation with pacifism. While few on the Left are pure pacifists, most of them have a high regard for this belief that killing is never moral
(my comment: unless it's an abortion--that's not killing to them!). That’s why they have a deep ambivalence, at best, toward the military and the police. Those people devote their professional lives to preparing to kill when ordered to or when otherwise called for. That is why folks on the Left either display, or highly regard those who display, bumper stickers that read “War is not the answer,” or “Violence never solved anything,” or Gandhi’s “An eye for an eye will make us all blind,” or “Imagine Peace.”
Finally, the Left hates talk of good and evil because it smacks of traditional Judeo-Christian religion, and the Left either loathes Judeo-Christian values or redefines them. The Left adores Western Europe because it is a welfare society (fewer rich people, less social inequality) and because it is secular. The latter means a great deal to the Left. The Left regards itself as on a much higher intellectual and moral plane than the religious. And the thing that they most loathe about the religious is their belief that there are moral judgments to be made and that there is therefore a standard of good and evil to which everyone is accountable.
So when the religious use the terms good and evil, the Left recoils.
All this leftist aversion to talk about evil has come to the fore since 9-11. In that sense, 9-11 was a catastrophe for the Left. It told most Americans exactly what the Left does not want Americans to believe: that there is major evil in the world which only America can truly fight; that America is not the Great Problem and, even worse, that the Great Problem regards America as its primary enemy; that sometimes only moral violence can end immoral violence; that people do terrible things for reasons having nothing to do with economics; that the U.N. is morally worthless; that America really is exceptional, and that there really is such as a thing as evil and those who fight it are better than those who fight the fighters.
9-11 was terrible for America. But it has thus far been devastating for the Left. That is one reason the Left so hates George W. Bush; and why, in their hearts, they have to hope he—and therefore we—lose in Iraq.
Dennis Prager is host of a weekday talk show on KRLA 870 AM in Los Angeles.
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This article appeared in the September 2006 issue of Citizen magazine. Copyright © 2006 Focus on the Family. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
