Plainly, not all the people I would describe as “leftist” are bad people. This realization is the reason I felt the need to coin the term “sybaritic leftist”. These are people who are fundamentally nice, and who naively assume this means other people will be too. They are the Eloi of Wells. Things can work out well for them for long periods of time, provided there are hard men with guns not too far away. Such has been the condition of Western Europe over the last half century.
What I meant to say, though, is that such people think they have to choose between idealistic “liberalism” (not a word I grant them in general), and hard-nosed conservatism. Do they pursue the impossible dream, or do they take their place with fundamentally uncompassionate people who make things work? Do they keep their romantic dreams, or face life as selfish individualists?
The naked reality is that this is a false distinction, and the primary fallacy that enables leftism to survive with a history of constant failure.
Once one grasps that there is no linear relationship between intention and ooutcome, then studies history, it becomes abundantly clear that the romantics–the self described anti-individualists, at least in the political sphere–have in fact been making things WORSE for the very people whose welfare allegedly animates their sympathies. Were the Nancy Pelosi’s of the world to do NOTHING for the next ten years, the populations they are trying to help would thrive. They are holding them back.
Thus in my view conservatives hold both the practical and the moral ground. The only thing leftism can successfully generate are feelings of patronizing moral superiority, unanchored by accomplishment, but for all that feeling no need to prove themselves. In certain social spaces, to be a “liberal” is to be good, and vice versa. That you need do nothing but conform to win this feeling is a powerful incentive to take this mind-altering drug.