Another changer, but not enough of a changer
Here’s a change article, of sorts (hat tip: commenter “Artfldgr”).
It’s written about a woman named Nora Gold who faces a contradiction between two things she loves—Israel and leftist beliefs—and can’t figure out how to reconcile them because they are irreconcilable at this point. I write “at this point” because, early in Israel’s 20th century history, leftists were highly instrumental in the formation of that country. Read about Israel’s history of Labor Zionism and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Whether or not the two were ever actually compatible, or whether it was just a pipe dream from the start (I say the latter), they were thought to be compatible by many of the leftists/Zionists of the time. That’s why Gold, the Canadian woman who experienced the supposed left to right(ish) change the article describes, had a formative pro-Zionist experience while attending a summer camp as a girl that was run by leftists.
She has enough smarts to see that there’s a problem in reconciling her two loves, and enough integrity to not be able to dump the pro-Israel part, but she can’t bring herself to really dump the leftism part or to see the anti-Israel stance of the left as intrinsic to the left. To her, it’s just a case of puzzling anti-Semitism, come out of the blue to turn the left away from Israel.
She also knows that in the past (when she was in that socialist camp in her youth) there seemed to be no contradiction. The left loved Israel back then.
What actually happened? The Palestinians became defined as the oppressed and Israel as the oppressors. That trumped everything for the left, and it never looked back.
Nor will it, despite whatever initiatives Gold may mount to stop the left from its anti-Israel fervor and support of the movements to boycott Israel. In order to understand this, she would have to look at leftism with a more analytical eye, and she could end up experiencing a great deal more of an upheaval and change experience than she ever bargained for. Until then, she will remain in a no-man’s and no-woman’s land, betwixt and between.
Purgatory
It must come as a real shock when/if these people come to realize that it is conservative Christians who are the strongest supporters of Zion, more so than liberal Jews. And they have forgotten that it was a Republican President, Nixon, who saved Israel in 1973 when he provided the resupply that they needed to defend themselves.
I have a close friend with the same problem as Gold’s. Last week, he sent me an email in which he said he finally had to admit that the “neocon Republicans” had been right all along about Obama’s approach to Israel. That was truly wrenching for him. But I just got another email from him today all about what Neanderthals the Republicans are with regard to the economy and all things cultural.
Jon Jewett –
They are aware of that. But just like on the subject of black racism, they find a way to massage their cognitive dissonance into line with their priors.
What they say is, “Yeah, but the only reason conservative Christians support Israel is because they believe the Jews should all be there to hasten the day of reckoning.” The point is, the Christians don’t actually support Israel; they support things that further their weird apocalyptic eschatology.
In effect: a holocaust by God himself.
I wish I was making that up, but just try bringing the subject up with a leftist, and you’ll witness that retort flow from them as naturally as sewage from a drainpipe.
It’s weapons-grade stupidity, of course. It makes no difference what sort of eschatology the evangelicals have – that’s on God’s time, and unless the lefties think it’s actually immanent, there’s no practical difference between what the evangelicals believe and what secular supporters believe: namely, that Israel must be supported in this life.
The most challenging belief to eradicate among the left is that the right is somehow bigoted and racist in their innermost cells. The Platonic Form of the right is Racism (today they are more inclined to say: their DNA). Even lefties who begin to doubt their own ideologies usually remain on the left because they cannot imagine any sane alternative. It’s like the empathic part of their brains atrophies to a pinhole when it comes to the right.
Most ideological lefties I know regard the American right as more sinister than Hamas. Some will say it out loud. Others just make statements that add up to it. Either way, they reach a level of abstraction in their thought which places the right on the side of those whose purpose is to foment discord and hatred, and thus oppression, poverty, and violence. And since the right in America is near the levers of power within the world’s hegemon, it stands to reason for them that this makes the right the world’s number one threat.
Often when I talk to a lefty, I can feel the hatred burning behind their eyes, with greater or lesser intensity. It’s there, anyway. And it’s extremely creepy.
Be that as it may, the issue of Israel is just another case of that. With respect to black racism, as I remarked on another recent thread, the excuse is that black’s feel threatened by white racists (conservatives), and so ironically develop the very authoritarian tendencies that the people who hate them exhibit. The etiology always goes back to the bigoted white religious conservative male.
