The climax of the New Left in American politics continues, built as much on faith as is the rise of the religious right among conservatives, bolstering the idea that a new dark age looms over Western civilization. For those inclined to think that’s hyperbole, if the success of Duck Dynasty and its supporters’ intimidation campaign to pressure a television network to rescind a suspension does not demonstrate wider cultural acceptance of archaic ideas, there’s today’s stark battle of words and ideas between gay celebrities, too. More on this later.
For now, consider the possible election of a New Left blank slate, merely the latest such candidate, as mayor of Chicago. His name is Jesus Garcia, though apparently he goes by the name Chuy (pronounced chewy), and he is the subject of a blistering report in the New York Times. The article by Julie Bosmanmarch begins:
When asked for his position on the pressing issues facing Chicago, Jesus G. Garcia, the man trying to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel, often has an answer — and sometimes more than one. When Mr. Garcia was recently asked what he would do about the red-light cameras that endlessly irk Chicagoans, he said that he would keep some of them. But almost two weeks ago, he had said he would get rid of them all. On the nearly 50 public schools that Mr. Emanuel closed during his first term, Mr. Garcia initially said that he would reopen some of them. Later, he said that he has “not committed” to such a move. As recently as January, Mr. Garcia said he opposed using public parkland for an Obama presidential library. Then this month, he reversed course, saying that he would support using parkland for a library.
So, in the wake of other New Left blank slate candidates in recent years, such as Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio—to the extent they were blank slates to obscure, distract or divert from their New Left political philosophy—how do Chicagoans respond to this elusive candidate who “presents himself as a warm, inclusive alternative” to Chicago’s incumbent mayor, himself a New Leftist, Rahm Emanuel, nicknamed “Rahmbo” for being an abrasive power-luster?
Judging by Garcia’s unexpected electoral success, pushing Emanuel into a runoff as a New Left Democrat who’s too pro-capitalist (!) for Chicago, and the Times piece, Chicagoans may be ready to swap a government-controlled economy for a government-controlled life. This is what they’re likely to get under Jesus Garcia, 58, a county commissioner, former alderman and Chicago community organizer like Obama. Garcia, who came to America as a child, admires Cesar Chavez and seeks to impose “social justice” with more government control imposed by more police officers, giving government-run schools “back to the people” which usually means less school choice, more school dictates and higher taxes. As the Times described the views of one voter, Rosa Alfaro: “[S]he is not sure how Mr. Garcia would fix the pension crisis, or pay for the new police officers he has promised to hire, or improve the struggling public schools. But she is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
In the words of one of his biggest backers, people have faith in Jesus Garcia: “They’ll trust him, they’ll believe in him.”
With faith—in the state (“public” schools, TSA, NSA, DWP, ObamaCare, etc.), in God, in the collective—rising above reason, and Mayor DeBlasio and President Obama among others as examples of radical New Left politicians taking enormous power over people’s lives in real, demonstrable terms, Jesus Garcia may become mayor of Chicago. Will Chicago’s people have faith in the blank slate Jesus Garcia? No one in Chicagoland should be surprised if and when people will.
Rational, secular and freedom-loving Americans should look to pop superstar Elton John for an example of what to do when others go by faith and announce an intention to impose their dogma on everyone. Gay fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, a former couple who created Dolce & Gabbana, told an Italian magazine that they oppose gay adoptions. In true Duck Dynasty/Islamic state/Iranian ayatollah fashion, the gay designers proclaimed:
The only family is the traditional one. No chemical offsprings and rented uterus: life has a natural flow, there are things that should not be changed.”
Speaking as a religious fundamentalist, Dolce said that procreation “must be an act of love”, adding: “You are born to a mother and a father – or at least that’s how it should be…I call children of chemistry, synthetic children. Uteri [for] rent, semen chosen from a catalog. The family is not a fad. In it there is a supernatural sense of belonging.”
When Elton John, who with his married partner has “synthetic” kids, promptly denounced them and called for a boycott of Dolce & Gabbana, pointing out that in vitro fertilization, which the Pope also condemns, adds value to the lives of heterosexuals and homosexuals alike, the designers affirmed their position and denounced Elton John as being close-minded, a favorite ploy of religionists, projecting their own bigotry to deflect from their irrationality.
