VDH: The Left Is What It Once Loathed

This is good.

   What I think is best about it is his summary of Russiagategate.

   His diagnosis of the fundamental nature and failing of the contemporary left is insightful, but I don't exactly agree with it.

   It's insightful and accurate enough to be worth quoting:

  What is the Left, then? Mostly a Jacobin party that operates ad hoc, without consistency.
   Its two guiding principles are now reduced to simple agendas.
   One, nothing matters unless one has power. The means to obtain it are always after the fact justified by the supposedly noble ends they once served.
   And two, what exactly are those noble ends? Or what unites the Google and Facebook zillionaires, the full professor of English, the Washington Post senior editor, Barack Obama, George Soros, the head of a major network, Harvey Weinstein, Robert De Niro, or Don Lemon?
   It is a desire to sound off about mandated equality, but only as long as one has the resources to be unaffected by the necessary consequences of one’s loud egalitarian advocacy. As a general rule, the more one is insulated from the downside of one’s abstract progressivism, the louder and more vehemently he expresses it.

There's also this:

Contemporary progressivism is an illiberal abettor of unconstitutional operations that are state-sanctioned rather than merely rogue.

I mean, it's done those things--that's more than bad enough--but I wouldn't say that's what it is... I include the quote mostly because I initially read it as ...abattoir... Which I thought was funny and maybe even kinda made sense in a way.