February 11, 2022
Tom and Jerry: The Parents of American Leftism
By
Vladimir Frumkin and Jacob Fraden
Countries, like people, are born in pain. They mature, grow old, and then inevitably die. They can fall into decay, can get sick, may recover and become stronger again. The maturing process usually takes centuries, and decline and disease can last for decades, while death sometimes takes only a few days.
Today, the great and prosperous America is seriously ill. It has been ill for more than fifty years with a mental disease called "liberalism."
Like a cancer, liberalism corrodes the formerly free and creative soul of the American people. For more than two hundred years, the U.S. population had markedly distinguished itself from all others by its perseverance, hard work, uncompromising commitment to freedom, desire for personal success, and primacy of the individual over the state.
In the past, people of the United States had been known for their ingenuity, perseverance, competitiveness, and ability to overcome adversity. However, in modern times, these winning qualities not only have disappeared, but even are considered something indecent and shameful. Succeeding, getting a strong education, forging ahead in careers — these are no longer virtues, but shameful shortcomings.
Liberal philosophy doesn't value equality before the law, which would be moral and right, but instead requires the recognition of equality of people in their abilities — something contrary to the laws of nature. Such equalizing attempts were made one hundred years ago in the USSR and seventy years later led to a degradation and disintegration of the country. Sameness inevitably leads to stagnation, decay, and dying. Only in comparison is it possible to select the best; progress is nourished only by struggle and competition. Today, these obvious truths are rejected by the liberalism-infected U.S. population.
We shall search for the origins of the liberal disease at the beginning of life — in a childhood, when the psyche is formed and the moral qualities of a person are laid.
In bygone years, children absorbed the realities of life through literature and cinema, and, in recent decades, mainly through television. In 1940, the first episode of the cartoon
Tom and Jerry was released, where, in the likeness of David and Goliath, the strong and aggressive cat Tom hunts for the small and weak mouse Jerry, who always wins with his ingenuity.
Several generations of American children grew up on episodes of this cartoon. Naturally, they developed sympathy and compassion for the weak mouse and contempt for the strong but inept cat. What character does a young viewer identify itself with? Of course, with this charming and resourceful mouse! This emotional reaction is absorbed into the consciousness and subconsciousness of an individual, and it inevitably it becomes a long-lasting conditioned reflex. Gradually, a stereotype arose when growing children became adults: one sympathizes with the small and weak and despises the big and strong.
Young people instinctively take the side of a weak. The same criterion worked for young people in real life, outside literature and cinema. It manifested itself in their attitude toward racial problems, feminism, the movement for the rights of sexual minorities, the homeless, and many other things. It goes as far as international relations.
It's normal and quite humane to adore Jerry and his real-life counterparts. It's morally good to treat well those who are weaker, who deserve love, sympathy, and support. But alas, not everyone deserves such sympathy! Love is often blind. Many young people are just not able to control their feelings in an "adult way," without romantic perception, to look at the object of their admiration in its true colors, and only then decide who deserves love and who does not.
In thinking adults, the reflexes acquired in childhood are adjusted and modified, filtered by a mature consciousness, verified by accumulated life experience and the absorbed "adult" culture. Yet, in the minds of many young Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, there was no reliable filter for popular culture. Their intellect did not receive the information that was available to the middle class of the previous generations. They lacked the necessary intellectual ballast of fundamental knowledge in such areas as history, economics, geography, and international politics. They had little knowledge of classical literature, art, and music.
Allan Bloom in
The Closing of the American Mind and Susan Jacoby in
The Age of American Unreason described the first of the "cancel culture" idea created by the American left: the abolition of the classical canon in liberal arts education, the rejection of the centuries-old heritage of culture created by the "Dead White Men." In liberal minds, the whites are the majority; thus, they are
a priori wrong and guilty.
In words of the great Orwell, "some animals are more equal than others." According to the concepts of leftist liberalism, the weak and small have more rights than the strong and skillful. Thus, the "general equality" that they proclaim turns into its opposite — a selective inequality. "Reverse" racism — really, just racism against a new group — flourishes, and discrimination is adopted against anyone who is above their low-set bar in art, science, technology, and all other areas of human endeavor.
Sometimes this comes to complete idiocy. Liberals developed an exaggerated tendency to romanticize reality, to sympathize with the disadvantaged. The infantilism of this kind of emotion usually leads to absurd decisions and demands, like to remake the Disney movie where the prince kisses the bewitched Snow White. "He kisses a sleeping girl without her consent!" the infantile idiots shout. "It's no good! Come up with a new ending!"
With the infantile liberals, weak Jerry is always right, and strong Tom is always wrong. Talk to the current students about the Middle East, about Israel — and you will immediately remember the predatory Tom chasing poor Jerry: the Jews have a state, a strong economy, a powerful army, while the Palestinians are a minority that has nothing. They are the suffering side and need our unconditional support. Yes, the weak "Jerry" has to resort to terror and kill civilians — how else to deal with the strong "Tom"?
Several years back, a filmmaker and freelance journalist named Ami Horowitz stopped students on the campus of the University of Portland (Oregon) and asked them to
donate money to Hamas terrorist operations against civilian targets in Israel: cafés, schools, hospitals, and synagogues. In just one hour, he managed to raise hundreds of dollars. The humane defenders of racial minorities, true allies of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders, do not hesitate to donate their own money to terrorists who are thirsty for the blood of peaceful Israeli citizens. How can one not recall the Russian philosopher
Nikolai Berdyaev, who warned about the danger of "a mixture of false sensitivity and affected compassion with cruelty and malicious vindictiveness. Sentimentality often leads to cruelty"? "This is the law of spiritual life," he said. Or remember
Friedrich Nietzsche, who spoke about the same paradox in other words: "Ah, where in the world did great stupid things happen if not among the compassionate? And what in the world caused great suffering, if not the stupidity of the compassionate?"
Our leftist humanists treat America in much the same way as they treat Israel. For the same reason: resourceful, powerful, rich...and thus guilty of all the world's troubles. Anti-Americanism has become part of the ideology of the "awakened" half of the country. It is taught in the schools through two programs: the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory.
American hatred of America is a relatively new phenomenon. Such sharp and self-destructing rejection by its citizens of American history, traditions, and values has never been seen before.
Will the healthy half of America be able to cure the other half?