This is the new faith, the new dogma, the new religion, same as the old. Watch for conservatives to rally around Dolce & Gabbana. Watch for leftists to rally against the designers, if not exactly around Elton John, a great artist with an independent, rational mind. The backlash against the New Left‘s incessant egalitarianism, pushing the transgendered as the same as gays, for instance, and other irrational ideas such as state-sponsored abortion and health care, is a stronger, more virulent strain of religious faith in fundamentalism. Besides the kneeling quarterback, Duck Dynasty patriarch, preacher, priest, pope, rabbi, mullah or ayatollah, add the gay fashion designer to those doubling down for a newer, darker age of faith, not reason.
It is fast approaching, it is happening and it is real. Watch it. Look to the rare, exceptional individual, such as Elton John, to act like a man, which is to say to act in his self-interest, defend his values—in this case, his family—and speak out against injustice with neither equivocation nor hesitation. He is the hero. He is the one who acts, who matters. He is the civilized man. He is the enlightened man: a man of both reason and action. This type of man is the avenger. Emulate this type of man if you want to live free.
Go ahead and feel free to boycott Dolce & Gabbana—also Duck Dynasty and absolutely reject and oppose dealings with religious dictatorships such as Iran—but above all stop putting others first and speak up for reason and justice. Start by naming the irrational when you see it, hear it and notice it going unnoticed, silently sanctioned, implying everyone’s consent. Don’t go quietly into the darkest times, places and chambers. Think, study, speak up, self-activate and don’t let up. Do it fast—or be damned to live under someone’s “supernatural sense of belonging”, whatever New Left or conservative religion or gang claims you as one of its own.
From the day I first became an activist – when my best friend told me that his family’s home was being seized by our hometown government when we were in the third grade (as I recently wrote about here) to this black day in our nation’s history, March 23, which, contrary to decades of my best activist efforts, marks three years of health care dictatorship known as ObamaCare (as I wrote about in an op-ed in this week’s Washington Times), I have learned the essentials of activism.
Key lessons include matching message to media, objectively communicating on principle, and not without consideration of factors which may at first seem irrelevant, an important aspect that many well-meaning activists, especially Objectivists, fail to grasp and master. For example, in the case of the third grade property rights action – we took on city hall with our door-to-door canvassing throughout the town – seeing two eight-year-olds walking across town to save a child’s home from government-sponsored seizure and demolition for the sake of a park concretized for residents that having a place for children to play seemed beside the point if it means depriving the child of a home to live in. Our campaign for justice was the perfect counterpoint in reality to the local government’s claims. They backed down. We won. My friend grew up in that home.
We bought time and we set an example of activism; he was able to keep his home. Seeing the bastards buckle was, for me, a tonic to the counterculture which I knew I hated. I could not have conceptualized it this way at the time, but I sensed that the New Left, which later spawned the ultimate nihilist Obamaand was spreading all around me as a child, was sinister – I was being subjected to it every day in government schools amid ‘progressive’ education which was pure poison – and even as a boy I knew the left was contaminating the government. Whatever had almost happened to my best friend was caused by some dark intellectual force I had yet to identify but knew was lurking and slithering around me in various forms such as hippies, drug users and dealers and all sorts of toxic hosts that people remarkably still refuse to acknowledge: teachers, priests, political operatives and especially college professors. There were good ones, too, which must be said. But the bad ones put their professions to shame and were feeding off New Left dogma – if it feels good, do it; whatever works; love the one you’re with; just believe; who are we to know?; what’s right for you isn’t necessarily right for me – and bloodsucking the life out of youths. I learned to be on guard. In this sense, I learned that the New Left radicals have a point; the personal is the political and the reverse is also true and both to the extent that politics apply to one’s life.
I had also learned as a child to commit to physical action, whether for property rights, charity (ringing bells for the Salvation Army and soliciting on street corners to raise money to help the blind), safety (as a crossing guard and kids’ safety school instructor) and politics, standing at blustery Chicago locations to promote individual rights. Chicago Police detained me without cause when, tipped off by a sympathetic union source, I joined a peaceful protest of a Carter/Mondale union rally. That’s where I learned the value of the proper maneuver, getting to know reporters on site and communicating the message to the right recipient. That day, we failed, outfoxed by unions and corrupt cops, ignored by the broadcast media that turned the other cheek to youths being wrongly evicted from an exercise in free speech. We had been unprepared for hostile reaction.
