Leftist denial.

Lawrence Auster puts his finger on what makes it impossible for realists (i.e., conservatives, traditionalists, reactionaries) to find common ground with leftists:

The essence of the left is to block out vast sectors of reality (e.g., the existence of evil and enemies; the existence of cultural differences, race differences, sex differences, ability differences; the realities power, etc.) and pretend that they don't exist.

Leftists are often highly intelligent people but that intelligence operates only in limited areas. The remaining areas are ones in which fascination with or fixation on the ideal predominate.

Why that is so is beyond my analytical competence. It seems as though idealists think that world peace and crime-free societies are attainable now because they have discovered novel theories of social and political control (e.g., public ownership of the means of production) in much the same way that scientific discoveries created vast new human opportunities. Once scientists reduced observations of the natural world to workable theories huge changes were possible.

So with social and political problems. New theories in these areas have similar potential to effect tremendous beneficial change and any who fail to sign on in the service of these theories are guilty of simple intellectual failure or willful obtuseness bordering on depravity. If tremendous social amelioration is possible through revolutionary thinking, opposition to revolution must be evil.

Corruption and misery do not come about because of evil, cultural differences, etc. but because non-leftists are the ones with the will to dominance, acquisitiveness, and indifference to environmental degradation. Evil after a fashion but, more properly, capitalist, nationalists, patriarchal, or Christian evil.

To leftists, misery is never the result of evil but is the result of opposition to the ideal. The conservative argues that misery is the result of denial of reality.

This still doesn't explain why leftists are so impervious to the concrete facts of existence. The attraction of the ideal is understandable but not the ability to block out facts that land on your doorstep like Monty Python's familiar "16 tons."

The entire 20th century was a time in which the horrendous consequence of governmental power were meticulously documented, yet leftists in the 21st century rush to hand ever more power to governments as though governments can always and forever be trusted never to abuse power. The same denial is evident throughout the West in the face of the clear failure of the welfare state.

Only Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "pitiless crowbar of events" will be sufficient to break through the shell of this kind of denial.

"Jews' idiotic (and wicked) anti-nationalism." By Lawrence Auster, View from the Right, 4/7/06.