Dead Cant Rant

In The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values, Tammy Bruce shows the reader what life is really like inside the Left’s standard-bearer institutions of feminism and gay rights: moral vacuity and hatred on a scale that most of us will simply find incomprehensible.

Ms. Bruce is the product of molestation; as she explains in the book’s introduction, at 17 she and Brenda Benét — star of Days of Our Lives and ex-wife of Bill Bixby — became lovers. “Brenda wanted what she wanted,” she explains, proceeding to show how her lover’s selfishness led her to seduce a teenager, live with her, and eventually kill herself in an alcoholic rage. Ms. Bruce’s descent into narcissism continued full-speed throughout her twenties, replete with drug-related bi-sexual promiscuity. Her ties with the feminist and gay movements peaked during her six-year reign as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women.

There was a point, however, when Ms. Bruce came to realize her part in the Left’s endless quest for cultural destruction. Unlike her feminist and gay “friends”, she saw the result of their scorched-earth policies and understood the future that was in store. This book is her attempt to stand athwart the tide, hands outstretched, screaming “STOP!”

Throughout the book you will see example after example of what Ms. Bruce correctly identifies as the fundamental problem lying underneath the surface of virtually all members of the radical Left: untreated childhood trauma. As explained in the first chapter:

Childhood trauma, stress disorders, and the resulting malignant narcissism all play a part in the Left’s victim mentality and in their effort, mostly subconscious, to shape our world to mirror their own damaged psyches.

The most important thing to realize is that these idols of the Left are afflicted — truly mentally ill — with malignant narcissism. To explain, she quotes Otto Kernberg, the psychoanalyst who first described this illness:

“This pathological idealization of the self as an aggressive self clinically is called ‘malignant narcissism.’ And this is very much connected with evil and with a number of clinical forms that evil takes, such as the pleasure and enjoyment in controlling others, in making them suffer, in destroying them, or the casual pleasure in using others’ trust and confidence and love to exploit them and to destroy them.”

The core components of this syndrome are pathological narcissism, antisocial features, paranoid traits, and aggression. Self-preservation, self-promotion, and maintaining power are all traits that prevail in the malignant narcissist. The people and issues they supposedly serve exist only to be exploited for their own benefit.

I have participated at both the local and national levels of NOW; I have spent time with other feminist and gay special-interest groups and their leaders; I have worked closely with all forms of news media; and I have worked with political campaigns for Democratic candidates (can you imagine NOW endorsing a Republican?!). I have also spent a fair amount of time around universities. I can say with full confidence that what I have seen driving and controlling the actions and agenda of the Left elite in all those venues — culturally, politically, and socially — is malignant narcissism. Issues are used and people exploited for the sake of power. Malignant narcissism is the god of the Left elite.

Note the emphasis on evil in this definition: the Left is afflicted with malignant narcissism; malignant narcissism is “very much connected with evil”; therefore the people who are a part of these institutions, by and large, can be classified as “evil.” This is an interesting observation coming from a proud lesbian feminist Democrat. This is also an observation that I, and I’m sure many of you, can identify with, having been in direct contact with individuals who displayed these traits.

Those who are victimized have a choice: they can reach the third stage of recovery, “reintegrating the survivor into the community of ordinary people”; or they can capitalize on their victim status, forming groups who seek, through legislation and cultural intimidation, to drag society down with them, thereby validating their selfishness and self-destructiveness. As she quotes Dr. Judith Herman of Harvard Medical School:

Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.

Given that one of the fundamental traits of sociopathy is an exaggerated sense of self-worth and self-importance, combined with one of the Left’s cardinal “values” that nothing should be done to erode the self-confidence of the individual — and in fact, every effort must be made to increase one’s own self-importance — we can see into the world Ms. Bruce has inhabited for these past twenty-odd years with a clarity rarely offered by the usual conservative pundits. As she describes the selfishness of the Left:

The isolated, multicultural, ghettoized world of the Left refuses to consider the fact that everything we do as individuals affects everyone else.

