Good Intentions: The Left's Trump Card
The results of decisions don't matter if your intentions are good...
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.”
―C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
They will never apologize.
They will never admit wrong-doing.
Because, to the Left, it’s the intentions that matter.
For the purpose of this article, I am going to divide people into Left and Right, with the Left defined as the illiberal progressives that are obsessed with safetyism and crave authoritarian rules and rulers who limit or remove their inalienable rights and liberties.
The Right will be defined as people who oppose the Left.
Good Intentions?
“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot
Are we really to believe that the Left has good intentions?
No. But we really need to believe that the Left believes they have good intentions. Because they do believe that. They really do.
In a 2005 interview, Thomas Sowell pointed out the difference between the typical person on the Left compared to one from the Right.
Sowell refers to the people on the Left as “The Anointed” because they believe they are “wiser and nobler than others.” Meanwhile, he defines people on the Right as being concerned with arriving at the best tradeoffs because they realize there are no easy solutions to the complex problems of humanity.
So if you are on the Left, it would make sense that you have constant friction with the Right. You have a vision for the future (Utopia) that is not shared by your friends on the Right. In fact, your friends on the Right are always concerned with outcomes, data and evidence.
Not only do they not have a vision for Utopia, but they don’t even believe it is possible.
A Problem Of Vision
The Right really has themselves in a bind in terms of vision casting.
The Left has a vision. It’s Utopia.
The Right has Tradeoffs. And what kind of vision is that?
Now, to say that “tradeoffs” comprise the totality of Vision of the Right is not totally fair, although that appears to be the case from the Left’s perspective. And, it is somewhat true.
However, the Right’s vision is really one of fulfillment of civil liberties—or the maximization and expression of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Inherently this vision is more individual and less collective. Therefore, the full realization of the Right’s vision is one where the Individual is free to maximize his/her civil liberties with other people.
The Strength Of Collectivism
The Left’s vision is a collective Utopia; the Right’s is a personal one. This is not to say that the Right only cares about the individual. But it does mean that, to the Right, the community is empowered and improved by the fulfillment of the individual’s civil liberties.
Have you ever noticed that the Left can mobilize a group of people for years to advance a cause? Have you ever sat back and appreciated the machinery in place that comprises a “get-out-the-vote” campaign for a Democrat candidate?
The Left has Unions and community groups and non-profits and legions of willing door-to-door knockers. They have a Utopia to build and armies to build it.
The Right, on the other hand, can muster up the energy for a good fight—but only up to the point that their civil liberties have been restored. Once a near term target has been accomplished, the Right would just as soon be left alone to enjoy their Pursuit of Happiness. I mean, can you imagine The Right spending 60 years building a mail-in ballot harvesting operation?
The Playing Field
Somehow, the Left and Right play on a field where the Left is allowed to be judged only by their intentions while the Right is judged by the outcomes of their policy decisions. This is an amazing trick exploited by the Left.
The Left can never be wrong or held accountable because they are measured by their intentions. In other words, if their intentions were good, then they did nothing wrong.
The Left, however, judges the Right on the outcomes of their policies because they assume that the Right has worse intentions. The Right allows themselves to be caught in this trap because…
…the Right would love to be seen as having good intentions (they want so badly be be held in high regard by Hollywood, or Yale, or the New York Times!).
Meanwhile, the Left can't imagine that their own intentions could be anything but the most noble. Therefore, the Right’s intentions can only be seen as relatively bad compared to the Left’s.
So. The Left is judged by their intentions. The Right is judged by their actions.
We see it all the time. Did “stay home; save lives” to “flatten the curve” help the hospitals “prepare for the pandemic?” By any measure no. In Left-run Minnesota, they were still overwhelmed 8 months after the initial lockdowns. And 13 months. And 21 months. It’s been almost three years and hospitals in this country are still complaining about being overwhelmed.
Any small business that ran their company this way would go out of business. But entities aligned with the bureaucratic state can leverage mediocrity and failure for more money and power. Fail up.
“But that was Trump’s doing and he is a right wing fascist.” No. Trump took a back seat to the bureaucratic state, our fourth branch of government, during the Plandemic. He deferred.1
For the Left, being defined by intentions instead of the outcome of those intentions is a feature, not a bug.
If you can keep your audience focused on your intentions; then you can implement any type of tyranny you want on them. While the Left warms you up with their virtue and nobility, they pickpocket your freedoms.
What cities are better under 40+ years of Democrat control? Crime? Health? Families? You would be hard pressed to find any examples where The Left has imposed it’s will for decades and things have improved.
Look at inner city public schools.
But can kids choose to go to any school they want if their school sucks? No way. The Left has control of those kids. They have accomplished their ultimate goal.
The Ultimate Goal
The Left has one goal: power.