For most leftist supporters of Israel, it would probably take nothing less than Democrats personally and publicly giving Hamas the go ahead to do their worst to the Jews for them to even begin to see the right as a legitimate alternative. You have to imagine it as someone coming to feel that the Nazis are a legitimate alternative.
Notice that the same mental contortions by the left are exhibited with respect to most other policies as well. Which tells us something we know already, but bears repeating again and again (the truth bears repeating): for the left, leftism is religion.
Often when I talk to a lefty, I can feel the hatred burning behind their eyes, with greater or lesser intensity. It’s there, anyway. And it’s extremely creepy.
Their hate is weak and is no where close to the True Hate.
Compared to even the Islamic Jihad, most Leftists aren’t willing to kill or die for their beliefs. Thus their “hate” merely amounts to what people feel when they pick chocolate over vanilla.
Y,
I think their hate is real, it’s just that they’re also cowards.
Ymarsakar, you’re fooling yourself. While lefties may not yet be willing to kill you, they’re currently fine with imprisoning you and confiscating your property.
Matt –
Yep. But it never mattered whether a Duranty or a Bukharin or a Zinn was a coward mano a mano. Of course they were all cowards, as their ilk is today.
They provide cover for, justification of, and commands to others, who do the killing for them. Or else, like Che, they will put two in your skull when you’re chained against a wall outside a secret prison.
That unforgettable vignette from Sidney Hook’s autobiography about his encounter with Brecht is emblematic of this:
“I turned to Brecht and asked him why, if he felt the way he did about Jerome and the other American communists, he kept on collaborating with them, particularly in view of their apparent approval or indifference to what was happening in the Soviet Union… Brecht shrugged his shoulders and kept on making invidious remarks about the American Communist Party and asserted that only the Soviet Union and its Communist Party mattered.
“But I argued… it was the Kremlin and above all Stalin himself who were responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of the opposition and their dependents. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, ‘As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.’
“I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him. ‘What are you saying?’ I asked. He calmly repeated himself, ‘The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.’
“I was stunned by his words. ‘Why? Why?’ I exclaimed. All he did was smile at me in a nervous sort of way. I got up, went into the next room, and fetched his hat and coat. When I returned, he was still sitting in his chair, holding a drink in his hand. When he saw me with his hat and coat, he looked surprised. He put his glass down, rose, and with a sickly smile took his coat and left. Neither of us said a word. I never saw him again.”
Their hatred is very real. Their cowardice is too – like Brecht’s nervous and sickly smile, walking out the door feigning pride but revealing a deep shame.
Yet, very real also is is their willingness to exterminate, so long as they can sit at a sufficiently abstract remove from the butchery which they facilitate and/or command.
Ymarsakar, you’re fooling yourself. While lefties may not yet be willing to kill you, they’re currently fine with imprisoning you and confiscating your property.
They’re not able to kill me, via their own personal tools. Quite a difference that makes.
Have you ever exerted enough Will to kill a living creature, Irai?
If not, you’re the fool here, that is speaking of what you don’t know anything about.
Their hatred is very real.
Then you are claiming to have hated someone enough to kill them in such a matter, kolnai?
Cause otherwise, you’re just theorizing based upon some intellectual profile of the Left, who you have not met nor have you become.
The walking brain dead of the left are clueless about the true nature of the ideology to which they have sworn alligence. All inherent contradictions in their ideology are magically reconciled to fit the narrative of the day. Jews are good except when Jews are bad for defending themselves from homophobic, misogynistic arabs who are good because they are resisting the repression by the Jews who are bad for conducting imaginary genocide against people who would be all to happy to stone/behead homosexuals and naughty women in NYC.
Pretzel logic…. its not just a great Steely Dan tune.
Cognitive dissonance will just make her uncomfortable. It usually takes something more painful for a full conversion
Y –
I’m sorry I don’t understand the point you’re making (I’m not being snarky; that’s sincere).
I don’t see the logical chain leading from my observation that their hatred is real to, ergo, I must necessarily claim to have hated someone enough to want to kill them “in such a matter” (what matter are you referring to?).
I also don’t understand why it follows that if I haven’t wanted to kill someone in such a matter I’m just “theorizing based on some intellectual profile of the left,” who I “have not met nor become.” I don’t understand what that means.
Sidney Hook was a leftist and he talked about their hatred; David Horowitz too; etc., etc.; but I don’t see why I’d have to have shared in that hatred to observe it. I’m not theorizing based on an intellectual profile; I’m drawing a profile based on my experience with being around and observing leftists.
