What Does the American Left Really Want?

The question I have been asked repeatedly since Charlottesville is: “What do the leftist protestors want?” Everybody knows what the neo-Nazis and white supremacists want. But what objective is driving their leftist opponents? The answer may surprise you.

The “Antifa” protestors—dressed in black, sporting helmets, wielding weapons and shields—are not seeking an ideological objective. When reporters ask them what they are protesting, they stutter and mumble and then cough up the party line: “We are against racists, Nazis, white supremacists, and hate speech.” When asked to define any of these pejorative terms, they are at a complete loss for words. They don’t know why they are protesting.

It doesn’t matter. Their aim is not ideological. It is hormonal. The ranks of Antifa are swelled by young people who haven’t found a socially acceptable way to channel their excess of youthful energy. The Left has exploited this latent exuberance. Left-leaning professors are indoctrinating the kids and turning them loose on the rest of us. As demonstrated by the Women’s March, the Left is adept at deceiving large numbers of otherwise reasonable people and convincing them to support its agenda.

The Left is encouraging pathological behavior for its own ideological purposes. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson said: “If you live a pathological life, you pathologize your society. And if enough people do that it’s hell.” He is describing the violent behavior that has become the hallmark of the American Left. The Left is deserving of the epithet “pathological” by virtue of its compulsive, quasi-religious drive that seems to justify all sorts of extreme behavior, not the least of which is violent protest.The leftist mobs appear to be suffering from two pathological behavior patterns: freedom to disobey laws they don’t like, and refusal to assume responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Political commentator Mark Levin calls Antifa “the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party.” They show up everywhere with the intention of shutting down free speech. We don’t hear much about it because the mainstream media is the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party. Hitler used similar tactics in the 1930s. Antifa vilifies white supremacists and neo-Nazis; Hitler’s thugs targeted communists and Jews. Our liberal mobs believe their mission is to physically assault anyone who happens to be conservative. They feel justified in doing all the things that the Nazi Party did in Germany.

The irony is that leftist behavior is racist, fascist, and hateful. These are a means to its actual ideological objective: The transformation of America into an authoritarian socialist nation run by an elite composed of unaccountable bureaucrats. The elite who are driving all of this are using the protestors to create an atmosphere that will justify increased government intervention. The Left would love to see martial law. Out of that chaos would come a Stalinist state with power going to a few—a tyranny of the minority.

We can see all of this playing out in Europe. The objectives of the European Union are identical to those of the American Left. A cadre of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels is attempting to break down the nation states that comprise the EU so the elite can seize control. The globalist intentions of the socialist bureaucrats who run the United Nations are weaved from the same cloth.

If the American Left succeeds, the United States in 2037 will be unrecognizable to most of us who are alive today. It will be familiar to those who have lived in Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea. The European public has figured out what the EU is doing and they are finally pushing back against the leftists. It may be too late for them. It’s time we did the same before it is too late for us.

Ed Brodow is a political commentator, negotiation expert, and author of Tyranny of the Minority: How the Left is Destroying America.