Bruce A. Riggs:
Much of the political history of the extended twentieth century is that of massive extinctions of citizenries by their dictatorial governments.  Take the engineered mass starvations, torture chambers, firing squads, and gulags of Lenin and Stalin; Nazi gas chambers; Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killing fields; the genocides of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”; and the tyrannical North Korean Sung dynasty, and one will find that over one hundred million people have been slaughtered.
Systematically murdering millions to create an imagined earthly Eden is clearly irrational.  In this sense, leftist ideology has the look of a religious inquisition.
In his introduction to Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (1), Dante Germino neatly captured Voegelin’s thesis of the left as an atheistic “religion”:
[M[odern Gnosticism has been dedicated to the hubristic attempt to overcome the anxieties and uncertainties of human life by building a terrestrial paradise. However well-intentioned, even the ‘moderate proponents of the ‘progressive’ program bear a heavy responsibility for the disasters of humanity.
Others have alluded to this secular religious characterization of leftist ideology:
- “Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion.” (2)
- “Marxism … was a religious atheism, a secular religion that proposed to build utopia only to open the gates of hell[.]” (3)
- “The ability of the intellectual Left to survive the catastrophe of its Communist attachments derives from its essentially religious nature[.]” (4)
Fischer (5) put it this way:
[T]otalitarianism represents the twentieth-century version of traditional religiosity; it is in many ways the secular equivalent of the religious life. Unless this crucial point is captured, the quintessential nature of totalitarianism will elude us.
This “totalitarian religiosity” continues as a secular, politico-centric faith, disdainful of theistic beliefs and contemptuous of those who subscribe to them.  It is a faith that, in its historical manifestations, has birthed the murderous tyrannies of the extended twentieth century — tyrannies that have marched under left-wing banners of Marxism, Communism, and National Socialism, or, more generally and descriptively, Coercive Collectivism.
For the past eighty-plus years, America has been heading toward such an elitist tyranny in accordance with such socio-political contrivances as “New Deals,” “Great Societies,” “Fundamental Transformations,” and the steady, piecemeal abrogation of the Constitution.  We have not yet reached the “Heil Hitler” or “Hail Stalin” state, but we’re getting closer with the hope-and-change nihilism of Critical Theory and arbitrary Postmodernistrelativisms (e.g., “situational ethics”).
It is asserted here that this coercive faith has the character of an endemic narcissism.  It is an arrogant faith led, and largely populated, by a relentlessly aggressive, power-obsessed political class dedicated to imposing an egalitarian minimalism (“social justice”) on the world.
While the classic definition of narcissism focuses on the individual, collective narcissism asserts that one can have a similar excessively high opinion of a group, and that group can function as a narcissistic entity.
In the broadest terms, this narcissistic entity is America’s left-wing political establishment and the purveyor of an authoritarian collectivist faith.  It is a faith largely populated by those in the high-visibility, look-at-me intellectual professions of politics, the arts, teaching, journalism, and various political foundations.  All are professions inordinately able to shape the public mind both short- and long-term.  As such, it is a propaganda-intensive collective that includes the left-biased “news” media and the TV and film industries.
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