The Leftist War on Social Cohesion

Thought this essay was kind of interesting. Its source, "The Conservative Debate Handbook" will no doubt be ridiculed, but I think the author makes a convincing arguement. There are links to other interesting articles at the bottom.


Excerpt: Edited. Upon further review, I like this excerpt better.

James Madison, our fourth President and the "Father of the Constitution," clearly warned against the dangers of factions in the Federalist Papers. But in his wisest moments, he could never have foreseen anything like the factionalization of America in the latter days of the Twentieth Century.



This factionalization, while drawing upon different verbal rationalizations, group by interest group, has in each of its manifestations reflected an application of the standard Leftist technique of exploiting the grievances (real or imagined) that most people feel at one time or another. The keys to this exploitation lie in two unprovable assumptions: First that all people are basically equal, in fact as well as in relationship; and second, the subtle corollary of that assumption, that there is collective responsibility to solve the problems of the individual. Let us see how these concepts--really no more than notions--are applied, singly or together, to alienate a people from their heritage:

In our essay on The Lies Of Socialism, a link below, we refer in slightly different words, to the standard Socialist effort to demonize success and rally failure by blaming that failure on others' success. Long before the Twentieth Century, the Left had succeeded in converting social classes, other than those at the top, from groups with a common heritage into economic interest groups, seeking material gain on the basis of existence alone. With the Twentieth Century, they became more skilled in adjusting the same techniques to other targets, using the human weaknesses of suspicion, envy and resentment, to overcome more positive emotions. Basically, this involved applications, which may be described as "dividing and recombining"; shattering the old motivating identifications--the self-images that nurtured cohesion and continuity, that sustained family and community values independent of the collective and opposed to a new Statist culture--to build the new identifications of dependency, of factions looking to the whole--or more pragmatically, to the politicians directing the collective--to advance their interests and fulfill a new set of priorities.