ANALYZING LEFTIST IDEOLOGICAL CONTRADICTIONS - or - IRRATIONAL AND INCONSISTENT MORAL RELATIVISM AS A LEFTIST STRATEGY

DR. SANITY: THE LEFT'S THEORY OF RELATIVITY

For a group that wholeheartedly subscribes to moral relativity and subjective ethics, you've got to wonder about the left and their constant search for some kind of "moral authority" to justify their beliefs.

After all, if morality is relative; if truth is subjective and there is no objective "good" or "bad"; then why bother? ...

[The Doctor then describes some famous anti-war Leftists and their arguments - READ IT!]

What these three examples [Murtha, Sheehan, and the Jersey Girls] (and there are many more) have in common is both a breathtaking subjectivism and relativism in one breath; and ideological absolutism in the next.

This is as good a demonstration as any of the inherent philosophical and psychological contradictions that the postmodern left exploits in order to achieve political power.

They are perfectly aware that their positions don't make any sense and can be refuted by anyone with basic knowledge of logic and logical fallacies; but their goal is to maintain the psychological denial necessary to believe in the left's ideology.

Interpreting this defense and exposing it is essential to countering that ideology.

Stephen Hicks asks this important question (page 184):

The pattern therefore raises the question of which side of the contradiction is deepest for postmodernism.

Is it that postmodernists really are committed to relativism, but occasionally lapse into absolutism?

Or are the absolutist commitments deepest and the relativism a rhetorical cover?

The possibility that the relativism is primary can be ruled out with some thought. If the modern leftist truly embraced relativism, then you would not see the uniformity of their politics. Hicks again:

If subjectivity and relativism were primary, then postmodernists would be adopting political positions across the spectrum, and that simply is not happening.

Indeed. Thus we must conclude that the moral relativism that characterizes the left's equation of terrorism with America; deliberate targeting of innocents with herculean efforts to spare innocent life; Bush with Hitler; Iraq with Vietnam; etc. etc. are simple rhetorical devices being used to manipulate and forward their socialist / totalitarian agenda.

There's plenty more: RTWT.

[BTW: isolationists, appeasers, defeatists, hard-core libertarians and anti-Semites use many of the same illogical tropes. IOW: you DON'T have to be a Leftist to be irrational. But if you ARE a Leftist in 2006 then you are irrational.

OR LOOK AT IT THIS WAY: when people don't have the facts on their side - or logic - and when they are unable to admit that their ideology is bankrupt or amoral, then they often resort to contradictory and illogical arguments.]