If there is one lesson I learned working in the startup industry, it’s that people tend to assume everyone else will behave the way they behave. This was a revealing education in human behavior. Someone who accuses everyone of cheating is likely to be a cheat. Someone who tends to be trusting is likely to be trustworthy.
Unfortunately, of course, trusting types don’t always make the best businessmen: This quirk of human nature, the tendency to see everyone else through one’s own reflection, often makes victims of the best people. There is nothing quite as rotten as seeing a crook accuse an honest man of being a crook.
And it does make me wonder about many of the things the Left says: Do they accuse people of “not paying their fair share” of taxes because they know, in their Silicon Valley mansions, that their own lifestyles are wildly divergent from the economic views they espouse? Do they think that parents can’t be trusted to raise and educate their children because they themselves raise Hunter Bidens?
Do they believe people can’t be trusted with guns because they themselves can’t be trusted with guns? Anyone who has grown up around guns—before he fires his first shot—learns that every gun is to be treated as loaded: Sweeping someone with the muzzle even of an unloaded gun will get you banned for life from any firing range I’ve ever visited. But perhaps if you don’t have the training or the common sense, you assume nobody has.
Does the Left claim that society is irretrievably sexist because they themselves are sexist? They talk a good game on women’s rights, but they side with the alleged rapist and against the victim in the Loudoun county rape case. Bill Clinton continues to be welcomed and adored in polite Beltway company and elite academia, even though he has an epic record of sexual predation. And his wife Hillary was perfectly willing to help disparage and discredit Bill’s accusers for the sake of her own power. All of Hollywood knew for years everything the public now knows about Harvey Weinstein, but they still went to his parties, and continued to do so right up until their private knowledge became public.
But there is something beyond the Left’s usual odd behavior when their affection for a rapist exceeds their sympathy for a victim: The Left has broken away from equality of rights into a bizarre sphere where they claim everything men have traditionally done is what everyone should want to do. They claim that everything women have traditionally done is worthless. Validation is on an exclusively male scale. The Left isn’t just sexist in this respect—it is misogynist. It loathes womanhood and envies manhood (while understanding neither and failing at both).
Does the Left claim that we are all racist, and born racist, because they themselves are racist? I am speaking here not of casually offensive remarks, or even a certain governor’s blackface costumes: I mean the deeply held conviction that certain races are inferior, and can succeed (i.e., can “be like us”) only with extensive and patronizing assistance. What conclusion should we draw from statements such as “poor kids are just as bright as white kids” or the suggestion that blacks and Hispanics don’t necessarily “know how to get online” (both courtesy of Joe Biden)? American blacks were gaining in wealth faster than any other demographic when LBJ enacted the Great Society. Since then, the Left has used minorities as a permanent underclass who are expected to supply votes and menial labor in exchange for handouts on which dependence is encouraged.
Finally, does the Left accuse everyone of trying to overthrow democracy because that is precisely what the Left is doing? How does #TheResistance of the Trump years square with gulag-style prisons where January 6 protestors can be punished and tortured before trial? How does General Mark Milley’s concern that Trump would attempt to remain in power past the end of his term square with Milley’s decision to take the executive power into his own hands? How does the claim that Republicans want to suppress voter freedom square with the Time article on “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” that spent hundreds of millions guaranteeing a “proper” result in 2020? How does the proposal for a vaccine passport square with opposing photo ID for voting?
Just as the man who suspects he’s always being cheated thinks of himself as impeccably honest, and considers himself driven to cheat only in order to defend himself, the Left projects its own flaws on society at large as an excuse for its own behavior—as expiation for its own sins, as atonement for its own weaknesses. The Left’s policy prescriptions are the black mirror in which their own personality is reflected and amplified.