Over years in campaigns and, later, on Capitol Hill with John Porter, on the advance team for Ronald Reagan, whom I met and talked with, and while running editorial operations for free market health care and patient advocacy, while reading Ayn Rand’s writings and reporting on news, sports and commentary, I developed the ability to quickly assimilate facts and action with a principled purpose, often in a crisis with a distinct and legitimate requisite for some degree of theatrical appeal. In Chicago, I had faced harsh weather and physical threats. I was also threatened with physical force on the streets in Philadelphia, where I coached and advised a student protest against state-sponsored voluntary servitude. There were lessons in Miami, too, when I met Elian Gonzalez days before he was seized at gunpoint by the U.S. government only to be returned to a Communist dictatorship.
At times, the activists walked away thinking we had won when, in fact, we’d lost. In other instances, the team figured we may have wasted time when, in fact, we had advanced the cause for freedom in some small but measurable way; the campaign to liberate Elian, which was opposed by some top Objectivists, comes to mind. The team had mobilized and activated thousands in unity in an unprecedented national effort which provided crucial experience to future leaders and serious artists, entrepreneurs and intellectuals. Most of the time the results were as mixed as the culture, a fact of reality which yields the best lesson of all: that, with regard to activism, reality is beyond one’s immediate control and you have to let go of what you can’t control to focus on what you can control, which may be an extremely difficult balance to achieve in an activist moment. Yes, one must act on principle to be a rational activist, as I learned in my youth. But one must act, which I have observed in 40 years of experience most Objectivists do not. When they do, it is often with self-aggrandizement, sanctimony or sneering that puts people off and precludes an intended audience from being receptive to persuasion from an objective communication about what’s in philosophy for them.
I’ve made scads of mistakes and the record proves it. We did not stop welfare statism or eradicate the notion of being morally obliged to “give back” to God, religion or others. We are losing that intellectual battle and fast and on an epic scale. We lost free choice in medicine to health care dictatorship and a child refugee to Communism. But, for the few who have activated their minds in principled action, and you know who you are, activism is not hustling in a self-centered way as most right-wing think tanks and professional political activists do. Activism offers a trade. When properly executed, results are the reward: Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), a moral challenge in action to those who seek to rule by force in the heart of where they gather – Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, DC – and a house a child calls home.
There are other benefits of rational activism: a strong, seasoned, unified network of rare, exceptional intellectuals, neither ivory tower types nor hucksters, who activate like real-life superheroes in a given crisis in a nation heading toward catastrophe, buying more time to live, which buys more time to be happy here on earth. For myself, I know firsthand that activism should not be a sacrifice, and that the greatest reward is having acted in my self-interest. From the life of the late John David Lewis, whose Tea Party speeches for free market medicine and victory in war with jihadists were as passionate as his lectures on history, to the example of Leonard Peikoff, who learned from Ayn Rand (who was also an activist), I have learned that the more the altruist-collectivist axis enacts a dictatorship, the more urgently the egoist-individualist and his allies must self-activate.
On this horrible date in history, the day the dictate ObamaCare became law, Americans should keep in mind the words of Leonard Peikoff, who said, when faced with the prospect of government-controlled medicine – and he said it to a general audience, not to a cluster of academics, let alone Objectivist academics: “So long as people believe that socialized medicine is a noble plan, there is no way to fight it. You cannot stop a noble plan—not if it really is noble. The only way you can defeat it is to unmask it—to show that it is the very opposite of noble. Then at least you have a fighting chance.” The upshot of this thought is to fight on principle; to know enough to fight to win and live life. In this sense, activism means fighting to live and this is a balance; one must keep in mind both that the point is to live and that living means active fighting, not passive griping, forwarding of e-mails and sharing of posts or making jokes, memes and comments. Activism is not only reading, listening and making donations to others. It means going on the offense, deep into the adversary’s field of operations. It means the opposite of sloughing off the world at large; it means engagement, not disengagement. As Ayn Rand wrote, it is sooner than you think. I think this is still true.
Objectivism is a philosophy for living on earth. Its application requires thought and action. Today, especially on this day, this means being an activist, not for the sake of activism but for the sake of your life. Dr. Peikoff’s forementioned health care activism resulted in an instantaneous standing ovation. I know because I was there and, as I remember it, I was first to stand up. The injustice he was fighting, the Clinton health care plan, was not only defeated; unlike ObamaCare, it never went to the White House for signing. That’s because it never made it to the congressional floor for a vote and that’s because it never became a piece of legislation. This is what activism can do.
Author’s Note
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