No Escape

Sometimes watching the Democrats struggle with their core misapprehensions can be a painful experience. Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom—an outstanding and irreverent liberal capitalist blog—came across just such a lamentation yesterday on a left-wing community site called MyDD (Direct Democracy). In a piece Goldstein equitably categorizes as serious, the author, Chris Bower, addresses the recent "undermining" of "progressive" Democrat Paul Hackett's challenge candidacy for a US Senate seat in Ohio. It seems that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) recently asked Hackett to quit the race and allow a more experienced (and more moderate) Democratic candidate to run. Bower proceeds to deconstruct the episode into a class struggle within the Democratic Party between "progressive activists" and "the establishment." He goes on to describe various "netroots" sub-classes made up of "aristocratic elites" and "the rank and file" and proceeds to describe, using these terms, what he perceives to be the nature of their struggle.

Every time I see such leftist analysis I can't help but being reminded of a story I read as a boy about Harry Houdini. I have no idea if it's true or not, but the story is about a particular incident early in Houdini's career when he traveled the country with various vaudville acts claiming that no prison could hold him. He had found that escaping from small town jails often landed him in the newspapers, furthering his reputation. The story regards one such episode in a town where the sheriff was particulary proud of a new jail the town had built which utilized double cells, one within the other, and equipped with steel doors using the latest "pick-proof" locking mechanisms.

When Houdini arrived in town, he inspected the jail beforehand as he always did so he could decide whether to accept the challenge and build his plan of escape. After viewing the cell, he confidently  accepted the challenge, and the next day was bound naked in chains and manacles from his neck to his ankles with the locks on his restraints wrapped with tape to prevent them from being picked. He was then placed on floor within the inner cell of the jail and the doors were slammed shut behind him.

During these escapes, Houdini was most often able to wriggle and squeeze out of body restraints, having taught himself how to dislocate his shoulders and other contortionist methods to help free himself. It took him all of a few minutes to escape these restraints, and then he coughed up the steel pick he had swallowed and began work on the door.

There was only one keyhole for the lock on the outside of the door, so Houdini had to lay on an upper bunk and stretch his arm through a small barred opening near the top of the door to get to it with his pick; it was difficult, but he could reach it. He had specially designed his pick to work with these new types of locks, and was very confident in his ability to pick them. But after several inexplicable hours, Houdini could not manage to crack the lock. Every time he thought he had successfully turned the lock's tumblers, he would yank on the door latch only to find that the door remained locked tight. Finally near the end of his allotted escape time, Houdini collapsed against the door in sheer exhaustion, and when he did it swung wide open. As it had turned out, when Houdini was placed in the cell, the wily old sheriff had left the cell door unlocked, so each time Houdini had managed to flip the tumblers with his pick, he was actually locking the door. The simple assumption that the door was initially locked had very nearly defeated him, whereas in reality he could have walked out of the at cell any time.

Deep within their tacit primary understanding of how the world works, the left tends to believe that people in general, and purposefully organized groups of people in particular, are especially capable of managing collective knowledge and resources to produce desirable social outcomes for everyone, to the point that, to their minds, the will to progress itself is essentially sufficient to produce the deed. In other words, they believe that people generally have the power to run the world as we see fit.

This basic premise can be easily inferred from the policies they derive from their ideology. Can we have universal access to health care (or any other good or service)? No problem, simply have government take control of production and distribute output as it sees fit. How can we reduce gun crime? Also simple: have the government prohibit the ownership of guns. Do the people want "fair" or "living" wages? Again, easy as pie, just have government dictate wages—and on and on and on.

This thinking can be observed in other ways as well, such as how whenever some institution or system fails to bring about a desired outcome in a particular case (as all systems are bound to do from time to time), the left is often ready to significantly alter the system—or eliminate or replace it altogether, however they see fit at the time—regardless of how many generations of wisdom went into the evolution of the original system.

 Because of this overestimation of human power derivable from our will being applied to whatever knowledge we happen to have at any given time, the resulting leftist worldview is prepossessed with political, economic and cultural power. As Thomas Sowell points out in his book A Conflict of Visions, logically, if the will is the deed, then the deed is the will. Thus the left tends to automatically view any individual outcome, good or bad, as being the result of the intentions of some powerful interest instead of being the unintended result of the confluence of unpredictable circumstance and many different and competing interests. This is also why any discussion with a leftist about a political or economic topic invariably devolves, in short order, into a discussion of power. To the left, power is essentially the lowest common denominator of reality.

When we apply this understanding of the leftist worldview to Chris Bower's analysis of the put upon "progressive" activists and their battle to the death with the mandarins of the Democratic "establishment," it comes as no surprise that he can only articulate the situation in terms of power struggle. The fact is, due to the constraints of logic itself, Bower likely has difficulty even conceiving the situation in any other relevant terms. So he and the rest of the left continue to grotesquely bloody their heads against the four seamless, impenetrable walls of the political failure produced by their mistaken ideology. Falsly confident in the apparent precision of a simplistic, one note worldview, the left remains unable to glimpse the astonishingly complex nature of even seemingly simple things here in our natural world, nor conceive of the organic, spontaneous order required for us to transcend the primitive. The sad fact is that for these mostly intelligent and empathetic people, there simply is no escape from their frustration as long as they, like Houdini, continue to lock the door in front of themselves.