THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Overcoming the Leftist hegemony

"President Trump". What a magical sound those words are! I was intermittently laughing and crying with happiness for a couple of hours after listening to his inaugural address. It is so good to have one of ours in the White House again. It's been a long time. The two Bushes were OK but you have to go back to Reagan to get a really revolutionary President in the White House.

Revolutionary? Yes. A believer in the American revolution and a counter-revolutionary against the Leftist hegemony; someone who will smash the Leftist ratchet: The process whereby the government and society get steadily more Leftist year by year, with no going back even being considered by the governing elite. Note the excerpt from his speech at a pre-inauguration concert below. Trump speaks there of drawing on the past, of reverting to proven ways as the change that he has in mind. What a horror for the Left!

To this day Leftists characterize conservatives as people who are opposed to change. They can't accept that it is just Leftist change that conservatives find wanting. They do that because they have to defend themselves mentally from any suspicion that conservatives may have well-founded objections to their madcap schemes. Their claim has been an obviously false charge ever since Reagan and Thatcher but it is good to see Trump reinforcing the real story.

Why is Trump so different? Mainly because he isn't. What he says was obviously close to the hearts of the millions that voted for him. But he does differ in saying out loud what a lot of other Americans were only thinking. He completely ignored political correctness when most others feared to do so. How come? How come he is so free from the mental and verbal shackles that the Left have managed to place on most people? Even the GOP in recent years have just been Leftism-Lite. How come Trump escaped that?

It's got to go back to his upbringing as the son of a very rich man. His riches would have freed his father from much need to seek the approval of others so he did not inculcate young Donald with the then current middle-class notions of what is acceptable and what is not. Donald grew up as something of a "natural" child. His instinctive feelings were minimally suppressed. So he is rude to those who are rude to him and is annoyed by the rudeness. He has not been taught not to sweat the small stuff and has not been taught that "A soft answer turneth away wrath" (Proverbs 15:1). As a kid, he went to a Presbyterian Sunday school, as I did, and he had a Scottish mother so he obviously got a lot of wise guidance, but it was not enough to suppress who he is.

And the charge that he is a rude man is one-eyed. He certainly is rude to those who abuse him but he seems also to have learned long ago the two most important words in the English language: "Thank you". He spends a lot of time thanking people. In his inaugural address he even thanked Mr. Obama for smoothing his transition to power, which visibly moved Mr Obama. Obama seems to be basically a nice guy but he has just never managed to break the mental shackles placed on him by his Marxist upbringing. He is probably not terribly bright. It was just a nice guy in a black skin that people voted for.

Trump's emphasis on the centrality and importance of the ordinary people is rather reminiscent of another great conservative, Benjamin Disraeli, who led Britain at the time of Britain's greatest eminence -- in the late 19th century. Disraeli was himself a Jew (superficially converted to the Church of England!) but he greatly extolled the wisdom of the ordinary English people, and put his money where his mouth was by greatly expanding the franchise, so that more of those he extolled could vote in national elections. Disraeli was a great success in leading his nation and Trump will be too

Thousands of Donald Trump supporters have gathered near one of Washington’s famous landmarks for a concert celebrating his upcoming inauguration. The president-elect is embarking on a day of inauguration activities

The president-elect has spoken to the crowd at the inauguration concert.

We’re going to unify our country,” Trump told a crowd of thousands in front of the Lincoln Memorial after a pre-inauguration concert.

“We’re going to do things that haven’t been done for our country for many, many decades,” he added. “It’s going to change. I promise you.”

SOURCE

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

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