Democrat Dilemma: The Failure of Prophecy

Commentary from Christopher Chantrill on American Thinker.com (Oct. 1):

Last week I took apart an NRO critique of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “limitless ideology” on my American Manifesto blog. I said that it is not enough to critique the constant ideological expansion of government. You have to have an alternative. And anyway the key thing about progressives is that their politics is their religion.

But now I want to look at a different aspect of our political moment which expands on the lefty-politics-as-religion theme. It is that our Democratic friends are in the middle of a “failure of prophecy.” If you are a progressive believer the world was supposed to be all tucked up in progressive heaven by now. And yet here we have Trump siccing foreign governments on Deep Stater Joe Biden. The nerve!

Somehow the Prophecy has failed. But how? Everyone who was anyone agreed decades ago that way you bend the arc of history towards justice was with progressive politics. So of course they are all freaking out.

We humans desperately need to know about the future. Will it rain tomorrow? Will there be a drought next year? Will we run out of natural resources? The astonishing human way we try to divine the future is with prophecy. Some techniques of prophecy are extremely effective; I am thinking about science. Some prophecies are not so good. I am thinking about Marxism.

But When Prophecy Fails, according to Leon Festinger et al., the believers don’t just throw up their hands and go back to ordinary life. Instead they intensify their faith and sharpen up the prophecy. The problem, they decide, is that their faith wasn’t deep enough; they didn’t read the texts right. It is not till later that they lose heart and #WalkAway. [read more]

Since Leftism is a religion this analysis fits perfectly. Although the Left doesn’t see themselves as religious.

Other articles about the Left:

• Violence against the Citizenry Is the Left's Intent
• Progressives bent on purging conservatism
• The Left to America’s Children: Your Past Is Terrible, and Your Future Is Terrible
• The Dangerous Lessons the Left Is Teaching Our Kids
• Elizabeth Warren: Leading Liar in the Party of Liars
• 'The Leprosy of Unreality' and the Demise of the Left
• The Left’s Dangerous Assault on Free Speech
• The Totalitarian American Left
• The Progressive Socialist Left’s New McCarthyism
• 7 Leftist Words in a Dictionary Near You
• Liberal Policy Failures Are the Reason for Socialism’s New Appeal
• Nihilism Is Driving Leftocratic Rage
• The New Nihilists: Political Nihilism and the Progressive Movement in America
• 6 Reasons to Believe Left Hates America
• 3 Reasons Why the Left Doesn’t Like Christmas
• The Democrats are engaged in a coup. What do we do about it?
• Democrats aim to abolish right-to-work laws
• California’s Disastrous State Illustrates Limits of Progressivism