Their vision of Utopia requires, first, a socialist dictatorship from which a communist Utopia can emerge.2 Well, how in the world are you going to get a socialist dictatorship in America? Vote on it?
No. You need to gain control in order to incite a revolution. The revolutionaries will beg for a dictator—someone who will keep them safe, give them food and (pretend to) punish the protected classes.
The Left has a willing partner in their endeavors: the bureaucratic state. The 4th branch of government needs control to stay alive. The CIA, FBI, CDC, FDA, IRS, DoD, are self-accountable systems now and just like the Teacher’s Unions, the 4th Branch no longer has constituents. Voters, like students and teachers, are just a front to keep the machine alive.
While the Left is a great bedfellow for the bureaucratic state, I think it is possible that the 4th Branch could have found a partner in the Right if the stars had aligned (remember when Big Corporations were “in bed” with Republicans?). But it would have been more difficult because voters from the Right do not crave what the neo-cons and RINOs crave.
No. Most Republican voters want to be left alone to enjoy their liberties. And therefore they would be less likely to build the type of grass roots bureaucracies needed to support the 4th Branch.
The 4th branch of government, along with the sister-bureaucracies in academia, healthcare, science, media and education all need to be slimmed down. Universities should be run by professors, not administrators and DEI departments. And the United States of America should be run by the People; not unelected bureaucrats.
The Left Will Never Come Around
One of the mistakes people on the Right make is believing that the Left will “come around.”
Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that won’t happen. I mean, why apologize if you were right?
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
-Maya Angelou
Let’s not forget how people from the Right made those on the Left feel during the heights of Covid.
If you were on the Left during the pandemic you were most certainly nobler than your friends on the Right. You cared about grandma. You cared about teachers. You were concerned with the safety of others (“Stay Safe!”). You wore your mask (“Love Your Neighbor!”). You got vaccinated even if you didn’t need to or want to (“Its The Kind Thing To Do!”).
Meanwhile, the cold-hearted parents of school children were complaining about not being able to do “in-person learning.” They made a huge deal about masks—bringing up studies about efficacy and harms. They were nitpicking about PCR tests and referencing “cycle thresholds.” They had the gall to question the rationale of what a “close contact” was. They questioned the new “vaccines” and talked of “natural immunity.” And they kept harping on the “harms” to kids during the lockdowns.
If you can put yourself in the shoes of a person on the Left—measured on their good intentions—then those data, evidence & tradeoff talking points would seem extremely insensitive. Downright disgusting. How could anyone talk about evidence at a time like this? People are DYING!
Imagine how people on the Right made people on the Left feel. Imagine how those calls for risk/benefit analyses sounded. “Off ramps” and “success criteria.”
The results of the good intentions don’t matter to the person who measures themself on their virtue. Worse, the person with lesser virtue who measures outcomes is a Cretan.
Summary
There will be no apologies. No accountability. No reckoning.
The Left is nobler and always has good intentions. What happens as a result of those intentions is inconsequential.
We need to recognize our friends on the Left for what they are. They aren’t “data-driven.” They are virtue-driven. And, bless their hearts, they truly believe that they are nobler than you.
Even though the evidence supports little of what they pushed over the last three years, their intent was virtuous—and their intent was all they were ever accountable to anyway.
The good news is that most people on this planet are somewhere in the middle. And the people in the middle are your audience. They like a sound argument and don’t think they are nobler than you. They value a good risk-benefit analysis, success criteria and evidence-based arguments.
People in middle value the results of actions. They prefer accountability that is measurable. They might just be willing to appreciate that, like Sowell says, there are no perfect solutions, that neither the government nor the market will solve everything and that we may need to tolerate something short of a collective Utopia.
“God save us from people who mean well.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
To be fair, Trump would have been called a Fascist if he had done what his gut was probably telling him to do. He could have put his foot down and refused to lockdown. But it does not take a rocket brain to figure out how the Left would have responded. Every death from Covid would have been blamed on Trump and he would have had to deal with “1 Million Deaths” as a campaign slogan. He was already being called a Fascist. So deferring to the CDC, HHS and the Covid Task Force was probably his only real move. That said, once he deferred, he should have stayed involved and trusted his gut. Read Scott Atlas’ book for more details on this story.
I highly recommend James Lindsay’s Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis for more on the Left’s Utopian goals.
A winner tries to judge his own acts by their consequences and other people’s acts by their intentions; a loser gives himself the best of it by judging his own acts by their intentions, and the acts of others by their consequences. -Sidney J. Harris, “Winners and Losers”
With respect, CB, the people at the top in the Left are homicidal maniacs intent on world domination, otherwise known as Neocons. The rank and file sheeple are just following the dictates of the mass media, believing that it is all for the good, and that the ends justify the means.
The people at the top on the right are also Neocons, which means we have a serious problem.