This point is hammered home in each chapter, with revelation after shocking revelation detailing our culture’s slide down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass:

• How “feminists” have rallied to support women who murder their own children, claiming they suffer from “post-partum depression” and are “guilty of little more than extraordinary need and dangerous fragility.”
• The Left’s mostly-successful efforts to ensure that, if a black man kills a police officer, it is seen as an act of “self-defense” against an “oppressor”.
• The desecration of sacred religious symbols in the name of “art”.
• NOW’s relentless assault against what they deem “the insidious cult of motherhood”.
• The gay elite’s romanticization of AIDS through the “bareback” phenomenon (promoting promiscuous, unprotected gay sex) and the growing group known as “bug chasers” — gay men who actually seek to become infected with HIV/AIDS to ensure their victim status!
• How gays were instructed to lie to the Red Cross about their homosexuality, circumventing anti-HIV safety nets — ostensibly so they could donate blood for the victims of September 11th, but in reality to “fight” supposed anti-gay “prejudice” and “bigotry”.
• The scam perpetuated by so-called Black Leaders: Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Kweisi Mfume, and Maxine Waters. Instead of raising up the black communities, these race-baiters step on the backs of blacks everywhere, spewing hatred and blatant racism while profiting off of their hypocritical enslavement of their own.
• The inroads made by groups such as GLAAD and GLSEN to sexualize young children, using public schools to teach children as young as five that their bodies exist to provide them pleasure, instructing them in masturbation techniques, and asserting that child molestation and pedophilia is not only not harmful, but is in fact beneficial and “fun”. Any doubts that this is not intended for children will be dispelled by quotes from Judith Levine, author of “Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex”: “Sex is not harmful to children. If is a vehicle to self-knowledge, love, healing, creativity, adventure, and intense feelings of aliveness. There are many ways even the smallest of children can partake of it.“

The mindset of the “bug chasers” is a microcosm of the beliefs of the Left as a whole:

• Victimhood is your empowerment — hence the desire to become infected and infect others.
• You work to have AIDS become normal and inevitable by leading a life that spreads the contagion, thus forcing society to assimilate with you.
• You then demand that all the world accept your behavior and suppress judgement, perpetuating moral relativism.

Her most powerful writing is contained in the epilogue, wherein she confronts her selfish past by reflecting on the 1994 disclosure by Ronald Reagan — a man whom she voted into office in 1980 — that he suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, and in the process shows the dichotomy between normal American decency and the degenerate and destructive narcissism of the Left:

The conditioning of the Left Elite works so well partly because the people attracted to that camp are looking for family, they are looking to belong; consequently people like that — people like me — are easy pickings. My emptiness compelled me to cheer when a decent man who followed his principles was struck down by an unforgiving assailant. Alzheimer’s had done what many feminist leaders fantasized about doing themselves, if only they could get away with it.
…
We will have to agree to disagree [regarding abortion and fetal tissue research], but only now do I consider those on that other side decent people — as decent as I, but with a different focus. Ronald Reagan is one of those decent people, but in all the feminist establishment’s mirth about his illness, never did they consider, never would they consider, the humanity of the man. Some may have made sympathetic public comments, but, like Madelyn Toogood, the woman who beat her little girl in a parking lot, they were simply looking around to make sure no one was watching before they returned to privately declaring that Reagan deserved to suffer.
…
By now, you may not be surprised to learn that in certain gay and feminist circles, bottles of champagne wait in refrigerators to be opened when President Reagan dies. I am ashamed that I contributed to this mentality, which has survived to this day, infecting young people with hate for a man they never even knew. They trust the older generations — including people of my age — to be telling them the truth about monsters in the closet, the Abominable Snowman, and how Ronald Reagan deserves to die a slow and awful death.

As I think about all of this, it is difficult not to cry.

Ms. Bruce can finally look back on her life honestly, with a heart that has been opened by the revelation that “the enemy” are in fact often decent, hard-working, truly loving Americans who simply have different ideas than her own. And even though she was taught to hate and revile those who disagreed with her, she can now view her ideological opponents with respect, and feel a deep spiritual pain over her role in furthering the Left’s desecration and destruction of the Shining City on a Hill.

This is the ultimate lesson of the book, and in a work filled with examples of moral repugnance and depravity, it is a heartwarming endorsement of the power of common human decency to prevail over banality and evil — provided we as a society do not walk through our lives ignoring the ground that crumbles beneath our feet.