Moreover, not everyone who hates is brave enough to put themselves at risk on behalf of their pathos. That’s not really a deep insight and I don’t know why you want to insist on the contrary.
What am I missing here?
I don’t see the logical chain leading from my observation that their hatred is real to, ergo, I must necessarily claim to have hated someone enough to want to kill them “in such a matter” (what matter are you referring to?).
The cowardly manner described above, from a distance, so to speak, vs direct action where people do it personally.
If you don’t have any personal experience to judge from, then how can you tell what is real hate from merely a dislike of ice cream flavors?
For example, if someone has not ever walked, swam, or ran before, how can they tell the difference between the 3 when they see one? Because somebody else tells them it is so?
Their hatred is weak. And what is real is what exists, and the weak has a very faint existence.
Sidney Hook was a leftist and he talked about their hatred; David Horowitz too; etc., etc.; but I don’t see why I’d have to have shared in that hatred to observe it. I’m not theorizing based on an intellectual profile; I’m drawing a profile based on my experience with being around and observing leftists.
You’re drawing it based upon what those people told you, yes. But you err greatly if you think that’s your own experience talking, because you haven’t observed. It’s second hand information.
Horowitz is such an unredeemed Leftist that he went after the author of one novel concerning the history of communists in Roosevelt’s administration. Are we supposed to take his views here, regurgitated from you, as the basis for our experience based observation?
Why Why Why Ymarsakar
Because innocents have no strings to manipulate or steer them, they are always dangerous to the dirty for many reasons.
and your wrong Ymarsakar
plain and simple
there need not be a philosophical contortion that satisfies you
as none would
better yet, your not even wrong…
your not even in the ball park of right
by your own logic, you don’t exist…
you and all you have ever brought here is made of the same flimsy material you accuse for others. for that matter, France probably doesn’t exist, nor much of anything else.
are we supposed to take your views, spewed forth from you, as the basis of anything? once we did they would be but second hand experiences we would loath regurgitating.
even if you think they are something, you just insured that they were nothing.
“not everyone who hates is brave enough to put themselves at risk on behalf of their pathos.”
Fortunately for us. Although you have already said so, a great many would be uninhibited to exercise their hatred if personal risk was removed.
Being more cynical by the day, I believe that number would shock even the most cynical among us.
Even if it was indifference rather than malice, the end result would be the same. the Left has successfully stigmatized conservatives as the enemy, and the disciples it has recruited are a frightening bunch of fanatics- the majority unable to resolve the cognitive dissonance without deprogramming. A religion they are- in the way a cult is a religion.
Many people who get caught up in cults are not stupid- they’re brains are reprogrammed by diabolical people who happen to be smarter, at least in the ways of manipulating a mind. When I speak to a committed Lefty, I try to remember they have a programmed response for almost everything. If none is available, there’s a real frustration that often looks like, and probably is hatred. Unless you can isolate that person from the cult support structure and reprogram them, you’re wasting your time. Even betrayal by their own isn’t sufficient, it usually takes something personally catastrophic to shake a cultist from their devotion.
Y –
Got it – we disagree fairly thoroughly. But I still leave it open that we’re talking at cross-purposes.
* I do not agree, first of all, that you need to have been once filled with hatred to understand and recognize real hatred when you see it. Jews in the Holocaust were not filled with hatred, but they understood that Eichmann and Goebbels hated them. Most Jews also understood that anti-Semitic journalists and novelists hated them vigorously well before the Holocaust, despite their lack of “direct action.”
The same holds for other attitudes, emotions, and moods: you don’t have to be wise to recognize wisdom, a genius to recognize genius, angry to recognize anger, grieving to recognize grief, or dead to recognize death.
I dare say that someone born without legs can understand the difference between walking, running, and swimming. It’s pretty easy – by observation. You don’t have to personally experience it to know what you’re dealing with.
Maybe you want to say something more like a blind-for-life person can’t understand colors. That’s true, but I don’t accept the analogy. We’re not empathically “blind” (unless, perhaps, we’re afflicted in some way). We’re fundamentally empathic creatures with a spectrum of emotions, and certain thoughts and deeds tend to be attached to those emotions, such that we can generally recognize someone filled with love even if we’ve never been so filled (likewise with hatred).
