THE MYTH OF THE LEFT

Our political environment is based on weaponized misunderstandings and advantageous illusions. It's time we disabuse ourselves of these lies and create something better.

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Bourbon Talk Political Q&A Livestream, October 23rd, 8pm eastern

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In a dangerously polarized world, there’s at least one thing most everyone can agree on.

The Left is the problem.

For Republicans, it’s woke socialists. They’re everywhere. The universities pump them out by the thousands. They’re protesting a multi-discipline building named after a racist. Silencing speakers when they’re not learning CRT and pledging their lives to transhumanism and aggressive atheism.

Culturally they have all the power. Cancel culture threatens every straight white man. Movies, television shows, even the commercials and football games, for god’s sake, are so woke it hurts. You can’t even turn on the tube for seeing a same-sex transgender mixed-race family eating Cheerios while declaring their pronouns.

Why, their dangerous ideology is so omnipresent and poisonous that it’s literally forcing Republicans and conservatives to consider becoming fascists and raising a strongman authoritarian to put things to right.

And the Left’s control over the Democratic Party? Absolute and total.

Even some Democrats agree. The reason the party keeps losing elections, they tell you, is a suicidal relationships with the Left. What’s necessary, they’ll never stop telling you, is a movement toward the Center. Give up on the more “radical” stuff that freaks out the fabled independent voter. Quite talking about institutional racism and inequality and seek out moderate Republicans.

It’s the only way.

This liberal point-of-view is echoed by Democratic politicians, published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, bandied about on the “Leftist” airwaves on CNN. It is, in a word, everpresent.

And so, it needs asking: what is the Left? Because outside of Bernie Sanders or members of the isolated “Squad,” no one can particularly define it.

Sometimes, in attack ads, it’s Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and even Joe Biden. But those claims are always accompanied by the subject’s picture photoshopped alongside Sanders and AOC, though both are largely ostracized by the party structure. And there are hardly any pictures at all because they largely do not work on projects together.

So, again, what is the Left?

Historically speaking, the Left is a term for people looking to fundamentally change the political system, whether through redistribution of wealth or through attempts to address systemic inequality. Routinely this includes socialists, democratic socialists, and other like-minded individuals and organizations.

In other words, a grouping that has no power or actual influence in American politics. Or, largely in Western politics in general, which is not an accident but the result of centuries of struggles and decades of deliberate action.

“The Left” is not real. Well, at least not “real” if “real” means a workable coalition of influence. The Left has been marginalized, sheered away from public discourse. It exists as a strawman, or rather a ghost that haunts moderates and conservatives alike. A specter that legitimizes their stances and actions, a warning of what could be if steps are not taken to prevent ruin.

Politically, the Left has been effectively neutralized. This was achieved through elections, propaganda, the machinery of the major parties, and, in a bizarre and disturbing story, victim of a worldwide conspiracy to kill and undermine Leftists who might challenge the status quo.

What we do have, though, is a facsimile of the Left that is communicated through our media by publications, corporations, and the parties themselves in order to profit and consolidate power.

This is the story of one of the most consequential misunderstandings in American politics. It is the story of the myth of the Left and it is a story we must learn if we are to ever escape this death spiral and worsening crisis.

And we begin with a car bomb in Washington, D.C. in 1976 and a political assasination that would be largely lost to history.