How to Describe the Left?

In an article titled "Woke Christmas," human rights lawyer Leighton Grey, nominated as one of the 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada, speaks moderately but trenchantly of the sensibility of the Left. 

“The left especially hates Christmas,” he writes, “because they are joyless. Whatever and whomever the left influences has less joy in life. No one has ever met a happy leftist. They are guided by the forces of darkness and governed by black hearts, unable to see any light or beauty in life or God’s Kingdom.” 

One does not have to be a practicing Christian to agree fully with Grey’s assessment. I have yet to meet a “happy leftist,” a leftist who can tell a good joke, a leftist who understands satire and appreciates irony, a leftist who entertains a festive relation with his fellow man, a leftist whose laughter is infectious, a leftist who can be genuinely self-deprecating, a leftist with whom one can enjoy a conversation that does not lapse immediately into ideological stridence and sanctimonious posturing, a leftist who refuses to transform a fact into a conspiracy, in short, a leftist with whom one can have an unpresuming good time. There may be some, but on the whole they are rarer than corpse flowers and just as malodorous.

Not everyone, however, is as moderate and diffident as Leighton Grey in depicting the nature and character of those who profess and practice the principles and policies of the Left. Newly elected Argentinian president Javier Milei, relying on the millennial vulgarity whose middle vowel is generally banished from print, makes no bones about his detestation of the Left and its feculent swarm of adherents and advocates. 

The new Axis Powers of Big State, Big Media, and Big Tech have earned his scatological animus. As the Heritage Foundation writes, “Leftist policies cause open borders, rampant corruption, rising crime, and the erasing of American freedom. And the corporate media refuses to cover these failures and instead push their own leftist narratives.” 

Milei, for his part, is rather more explicit. One can relish his directness since he does not scruple to put, in off-color (or colorful) language, what many may think but are too polite or diplomatic to speak. In a recent interview, Milei, a former goaltender, Rolling Stones cover singer, and TV celebrity, was a mine of profane invective, a patois for which he is famous. 

“You can’t give s**t left**ds an inch,” he fumed, “you can’t negotiate with trash because they’ll end you.” Indeed, “All collectivists are s**t.” Milei was on a fecal tear, plying obscenities that the more soigné among the conservative political class may endorse but are loath to use. The political latrine, however, is being cleaned. The good news is that “the desperate s**t leftists are losing the cultural war.”

There may be considerable truth to Milei’s spray of expletives and his prognosis for the future. Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico has recently put the WHO and its Pandemic Treaty on notice, calling it “nonsense invented by greedy Pharma companies.” New Zealand’s newly elected prime minister, Christopher Luxon, has scrapped many if not most of the progressivist policies of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government. 

We have seen populist uprisings and the installation of conservative governments in Italy and the Netherlands. El Salvador has become a beacon of right-wing democratic governance under President Nayib Bukele, who has imprisoned 66,000 felons and drug dealers — the Left’s knickers are in a twist. Sweden is governed by a coalition of right-wing parties which “remains firmly anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism.” Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump will win their forthcoming elections in Canada and the U.S., assuming electoral corruption can be countered.

One can describe the Left in many ways, say, as a pack of gutless Wokesters, a cabal of ignorant hypocrites, or a demonic force bent on destruction. One can describe the Left as The Devil’s Triangle, an equilateral of decadent politicians, unscrupulous media, and a venal commentariat. One can describe the Left as the enemy of both scientific reason and spiritual faith. 

One can describe the Left, in the words of the late Berkshire Hathaway executive Charlie Munger, as “toxic people and toxic activities…. A great lesson of life is [to] get them the hell out of your life — and do it fast.” One can describe the Left as a disease, a viral pandemic of lies and neural vacancy. Of course, one can adopt the more temperate route and denounce the Left, with Leighton Grey, as joyless, humorless, dreary, pietistic, pharisaic and coercive. Or one can simply and justifiably befoul the Left in the mode of Javier Milei. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive.

I see the Left as pathologically self-indulgent, errantly convinced of its own moral superiority, and intellectually void of substance. With respect to my own country, I have yet to meet a Liberal voter who has read Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell, let alone heard of them, as the country slides into a sinkhole of unpayable debt. I have yet to meet an NDP or Green voter who has given serious thought to the political history of socialism and communism. 

Almost the entire country has fallen timorously for the COVID-19 pandemic scam propagated by an authoritarian left-wing regime that it thrice vaulted into power. These were the people who voluntarily took the vaccines, those whom journalist Alex Berenson calls “midwits." 

With only a mere handful of exceptions, I do not think I have ever met an extremely smart or well-informed leftist. Practically none of my ordinary correspondents of a socialist stamp have heard of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, or the Great Reset intent on re-feudalizing Western civilization. 

The only public figures I am aware of in this country and have been privileged to communicate with, who are widely read and historically literate, are Brian Peckford, Maxime Bernier, and Leslyn Lewis, the cynosures of our political milieu. The present Canadian government, its major figures, caucus, and parliamentary representatives, including our tainted judiciary, fall squarely into the purview of Milei’s excremental vision. The same, mutatis mutandis, can be said for the U.S.

The more I think about these matters, the more I go back to Javier Milei’s unprecedented forthrightness. Milei may not express himself in politically conventional terms or in the perfumed dialect of the professional politician, but sometimes it is both refreshing and pertinent not to mince words.