Why the Left Has an Instinctive Urge to Tear Down America

If you pay attention to liberals long enough, one thing you will come to realize about them is that they have an almost instinctive urge to tear down America. Whatever it is, if it makes our society function better, liberals will ceaselessly try to undermine it.

The borders? They want them wide open. The military? They look at them as a bunch of mindless drones. Police? They can’t stand them. Criminals? They try to protect them. Welfare recipients and bums? They encourage them. Drugs? The more they can encourage their use, the better. Having non-political events and institutions so people can just enjoy each other’s company without inserting politics into it? No, everything from sports to schools, to games to the FBI must be blatantly politicized. Government spending? No amount is too much. The Constitution? They consider it to be an irrelevant set of rules that’s in their way. Successful people? They’re greedy and we should hate them. The Founding Fathers? Just a bunch of dead, old white men. Religion? They detest it. Morality? They laugh at it. America’s friends around the world? They’re lukewarm toward them. America’s enemies? They’re ready to cater to them to show them we’re nice people. The American people? They need to be split into different racial groups and turned against each other. Also, all the ones that don’t support liberalism are greedy, evil, bigots and you should hate them, even if they’re your family.

You can see this tendency reflected in two incidents in New York that have been in the news a lot lately.

Jordan Neely was a career criminal with 40+ arrests, some of them violent, who threatened a subway car full of people. Some of the passengers, including Daniel Penny, were afraid for their lives and the lives of the other passengers. Daniel Penny subdued Neely and he later died. The DA attempted to put Penny in prison, but a jury refused to convict him. Most liberals considered this an outrage.

On the other hand, the CEO of United Healthcare was assassinated in the street by an unknown assailant (he was later caught and turned out to be a radical left-winger named Luigi Mangione). An awful lot of liberals publicly cheered that murder. I could easily give you almost countless examples, but here’s famed liberal “journalist” Taylor Lorenz who was thrilled that the CEO of an insurance company was murdered in cold blood by a lunatic:

You could say a lot of things about this, but it falls into that same pattern you will see from liberals over and over again. If it preserves civilization and holds society together, like a selfless hero standing up to defend a subway car full of people from a threatening criminal, liberals hate it. On the other hand, if it’s something that tears society apart, like endorsing the assassination of people just because you don’t like the industry they work in? They’re all for it.

Why are they like this?

I’d say there are three interlocking reasons for it, all of which could be standalone theories. One of them is a bit charitable, but the other two? Not so much.

The first one is based on the research of Jonathan Haidt, who does some brilliant work on multiple subjects, including the differences between how conservatives and liberals think. Although the particulars are highly controversial, Haidt theorized that conservatives tend to have a different, broader moral structure than liberals:

In the book, Haidt uses experimental research to develop what he dubs a theory of moral foundations, though I prefer the term moral ideals. (I’ll use that alternative throughout this post.) Haidt found that people expressed attachment to as many as six of these ideals:

Care—the desire to help those in need and avoid inflicting harm

Liberty—the drive to seek liberation from constraints and to fight oppression

Fairness—the impulse to impose rules that apply equally to all and avoid cheating

Loyalty—the instinct to affirm the good of the group and punish those who betray it

Authority—the urge to uphold hierarchical relationships and avoid subverting them

Sanctity—the tendency to admire purity and experience disgust at degradation

Haidt then examines which moral ideals line up with different political commitments. As one might expect, doctrinaire libertarians are strongly devoted to liberty, pay a modest amount of attention to fairness, and display indifference to the other moral ideals. Liberals, by contrast, tend to emphasize the first three ideals in descending order of intensity—care, liberty, and fairness—and express little concern about the others. Social conservatives, meanwhile, affirm the goodness of all six moral ideals.

In other words, Haidt would say that both conservatives and liberals value care, liberty, and fairness, but conservatives also have other moral values that get factored into the equation that liberals don’t. That’s why, for example, a conservative may highly value patriotism while a liberal doesn’t, show respect for the police while liberals think “All cops are b@stards,” and the right finds drag queen story hours horrifying while liberals don’t see the problem.

You could certainly nitpick this whole concept to death with exceptions and areas that don’t quite fit in one case or another, but there does seem to be something to this idea. Whether it’s genetic or just a way of looking at the world, liberals and conservatives as a class do seem to view an awful lot of issues in a fundamentally different ways. This would help explain that.

Of course, my friend Evan Sayet had a different theory about this that got a lot of attention a few years back:

What happens is, they are indoctrinated into what I call a "cult of indiscriminateness." The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, starting with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry; that no matter how sin­cerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your upbringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfa­ther's birth; that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. It is nothing other than the reflection of your bigotries, and the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought.

…Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. It leads the modern liberal to invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Very simply, if nothing is to be recognized as better or worse than anything else then success is de facto unjust. There is no explanation for success if nothing is better than anything else and the greater the success the greater the injustice. Conversely and for the same reason, failure is de facto proof of victimization, and the greater the failure, the greater the proof of the victim is, or the greater the victimization.

If you succeed, you must not have deserved it by default. If you’re a failure, then it must not have been fair, or society must have let you down. If black Americans aren’t as successful as white Americans, it HAS TO BE because of racism. If the Israelis are stronger than the Palestinians, it must make the Palestinians the good guys. If somebody mugs you, it’s America’s fault because they must have been poor or frustrated by the system. If the United States is the strongest country in the world, it has to be because we’re the most unjust country in the world.

Liberal thinking is shot through with this philosophy from top-to-bottom, although they will certainly make exceptions for liberals. In other words, as long as someone is on “their side,” this doesn’t apply, but the second they go off the reservation like Joe Rogan or Elon Musk, their success makes them villains again.

Last but not least, there’s a third factor built on the backs of the other concepts. Liberals think America is an awful place AND they have a lot of trouble grasping the importance of authority or concepts like patriotism, which means they’re going to struggle with some of the key concepts that make a society work in the first place.

Now, combine that with the fact that liberals are utopian at heart, which is why socialism and communism are so appealing to them – and what do you get? “We need to tear this society down and rebuild it from scratch! We’ll have 90% tax rates on the rich, everyone will have a right to free everything, and we’ll decide everything by government committee!”

Does it matter to them that kind of utopian thinking has led to murder by the millions in places like China and Cambodia? How about that they completely control wealthy cities like New York and San Francisco and haven’t come close to turning them into paradise? Not one iota. All they need to do is “burn it all down” and rebuild it like one giant left-wing college campus, and we’ll have heaven on earth (you know, if they believed in heaven, which most of them don’t).

Of course, at the end of the day, it’s what they do that matters, not why they do it. Why are liberals so hellbent on tearing our society apart? Why does the Left almost inevitably support people and policies that weaken America? Does it matter “why,” or does it matter that it’s a core part of the way liberals think? Unfortunately, if your goal is to keep America prosperous, strong, and together, you will find liberals opposing you every step of the way.

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