To be sure, we don’t know the full richness of an experience if we’ve never felt it ourselves, but that was never the point at issue. The point at issue is knowing what you’re dealing with. And a willingness to rationalize, cooperate with and participate in mass slaughter of innocents in collusion with evil, combined with near complete intellectual dishonesty – well, hatred tends to play a part in that. I can’t for the life of me see why you think it’s necessary to have authentic personal experience of feeling deep hatred to confirm that the above really is hatred.
At the very least, this much can be said. Aristotle wrote that a certain people was not stupid, “but they do the things that stupid people do.” The left, even if I’m wrong about their hatefulness, do the things that hateful people do – I suppose not to your satisfaction, and that’s fair enough.
* Second, if you want to say that the left’s hatred is weak by definition, because they don’t personally go after the objects of their hatred, then again, that’s your prerogative. I think there are different ways to act on hatred, and just because someone chooses to act on it by legitimating or ordering mass extermination doesn’t make it any the weaker. People who hate intensely are often cowards. We learn that by observation, not by being hateful cowards ourselves.
* As for Horowitz et al., I am not drawing my opinion “based on what they told me.” They didn’t tell me anything. I read their books and took them as reference points for possible confirmation or disconfirmation in my own experience. Do you not read books? If you do, I wonder what the reason is, given your expressed views.
What exactly does one who reads about the history of the left and the Gulags, who associates with hard-core, ideological leftists on a daily basis (as I do), who observes what the left does and says persistently – what is such a person failing to observe?
I think you may have mistaken me here. You seem to think I’m trying to force something – something “regurgitated” – on the good commenters at neo’s palace. I only brought Horowitz up as an example – a hundred others would have done just as well. By your understanding he should be a legitimate judge of hatred because he has personally experienced it. And if he is a legit judge, then his judgments should be kosher. That’s all I was saying.
* Who is “our” in “our experience-based observation”? You mean our fellow commenters here? They know me well enough, and they certainly don’t need me or you to speak for them. I couldn’t regurgitate or force anything on them if I tried.
What actually happened? The Palestinians became defined as the oppressed…
No.
What happened was 9/11. The Mooslims attacked America. And in Leftie-land, that is all it took to flip the Mooslims into heroes. Look how they love death.
Paul A’Barge:
Your time frame is wrong. The left had abandoned and turned on Israel long before 9/11. When Israel became (in the left’s eyes) “occupiers” by refusing to just give back what they’d won in the ’67 war, that was the first step. There were others, and important among them were that the Israeli government stopped being reliably on the left, when the Likud Party got power in the 70s.
neo, the left’s animus towards Israel has nothing to do with the “occupation” or their treatment of Palestinians just as “ra-a-a-a-cism” has nothing to do with race. It really began even before the 1967 war when the Soviet Union came down firmly on the side of the Arabs after Nasser took power in the ’50s (in Israel’s early days they took aid from both the US and the Soviets). The “true belieivers” then turned anti-Zionist. At first it was just the far left but it has gradually spread to take over most of the Democrats by now, coincident with the takeover of the Democrat party by the “Michael Moore” wing. But certainly not just a coincidence.
At the same time neo I do not want to dismiss your point about Likud. In fact that is a significant subtext in Obama’s policy; undoubtedly a lot of his hostility towards Israel is due to its being led by Likud who he sees as Republicans. Ludicrously simple-minded for such a “genius” bwahaha. If there were a more leftist government in Israel his posture towards Israel would be warmer though he would still be shamelessly groveling to Hamas
I have to agree with Kolnai about the leftists’ hatred. You can see it in their eyes; it makes you take a step back. I had a small snag with an acquaintance earlier this evening; I complimented his tan, he said the ozone hole means the sun is dangerous. I laughed that the ozone hole seems to be gone, we don’t hear about it any more.
That made his eyes flash anger, and he said, in clipped tones, “of course it’s still there! that’s why we have global warming.”
“No it’s not, it’s not the same mechanism.” (In my most reasonable tones.) He glared at me and was about to pounce, when the meeting was called to order. But the feeling it left me with was quite unpleasant: talking to the “devout” Leftist is like walking across rotten floorboards; you never know when you’re going to put a foot through.
Also, cowards can do a helluva lot of damage, in their own sneaky ways.
Almost through reading “Witness.” This is Whittaker Chambers reflecting on the Alger Hiss trial, and what it revealed about America, and the creeping socialist plague.
“The simple fact is that when [1948] I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.
