y wonderful, crusty 1958 dictionary defines “leftist” as “Com-munistic, Communist, red, pink.” The more current dictionary defines “leftist” as liberal or radical. Both definitions are accurate even if it is no longer politically correct to call someone “red” or “pink.”

Winston Churchill defined Socialism and the leftists who love it as “a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it. Conservatives mostly like America the way it is, and prefer to be left alone—by leftists. Probably the most interesting aspect of leftists and liberals is that they do not like change. Leftists and liberals only use “change” to acquire power; once they have the power, they fight any further change. They depend on coercion while seeking to diminish the core principles of our constitutional system.

The Left Brain
Leftists and liberals believe that our society is torn between the “privileged” and underdog victims of society, and they seek to fix all of the problems of society’s victims at the expense of the “privileged.”

Conversely, conservatives believe in right and wrong, and that there are consequences assigned to doing what’s right or what’s wrong.

Right and wrong, as well as the truth, never get in the way of a leftist’s agenda. Leftists believe in the ends justifying the means. Consequently, they actively support abortion on demand up to and including the third trimester, euthanizing grandma when she becomes too much trouble, condom dispensers on the playgrounds of elementary schools and even giving pubescent girls birth control without involving her parents.

The doublespeak that leftists and liberals use is challenging. Are we still supposed to believe in a government-mandated policy to “celebrate diversity” or “celebrate unity” as Sen. Barack Obama wants us to chant? And if he really is the great unifier, will all of the diversity training seminars go away because we are all so unified? Will we all become “Americans” instead of hyphenated African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Mexican-Americans?

This Orwellian line of thinking is terrifying. Columnist Ed Kaitz at The American Thinker identified it as George Orwell’s “doublethink.”

Kaitz wrote, “George Orwell claimed that there was something more calculated at work when politicians begin to claim for example that ‘Slavery is Freedom’ or that ‘Hate is Love,’ or in Mao Tse Tung’s words, that ‘Compulsion is Voluntary.’ The new and improved Democratic Party version seems to be that ‘Diversity is Unity,’ endemic of the Totalitarian mind. It meant the ability ‘to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory’ and ‘to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.’”

Who can forget the totalitarian super-model Mao Tse Tung when he opined that those who oppose progressive change “must go through a stage of compulsion before they can enter the stage of voluntary, conscious change.” There’s nothing like a little “voluntary compulsion” to encourage change.

“Progressive” Thinking
Probably the most enjoyable column I’ve read this year about leftists is from Lyle H. Rositer, Jr., M.D., a forensic psychiatrist, who describes the liberal mind as political madness.

He wrote, “Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation…

“The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state.”

One can hardly call leftists and liberals or Progressives a movement. It has been described as more like a mental hospital without doctors or nurses. They don’t have a cohesive culture, have no coherent ideology, but are “just quarrelsome factions with loads of issues.”