An Honest Political Party?

The Socialist party in Japan pulled out of the ruling coalition, and brought down the prime minister, merely because he failed to live up to his promise to boot out a foreign invader. (The American military base in Okinawa.) The socialists in Japan showed some real integrity and guts by reacting to betrayal the way they did; contrast this with the indifference of the American Left, when the latter's "peace candidate" turned into a warmonger.

Why the discrepancy? Does the "Left" mean something different in Japan than in the USA? Or is the American Left just especially spineless? Actually I don't think political ideology explains why the American Left continues to support a president who should be considered a political traitor. Demographics does.

The USA is a country that has few indigenous Leftists. By 1900 or so most of Europe's intelligentsia had become Marxist (on the continent) or Fabian Socialist in England. Many of the professorships at America's most prestigious universities were held by European intellectuals.

America has no native intelligentsia. Like ancient Romans, Americans stick to building roads, laws and courts, tax collecting, crass entertainment in the Coliseum, over-eating, and invading other people's countries. As for ideas, well, we outsource that to Europe, just as ancient Romans did to Greece. 

Once ensconced in America's elite universities, European socialism spread like Dutch Elm disease. The students went on to become professors at universities one notch lower. This process kept notching down and broadening until every journalist, TV or movie script writer, pastor, and school teacher became infected.

Finally, a suburban and corporate-cubicle-friendly version of Leftism-Lite became an endemic disease of middle-class brats whose parents could afford to send them to college. Students whose grades weren't quite as good, and whose parents were lower-middle class or even in inner cities, tended to prefer the military as the means of upward social mobility.

We ended up with two demographic categories, with disparate ideologies. Let's call them the college-type and the military-type. The college-tribe is taught to be properly Leftist, environmentalist, feminist, and to thinks it's hip, cool, and progressive to be gay.

The military-tribe is full of the jocks, gearheads, and Bible-thumpers of small town America, who are taught "patriotism," which basically means that God appointed America to rule the Earth, and that invading and bombing half the countries in the earth is part of our Divinely-appointed ministry.

And that is why the college-tribe isn't particularly upset when their peace candidate turns out to be a warmonger: it just means a thousand or so boxes come back to the States every year, filled with the mangled carcasses of the military-tribe, none of whom were personal friends of the college-tribe.