The one universal quality of left-wing politics that is true in every time and place is the need for an external enemy. It is onto this enemy the movement focuses its attention, making it a rallying point and a rallying cry. Ideally, the enemy is mysterious, maybe even a bit supernatural. A supernatural enemy supports the idea of the movement being in a decisive battle for the future of humanity. An important element of left-wing politics is a sense of urgency. There’s no time to wait, as the final battle is at hand.

Orwell, of course, understood this well and created two the great left-wing bogeymen in English literature. Emmanuel Goldstein is the “enemy of the people” during the two minutes of hate at the beginning of the novel 1984. In Animal Farm, Snowball is the blame for all the farm’s troubles, after he disappear. In both cases, the bogeyman is a traitor, who willingly turned on the cause. In both cases, the bogeyman is mysteriously absent, thus can be amplified as an almost supernatural villain.

Eric Hoffer said, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is certainly true, but it has a peculiar application on the Left, as the positive beliefs of left-wing politics are most often the least understood by the adherents. A feature of left-wing politics is a vague understanding of what they are for, but a detailed understanding of what they oppose. In fact, it is what they oppose that gets the attention. The bogeyman becomes an obsession.

For example, the modern Left in pretty much just a collection of incoherent bellows and yelps with no real purpose, other than opposition to white people. Last week the Left was anti-war and now this week they love war. Their position on foreign policy is dependent on whatever Trump has to say about the issue. The American Left is purely reactionary, tethered to Donald Trump like a slave being taken to market. Their politics are devoid of practical meaning It’s just ways to point and sputter.

This Rolling Stone article in the latest ways to spot an evil doer is a great example of how the Left invests everything in its bogeymen. The ADL, a left-wing terrorist organization, maintains a database of symbols they claim are used by the supernatural members of their even more mysterious enemies. Putting aside the absurdity of the bowl cut or the OK sign being secret symbols, think about the sort of person who thinks this way. It is a person obsessed with what they imagine is in the shadows.

That is why the Left invests all of its energy into inventing and describing various aspects of the Eternal Enemy. It’s not that they need the bogeyman as a rallying point for their coalition. That’s a mistake paleocons like Steve Sailer make. He’s a practical guy so he projects practical reasons onto the actions of the Left. If they were sober minded enough to reason through these things, they would not be on the Left. To be on the Left is to abandon all reason in favor of a set of beliefs.

Belief is powerful magic. Because the Left controls the high ground of the American empire, their beliefs are imposed on the rest of the world in a million little ways. For example, Neo-Nazis are the most hated group in the world. People from around the empire hate Nazis more than they hate criminals. The fact that Neo-Nazis really don’t exist, while criminals are a daily part of life is important. People have been convinced to hate an imaginary enemy more than the enemy at their door.

Of course, democracy is the most fertile ground for left-wing magic, because democracy provides no mechanism for uniting people. In fact, democracy is all about creating divisions, over which the public argues and comes to some compromise. Short of an official religion and extreme intolerance of alternative beliefs, a secular religion fills the void as a unifying set of beliefs. Democracy makes a people crazy, emptying their heads of reason in order to fill it with the nonsense of civic religion.

It is the desperate need for bogeymen that must be the focus of any successful dissident movement, because it is the spirit of the ruling class. The reason the Left advertises those lists of “hate symbols” is to encourage stupid people to adopt them as some form of rebellion. Again, the Left needs enemies to exist, so when none exist, it manufactures them. As the saying goes, the demand for Nazis long ago exhausted the supply, so the business of the Left is in creating new Nazis to meet demand.

Therefore, the successful resistance to the Left in a democracy is one that avoids playing the role cast for it by the Left. The battle for the shared reality of the public culture is a war of attrition. The winner is the one that is most efficient in the use of resources, but best at driving up the cost to the other side. Whatever comes after liberal democracy, the people who replace the Left, will fill a void created when the Left collapses after having exhausted itself maintaining its control of society.

This is a lesson of right-wing failure in its fight with the Left. The Right in American always countered left-wing belief with empiricism. Facts and logic would prevail over the emotions of the Left. Ben Shapiro chirping “facts don’t care about your feelings” is a rallying call for the Left. The reason is it turns the resistance to the Left into an easily demonized opponent. The alternative to left-wing belief is not the lack of any belief whatsoever. The alternative is a different, more appealing set of beliefs.

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