“This is not a charge. My opinion of that revolution is not at issue. It is a statement of fact that need startle no one who has voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and, consciously or unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years. It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of the struggle for power.
“And with that we come to the heart of the Hiss Case and all its strange manifestations. No one could have been more dismayed than I at what I had hit, for though I knew it existed, I still had no adequate idea of its extent, the depth of its penetration, or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper, which is a reflex of its struggle to keep and advance its political power.
“It was the force of this revolution that had smothered the Hiss Case (and much else) for a decade, and fought to smother it in 1948. These were the forces that made the phenomenon of Alger Hiss possible; had made it possible for him to rise steadily in Government and reach the highest post AFTER he was already under suspicion as a Communist in many quarters, including Congress, and under the scrutiny of the FBI.
“Alger Hiss is only one name that stands for the whole Communist penetration of Government. He could not be exposed without raising the question of the real political temper and purposes of those who had protected and advanced him, and with whom he was so closely identified that they could not tell his breed from their own.”
This he wrote over fifty years ago. That ice cap has advanced a lot further south in the time since.
I have to agree with Kolnai about the leftists’ hatred. You can see it in their eyes; it makes you take a step back
not me
i cant see that, i have aspergers
and so, i am surrounded by them, and given i have no connections, resources, social life, etc… they spend a lot of time impinging on me, hurting me, denying me the ability to have a raise and children and a home.
but unlike the military, they just leave people like me behind to be stuck in this morass with no way out.
Also, cowards can do a helluva lot of damage, in their own sneaky ways.
see Passive Agressive to understand their “style”
Passive-aggressive behavior is the indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, sarcasm, stubbornness, sullenness, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible.
I notice in the comments that a number of people reference the hard right as anti-Semitic. I know that most realize that this is a distortion of the left. I might point out that I live in a small city in North Louisiana. Some years ago, the leaders of the city saw that our Jewish population had decreased, likely as a result of economy. Since then, a real push has been on to increase this population. These are the same people that the people on the left would call Jew haters and these people certainly do not believe in diversity for diversity sake. The point is that there is a considerable disconnect between what is real and fantasy in the liberal mind. By the way, if anyone wants to move to North Louisiana, you will be welcomed.
Artfldgr: “cowards can do a helluva lot of damage, in their own sneaky ways.”
Cowardice changes means, not ends.
Ann: “he sent me an email in which he said he finally had to admit that the “neocon Republicans” had been right all along about Obama’s approach to Israel”
Suggestion: Explain to your friend that a neoconservative is essentially a Wilsonian liberal in the Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy lineage, which is a keystone of the Democrats heritage.
While they vilified Bush for partisan gain, the Democrats and Obama also continued to claim the traditional liberal goals they share with Bush. In the partisan arena, the Democrats have turned the trick on their fundamental contradiction by rhetorically relabeling Bush’s post-9/11 liberal foreign policy as neocon, said pejoratively (liberal:neocon :: studious:nerd).
The Democrats’ reward for pulling off the trick, with the support of people like your friend, was winning partisan political advantage. But there’s been a real-world cost.
In the real world, abjuring Bush’s practical means to achieve the liberal goals has rendered American leadership a feckless failure. At the same time, Obama’s continuing claim of the liberal goals while advantaging the Islamists versus the region’s liberals has made America leadership a betraying liar.
If the conversation turns to the Iraq enforcement at any point, which it often does, explain to him that the truth is OIF was right on the law, justified on the policy, and defined by essentially liberal principles.
kolnai: “for the left, leftism is religion.”
I agree with the direction, but not the destination, though I’ve used it, too.
Religion implies higher values, such as the utopian characterization. While leftists do cite to higher values, they also routinely contradict them with a marked lack of regret.
That tells me that the religion characterization for the left is off the mark. Tribe, rather than religion, seems the more apt characterization.
Left activism is client based, not principle based.
PIV is always rape, ok?
http://witchwind.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/piv-is-always-rape-ok/
the above person has a solution to ALL the problems…
Eric –
You make a sound point, but I stick with the religion characterization for the following reason, while admitting it’s problematic: most of the leftists I know genuinely believe in their utopian values, so far as it’s possible to “believe in” something one has no clear or consistent conception of.
