I sit in bewilderment at the Democrats’, the left’s ability to believe that a government beginning to take over one-sixth of the American economy for health matters, given the staggering failures that they themselves attribute to Medicare and Medicaid, given the collapse or near collapse of these systems in so many countries, it proves what I have believed my entire adult life, that the left has made its views a sort of religion. Most on the left are not religious, but people yearn to have absolutes in their lives. And the notion of government care is a religious value, a quasi-religious value, for people on the left in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. The notion that the government can do a better job than anyone else, that is its belief, after all, they can do the best, that it flies in the face of reality in virtually every country, and will in every country over time, does not matter.
Just as the left believed that men and women were basically the same, as I was taught in my graduate work and my undergraduate work, even though there was no basis, no shred of evidence for that notion, people on the left, many of them good and kind, believe what they want to believe. That is the bubble that I describe the left in.
I am almost speechless. Though I make a living talking, I am almost speechless at the belief that this will be better for America, to have the government take over so much more, increase taxes once again, expand government once again, expand the number of people employed by the government once again. What the left did to my state of California, the most prosperous, the most adventurous, the most successful country in the world, was California, because it is, it has the economy of about the seventh largest country in the world. Not destroyed, but on its way to destruction by Democrats running this state, and yet it doesn’t matter. It does not matter to blacks what Democrats have done to all of their cities, run their cities for an entire generation for forty years. They will vote them in again as they watch their cities crumble, as they watch their inner cities deteriorate.
It does not matter, because people on the left don’t vote based on reality. They vote based on hope. That’s why the word hope is so big on the left. It’s not nearly as big on the right. We never had a hope candidate, because conservatives don’t live on hope. They live in the world of reality where people are not basically good, where you believe that the more authority that you give to people in government, as Lord Acton said, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, that the more people have more power, the worse it is for a society, that the more you take away from people, the more you have an enervated society, a society in which you have sucked the energy out of it, and people don’t wish to produce any longer.
But for the left, it is a dream, that’s another term that is very big on the left, to dream, to hope. What was that famous Robert Kennedy statement? I never can remember word for word these statements, but essentially about some believe, some have hope, many of you know it by heart, and I’ll get it for you in a moment. Some have hope in what can be, but I have hope in what is yet unseen, or something to that effect, and it was such a big deal.
I don’t have hope for what is unseen. I have a very realistic understanding of the staggering limitations of human beings. And in light of that, I am in awe of the American achievement, in light of the raw material of humanity, how mixed, how morally mixed it is, how conflicted it is. The human being cannot be remade. What you can do is you can liberate humans to be the best that they can be. And in that sense, liberty is so essential to the American dream. And it is all being shattered by the left. And it is all being shattered, because what they believe, and it has been true since Karl Marx, is a dream.
When I studied Marxism at Columbia University, it was called secular messianism. Everybody who has studied Marxism who was not a Marxist, even Marxists acknowledged it. It was a secular form of messianism, from the word messiah. It was a chosen people, it was a quasi religion. You know who the chosen people of Marxism were? The proletariate – the working class. They will lead humanity to salvation. And then, just as Isaiah spoke of an eschatological time, a time after time, when the lion will like with the lamb, so, too, the left believes there is a time when people will not have to work, where all their needs will be met, and they can devote their day to poetry. That’s indeed Marx’s own vision of what he hoped would take place. It has not changed one iota. Europe dropped Christianity, and picked up leftism. It’s substitute religion.
And every single member of the Democratic Party in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives who goes along with this bill, is a member of that hope and dream crowd, that does not know reality, and doesn’t want to know reality. Every religious person has a suspension of belief, has a leap of faith. Of course we do. I have a leap of faith in a God, and I have a leap of faith to a good God, to a God who gave Moses the Ten Commandments at Mount Sanai. But that’s not the same as having a leap of faith to how the government should take over things. My leaps of faith are restricted to my religion. But for the left, leaps of faith are pervasive. And it is true about global warming. The amount of data coming in, as the BBC reported yesterday, maybe we were wrong. The world is in fact getting colder. But it doesn’t matter to the left. Facts don’t matter. Beliefs matter. Hope matters. Re-orienting the economy to be green, that matters, not truth.