Causal flows

From Instapundit.

MARCH 11, 2018

JOHN HAWKINS: What Conservative Women Can Learn About Liberals From the Way They Treat Dana Loesch.

I think that a lot of leftists are awful people in search of a belief system that sanctifies their awfulness, and that leads them to leftism.

An insight which feels right but, I suspect, needs some boundaries.

While virtually all forms of leftism are functionally and pragmatically wrong, there are plenty of people with deep socialist convictions who are essentially good people with good intentions but an incomplete knowledge of history and/or an erroneous interpretation of that history. Men of private virtues who misunderstand the inherent evil of the public policies they virtuously and with innocent intent pursue. Micheal Foot, leader of the British Labour Party in the early 1980s, comes immediately to mind. They intend no evil or tragedy, but that is the consequence of their ideology to which they deliberately remain blind.

It sounds like a thin hair to split but I believe it to be true. You can be wrong without being evil.

Reynolds' comment gets at the underlying causal flow. It is easy to look at all forms of socialism/communism as inherently evil. But perhaps that is the wrong description. It is people and their actions and behaviors which ultimately create evil. So perhaps socialism/communism is simply a tired and failed system of thinking. It is perhaps not the ideology that creates the evil per se, but the people attracted to it. That is what I take from Reynolds' insight.

And this hair-splitting is not to ignore evil on the far right. But there is much less moral or philosophical universality on the right. Religious conservatives, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, Burkean conservatives, Lockean conservatives, Hayekian conservatives, Randian conservatives, are not of an ilk. The commonalities among them are limited. The fanatics of the far right are few and far between and their motivation is far more transparently a personal will-to-power than some ideological inspiration.

Coming back to Reynolds. So not all leftists. What might be the appropriate delimiter? Social Justice leftists? Fanatical leftists? Totalitarian leftists? Not quite sure but Reynolds insight feels true. There is so much hatred, fanaticism, misogyny, racism, intolerance, violence, ostracism on the left. What is the correct rubric for that stew? Clunky, but perhaps:

Fanatic totalitarian leftists are awful people in search of a belief system that sanctifies their awfulness, and that leads them to fanatic totalitarian leftism