Surrender! How America Will Give It All Up For Nothing.

One of the most popular complaints or indictments against liberals – individual minions, not just the public figures – is that they are out of touch with reality.

They are.

So what?

What does this have to do with our country, really?

When it comes to national issues, Liberals find it most difficult to sort them out and identify topics as friend or foe. To them, personally, I mean. For them, societal issues are injustices, not facts of life or opportunities for object lessons to youth.

For all the lip service the Left pays to reality, liberals are betraying their own intimate difficulty on precisely that subject.

Liberals are impaired. They are not mentally ill, they are impaired. Like many of us, conservatives included, liberals erect a reality distortion device to cope with old wounds, only they cannot get past them. We all do it, but as some of us get past our anxieties and become self-confident, others cannot, and become the ever-wounded.

I have written and spoken on the subject of that impairment, on my thesis that unhappy children of three generations of broken homes make very hurt, very angry followers. Millions of them.

Many have put it differently, such as the breakdown of the family and so forth, but here is the political connection to that – not only the social consequences – and here is its significance. It’s so much more than a breakdown of the family: it’s that the nation is under attack by way of its households, and where the family breaks down, it gets a little shove from the angry.

What I identify as the causation and the relationship to a rotten values system and irresistible urge to alter the U.S. way of life is this and the constant ad hominem attacks: Childhood disaffection, parental indifference to a child or old wounds make a child angry. Other landmark events or even seemingly insignificant events can become enormous perceived crimes against the individual who finds it hard to manage. It becomes buried, it becomes longstanding and armor-plating part of the character such that symbols or icons in our society become provocative triggers to them – offensive is a popular word used – and everyone else has to suffer for one’s singular anger or constellation of angers. Multiply this by the number of broken homes over three generations or so and you have it.

The result is angry political change, talented, eloquent rhetoric and underhanded tactics, all justified in the mind of the angry to eliminate that anxiety that hurts so much.

Liberals are not evil - they are hurting, wounded people.

And now, the thrust of this piece: What if we cooperated with these personal, inner experience solutions as they are proposed to us? What if we changed a village for one person? And then changed all villages based on such an erroneous cooperation?

What if there were millions of these people who were offended by everyday institutions and who brought their political clout to bear on them?

Would it change their inner experience?

When the problem of one’s excess baggage cannot be contained any longer, and makes its way into politics, will changing that village or the entire nation cure the inner pain of the individual? Or of those millions?

No, it will not. Of course not.

But cooperation with such an unreality will tear the nation apart.

We’ve been able to determine that one out of two marriages will end in divorce. In the 1950's, it was one out of three.

Irrespective of what held a marriage together, it worked better for society, for it recognized, as we recognize today, that the Household is the Stronghold against adversity in our nation. Marriage was important then.

Somehow, they would make the effort to survive nearly anything, and many did, and an intact home made for intact kids you might say. We call this integrity. Fewer do today.

When no-fault divorce came along, it made the wimping out and begging off easier, which had the effect of abandoning the effort that was the very redeeming benefit of that contract: stick with it and you develop a personal strength you can use, and you create an environment that develops that strength in others. You make for yourself a private retreat and refuge unique in the world. Your Household is one of a kind. They all are. In so doing, you also confer to your children that strength that becomes for them the stronghold of the nation. More courage, less wimping out. In this, parents are all the Champions a child needs.

Liberalism is to wimp out, to interfere to try and change that pain by being the uninvited champions of others, and of course to attack a reliably safe target; the polite and etiquette-overly-concerned Right.

Meanwhile, dissolve the household and you can take down the whole nation. But that pain never goes away.

There are many glues that keep our society together, and if we permit any dissolving those glues, the nation will fragment and separate until it becomes a bargain basement investment, to put it nicely, and someone will always be around to pick up the pieces. There always is. Some are expediting this ruin in order to drop the value enough. It works by causing us to doubt ourselves, to cooperate in silly notions where we really ought to know better, and to discourage resistance when we do know better and protest.

The key is, naturally, to see through the rhetoric and understand the true motivation of the impaired: to try to resolve their own inner conflict by changing the external environment for the rest of us, a solution that cannot work because the inner conflict can be changed only from within.

Thus, liberal policies have failed so miserably over the decades. They are based on the defective idea that changing the political environment will somehow vanquish their inner conflict, that tragically misled sense of injustice, an injustice that often - often enough - isn’t even really there. When it doesn’t work (of course), they try harder and harder (slippery slope), and become enraged when it’s challenged, a small clue to the dynamic actually at work.

When we want to be good to people, and when we sometimes express that good will as cooperation or compassion, we can be used for our goodness. When anxiety is so great as to move an individual to action, as it does with activists, the idea can seem curative at first, irresistible to some, sensible. When that idea resonates with other angry, hurting persons as much as it does the kindly and the willing, it’s easy to swell the numbers.

In short, we are being lied to because the anxious liberal is lying to himself, and dragging the nation into it all.

When it’s proven that such approaches simply don’t work, and now we know why they don’t work – generations of broken homes leads to more broken homes with more angry kids who become hurting, angry adults – we stand to give away the entire nation on the distorted reality perceptions that create those policies demanding our cooperation. When we disapprove, they punish us or force it on us.

The clue to the angry liberal / failed policy connection is in the insistence of enacting laws against the will of the people. This urgency to stop the anxiety politically by destroying the icons that irk them is much, much more powerful (and in many ways more personally satisfying to them) than the political endeavor to find justice. Changing America isn’t where you’re going to get rid of that personal pain. And insisting on change against the will of the people is to deal in bad faith.

Irrespective of its origin, the lies and self-delusion of the Left means that what they ask, demand or coerce will not solve their inner problems, nor our joint societal problems. It’s all based on the misinformation input of their reality distortion device.

It means that whatever we agree to will have us giving away the nation for no justice at all, but merely to add to the long record of just making it all worse.

It means that we’ll be merely giving it all away, and for positively nothing.

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John Longenecker is author of The Battle We Fight, available at Amazon.com. He can be reached at John@thebattlewefight.com and he welcomes all correspondence.