Over at Dissecting Leftism, Dr. John Jay Ray has posted a rather interesting essay about leftist leaders and followers. While I enjoyed this one...

The characteristic Left-wing slogan is: 'Smash X' -- where X can be almost anything -- from the current government, to racism, to big business, to some particular law etc etc. They are very big on smashing things.

... and his observation about soldiers versus snipers (leftists prefer the safety of guerilla warfare) the bit that caught my eye his observation about the relationship between leftist leaders and followers. He writes:

People who vote for such parties can often be (as S.M. Lipset points out in his 1960 book Political man) actually quite conservative. They tend to be working class people who simply vote for those who appear to offer them the best deal. In other words, Leftist lies and pretences of good intentions do sometimes gain votes from those least able to be critical...

I used to agree with this view, and believe it can be true often, but I've been forced to draw a rather different conclusion from my own experiences.

When I started to become convinced of conservative beliefs, I wondered about those who felt otherwise. I believe in assuming the best where possible, so I simply assumed they were simply mistaken, as I once was -- including their leadership. But over time, I noticed many in leadership had to know better. Ted Kennedy had to have known that Reagan's tax cuts increased tax receipts and shrank the lower class. The people who took this or that quote deceptively out of context had to have seen the important words they were omitting to deceive the reader.

So I adopted the view, as John says, that the leadership often knows exactly what they're doing, but that most followers are just being bamboozled.

But I still had a problem. Most the liberal voters I knew were quite smart people. And, most distressingly, when presented evidence to the contrary, almost none would change their minds (as I had), nor offer a better counterargument.

In light of this, I've sadly come to believe most left-leaning supporters are complicit in their own deception -- almost as though, at some deep psychological level, they're attracted to the personality flaws leftists exhibit and defend such people to the death, much like some women are drawn into abusive relationships with men they fiercely defend. (Deep down, they are defending themselves, perhaps.)

For example, I have a friend who I'd never win a bet against: she's incredibly smart. Yet she blames Bush for putting additives in her gasoline -- though she knows full well Clinton did. And she was angry about Bush's overspending (no kidding!) but then voted for Kerry, even he promised to spend even more. I know a very intelligent liberal-voting man with a strong anti-gay streak (not uncommon in older liberals, in my experience) who suddenly did an about-face when Republicans opposed gay marriage. His hatred of Republicans was suddenly stronger than his disgust towards homosexuals. And a pro-life artist, who said she was voting for Kerry (though he was pro-choice) because Bush, she said, had slashed funding for the arts. I demonstrated Bush in fact had increased arts funding. She still voted for Kerry -- it was clear she went looking for another reason right after I deflated that one.

In each of these examples -- culled from oh so many similar ones I could name -- intelligent people clearly betray their actual core values in order to support liberal leaders or causes. Which indicates that for some, party support is a deep, deep value indeed. As John Ray would say, it is a psychological issue.

Every week, I see left-leaning associates willingly trap themselves in closed logic loops. If the news report proves Bush sucks, gosh, it's reliable. If it reports something flattering towards Bush, well, it's completely under control of the Bush administration who made them say that, or faked the story. It's hard to view people as simply misinformed when they do things like this repeatedly -- the self is participating in it's own deception.

Why? I suspect it's the old ego being held hostage. Lefitsts (and leftist-voters) demonize others for purportedly being wrong, so they build up this barrier against changing their minds: if it was evil to hold the wrong position, then the stakes are too high to consider admitting one's own error: one would have to face deserving every ounce of hatred ever hurled at one's enemies. (That old bit about being judged by the standards we used to judge others.) It's a vicious cycle.

And, as psychiatrist M. Scott Peck explains in his treatise on "evil", People of the Lie, for some, the ego must be preserved at all costs:

The real danger of evil is not wrong behavior or bad actions, but the effort to continue to view ourselves as "good". Some people can criticize and examine themselves, and admit when they are in error. Others are unable to accept the idea they could be evil or sinful, and would rather hurt others than admit they have serious, deep faults or sins.

Such people can appear as solid citizens. "They are not pain avoiders or lazy people", but they may also go to an inordinate amount of effort to engage in activities which appear to justify them -- at least in their own eyes, not others. "They may willingly, even eagerly, undergo great hardships in their search for status." They are of strong will, and determined to have their own way.

"A predominant characteristic of the behavior that I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection."

"Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. The evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgment of one's own need to grow. If we cannot make that acknowledgment, we have no option except to attempt to eradicate the evidence of our imperfection."

"Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others they should be destroying the sickness within themselves."

I never understood, growing up, why some said "pride" was supposed to be the worst sin, and the root of all other sins. What's wrong with having a good view of yourself? Isn't it healthy to be glad for what you've done, or what you can do? And yet once I noticed this phenomenon, and figured out how it worked and that it was, apparently, the main cause behind the strange behavior of liberals -- which I puzzled over for nearly a decade -- it took quite a while for me to realize that the old, biblical word for this mechanism, which I had long ignored, was "pride." Sitting right there in front of me the whole time.

This also makes profound sense of Jesus's teaching:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

Imagine how different the world would be if everyone people did this, and admitted their own evil and faults, instead projecting it outward, onto scapegoat after scapegoat.