The Democrats often quite successfully propagandize Americans into thinking of them as the party that cares, the compassionate party, and the party of love and tolerance, even as their policies wreak political and societal havoc — or even turn deadly. The great Russian novel “The Brothers Karamazov” and the English classic “The Screwtape Letters” can, however, help explain both the mentality of the leftist propagandists and why that propaganda is highly successful.
“The more I love humanity in general,” remarks a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, “the less I love man in particular.” C.S. Lewis’s fictional demon Screwtape observes to his nephew about keeping even praying men under Hell’s thrall, “I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s ‘soul’ to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.” In both cases, Dostoevsky and Lewis were highlighting a dangerous but very common phenomenon -- namely, that of a “virtue” that is entirely surface level, mere words, practiced by the very individuals who, in actuality, hate their fellow men passionately. It is also the phenomenon that very accurately describes the Marxist/globalist/leftist notion of virtue and heroism, a phenomenon I will examine in a two-part article series.
A man may really believe himself noble and good, may spout out endless protestations of compassion and tolerance, and yet act with the irrationality of a barbarian and the ferocity of a beast at the least provocation. This is the disease of the self-righteous Democrat. It is a virtue and “love” of mere words, totally at variance with a person’s actions. That is what makes it so particularly dangerous, for there is nothing worse than a virulently hateful hypocrite who believes himself kind and noble — and yet nothing more tempting than an ideology that promises self-righteousness without any real sacrifice or effort.
It is not only in direct opposition to the virtue commanded of us in the Bible, both by the Old and New Testaments (which is precisely why leftists hate Judaism and Christianity), but it is an ideology that can very rapidly destroy a society and turn it into the mere anarchy of mob rule or oligarchy.
Certainly, the Democrats in top leadership know perfectly well how destructive their policies are, and are under no delusions that they are really helping people. But many of their devoted activists and partisans go without any self-awareness from chanting “love trumps hate” and “tolerance” and “love is love” to attacking their political opponents physically or enthusiastically celebrating the murder of unborn babies.
The pro-Hamas protestors are a very stark example of how poisonous this ideology is. They extravagantly bewail the entirely fictional “genocide” of Palestinians, and yet cheer with unbridled and bloodthirsty joy the real genocide of Israeli women and children. The pro-Hamas protestors return home after calling for genocide of Jews, and the Antifa protestors leave the riot where they beat up innocents and destroyed valuable property, and in both cases many if not most of these wackos have a sense of overweening self-righteousness. They really see their hideous actions as proofs of, not arguments against, their heroism.
C.S. Lewis, in the voice of the demon Screwtape, describes how damning and damnable this philosophy is (“The Enemy” is Screwtape’s term for God, while “our Father” is Satan): “You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us… All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father’s house.”
The self-righteous leftist of today, full of his or her or zir own “virtue,” might very well be on the fast-track to infernal punishment. I will examine Dostoevsky’s perspective on this pernicious ideology in a second piece.