This brings us down (or up) to pretty sticky philosophical issues and I’ve already waded too far into those thickets for one thread, so you’ll understand if I’m a bit elliptical here. The basic idea is that utopianism is an inherently self-contradictory belief system that is premised upon (that marvelous phrase) an immanentizing of the eschaton.
This makes it more accurate to call it a “secular religion” (Raymond Aron’s term), a unique species of the larger genus.
In short, I stick with the “leftism is religion” slogan because 1) utopianism is at root a perversion of the belief in transcendent, higher values, a kind of political Gnosticism; 2) the fact that the left does, as you accurately note, routinely contradict their proclaimed values without regret, is an inevitable consequence of the perfection-on-earth nature of their values; and 3) the tribal element is a part of the religious devotion, an ecclesia of sorts.
I would need to add a lot of footnotes to this to flesh it out, but I’ll only mention the most important one, viz. , that the devotion to chimerical utopian values has a further perverse consequence, in that it makes it easier, not harder, to violate one’s professed values. This is because, first, what’s a little lying, cheating, and egg-breaking on the road to earthly paradise; and second, because if the conscience is troubled – as the Gnostic/utopian conscience tends to be – by merely being bound up with the fallen world in all of its pettiness, superficiality, and ordinariness, it isn’t likely to be bothered much by plain jane offenses against everyday ethical norms. Truly moral people don’t go around, like the left, trying to be Moral.
In other words, as the real Kolnai put it,
“if my personal feeling of guilt is centered on my ‘contamination’ by ‘original sin,’ little of it may be spared for the secondary and consecutive things of which I am properly and distinctively guilty, i.e., my ‘actual sins.”
Now, all of that being said, I take your point and I grant it could be right. I would only suggest that perhaps the Tribal and the Religious understanding of leftism are not necessarily at odds, at least if we take the above as what is meant by calling leftism “religious.” Both characterizations can accommodate the phenomena. The sticking point is what it means to say that “The left really believes in their ‘higher values,” and that’s a post for another day.
Kolnai-You are so right in this, “Often when I talk to a lefty, I can feel the hatred burning behind their eyes, with greater or lesser intensity. It’s there, anyway. And it’s extremely creepy.” It also applies to the Om Shanti / Namaste New Agey type. Once you pierce their thin veneer of Om Namaste, you will find a seething rage. YES they are cowards, but their rage IS an energy that feeds others who have the guts to do the violence the Left will only fantasize about.
And Artfidgr as always spot on, they can do massive damage with their passive aggression. ESPECIALLY when they run agencies like the IRS, and Dept of InJustice and achieve the power of POTUS.
Joshua Muravchik has an interesting article on socialism as religion.
http://www-tc.pbs.org/heavenonearth/resources/commentary_socialism_vs_religion_07-14-02.pdf
For how many years can anyone be deluded not only about their own nature, but about the nature of their enemies is an enduring mystery of humanity.
No doubt thinking of yourself as a “good person” and your cause as a “good cause” papers over the lies, deceit, and hatred.
ErisGuy: “No doubt thinking of yourself as a “good person” and your cause as a “good cause” papers over the lies, deceit, and hatred.”
Taking off from my comment and kolnai’s response at August 6th, 2014 at 12:36 pm about whether the Left is best characterized as religion or tribe, your comment brings to mind the related question: Is the Christian Church Christianity?
In other words, is the Christian Church a tribe and Christianity separately a religion claimed by a tribe called the Christian Church?
By the same token, there’s a recent dust-up with feminists about this social media phenomenon:
https://www.facebook.com/WomenAgainstFeminism
Generally, the women against feminism protest the track record of “lies, deceit, and hatred” of feminists (ie, the tribe) while feminists have countered with the ‘mission statement’ goals, ideals, purposes of feminism (ie, the religion).
Like people who remain Christian but have left the Christian Church because they deem the tribe is no longer true to the religion, I wonder if people like Nora Gold who believe in liberalism can be weaned from the Left if they can be made to see the difference between the religion they believe in and the tribe that practices “lies, deceit, and hatred” under the cover of the religion.
The same religion-or-tribe notion underlies my suggestion to Ann at August 6th, 2014 at 10:43 am. President Bush and other “neocon Republicans” have been thoroughly stigmatized by the tribe calling itself Liberal. However, Bush’s “neocon” post-9/11 foreign policy, though disclaimed by the tribe Liberal, was actually paradigmatically liberal. I’m curious what Ann’s friend reaction would be if she explained the contradiction to her friend.