Keep Quiet

The Left’s Century of Moral Lectures, Failed Policies, and Manufactured Virtue 

Everyone has at least a couple of friends or family members like this. They go into rants about Donald Trump and throw anything they can against the wall — usually without evidence — and then elevate themselves to some kind of higher moral ground from which they look down on you as a war criminal, or someone who uses grape jam instead of raspberry preserves, or something worse. Then comes the usual line about how disappointed they are, or how you are the only one in their circle that voted for Trump. “How could you?” Then they get in their BMW 9000 and drive off in a huff.

In fact, the Left has spent over a century portraying itself as the paradigm of virtue and sophistication, progress and all that is right and good in the world. “Tolerance” used to be a word they threw around until they stopped being tolerant and moved on to their latest moral crusade. The Left has adopted politics as its new religion, along with a strange form of “scientism,” which consists largely of selectively choosing which facts to emphasize and which to ignore. There probably are not more than a handful of leftists who understand that science developed out of wonder about the universe, and that the first “science,” as it were, was cosmology. God was never viewed as antithetical to science, and many early Enlightenment scientists were pastors. But I digress. I am here to talk about the Left’s obnoxious addiction to moral preening and the distortion of facts that serves that purpose.

We could go back to Karl Marx, or even the Jacobins — that tolerant and incredibly moral bunch that sent thousands of innocents to the guillotine. But for today we are going to begin with Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. One fun fact about Wilson is that during the final phase of his presidency he was operating much like President Biden. In October 1919, after agreeing to the disastrous Treaty of Versailles that helped pave the way for another world war, he suffered a massive stroke. Wilson was partially paralyzed and significantly impaired for the remainder of his presidency.

If this sounds familiar, the next part will sound even more familiar. His staff and his wife did not bother to mention this to the American public. Edith Wilson became a kind of shadow president — the first Jill Biden, if you will. She controlled access to the President, determined which documents he could see, who could meet with him, and which matters she would simply handle herself. Even cabinet members and senators had no clear understanding of the President’s actual condition. The Vice President was effectively sidelined because there was no constitutional mechanism at the time to deal with the situation.

The “liberal” and “tolerant” Wilson administration also set an early standard for concealment and manipulation within the administrative state — the willingness to hide material facts from the public “for the good of the nation.”

Unfortunately, by the time Wilson had his stroke, he had already done most of his damage. The Princeton progressive promoted eugenics, segregated parts of the federal government, and supported a treaty that punished Germany so severely that even John Maynard Keynes resigned in protest over the terms. Wilson distinguished himself in the way many intellectuals do — by confusing abstraction with wisdom and listening too carefully to the French.

 In addition to entering a war that many Americans believed the United States should never have entered, Wilson moved quickly to suppress criticism of the war effort. He set the precedent for Presidents claiming reluctance to enter foreign conflicts while steadily moving the nation toward them anyway. Later versions of this would appear with LBJ in Vietnam, Bush and “nation building,” Obama promising quick withdrawal, and our current political class promising no more endless wars. Wilson was the trendsetter.

Even in a time before Merrick Garland, Wilson showed he could imprison dissidents with the best of them. The Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 resulted in the prosecution and imprisonment of activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens under wartime speech laws. Newspapers were shut down, critics were targeted, and citizens were encouraged to report one another for “insufficient patriotism.” The cherry on top was the imprisonment of socialist labor leader and former presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for speaking against the administration’s policies. Wilson even established a Committee on Public Information — essentially a government propaganda bureau designed to shape public opinion and mobilize support for the war. The advantage was that the public could be brainwashed for free instead of paying $60,000 a year at an Ivy League school.

Since that time, the modern Left has combined moral absolutism with a strange relativism. On the one hand, they insist there is no such thing as objective truth. On the other hand, they display extraordinary intolerance toward anyone who disagrees with them. To sustain this contradiction, they have built entire classes of government-funded bureaucrats, administrators, credentialed experts, and ideological managers whose job is to give fashionable opinions the appearance of moral authority. Yet behind the polished rhetoric there has always existed a deeply authoritarian mindset — one marked by shifting standards, selective outrage, and an endless appetite for control. Even committed leftists often find themselves sprinting to keep up with whatever the newest orthodoxy happens to be.

 The net effect of many of these policies has been the dismantling of the moral and social institutions that once protected children, families, religion, public order, borders, and even basic restraint — without offering anything durable in their place beyond bureaucracy, slogans, and moral vanity. One of the strangest developments has been the way modern ideology has encouraged women to view motherhood, family, and even aspects of their own biology as obstacles to “autonomy,” as though maturity itself were some form of oppression. What has been sold to both men and women is essentially a false fountain of youth built on prolonged adolescence.

At the national level, permissive policies have coincided with over 100,000 drug deaths a year — nearly twice the number of Americans killed during the Vietnam War, which the Left once bitterly protested. For all the rhetoric about protecting children, abortion on demand has become morally normalized on a staggering scale. Meanwhile, amid all the outrage surrounding the Epstein files and exploitation scandals, open border policies have resulted in hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children becoming effectively untraceable after entering the country. It is difficult to believe all of them are safely at Disneyland.

 Then there is modern left-wing policing and law enforcement. Everyone now knows the story of Merrick Garland’s FBI raid on the home of Mark Houck, a Catholic pro-life activist accused in a local dispute outside an abortion clinic. Garland deployed a tactical response that looked wildly disproportionate to the allegations involved, while many violent repeat offenders in major cities cycled in and out of the system with little consequence.

The Obama administration’s IRS targeted conservative organizations — something confirmed by the Inspector General. Under Biden, internal memos surfaced linking certain Catholic groups to extremism concerns, while the FISA process used during investigations connected to the Trump campaign exposed serious surveillance and oversight failures within the intelligence apparatus. Hardly a shining example of moral superiority.

But perhaps the Left’s greatest betrayal has been what it did to its own historic voter base — the working class. Once the Democratic Party realized it could maintain power through bureaucratic institutions, affluent suburbs, corporate alliances, and credentialed elites, it gradually abandoned the industrial middle class that once formed its backbone.

The real unraveling accelerated during the Clinton years. Clinton aligned the Democratic Party with global finance, multinational corporations, and technocratic elites. After NAFTA, factories across the Midwest and industrial Northeast closed or moved overseas. Stable blue-collar jobs that once allowed ordinary Americans to support families, buy homes, and participate in civic life disappeared so corporations could squeeze out another few points of profit and executives could add another Bentley to the garage.

 From there the social collapse accelerated. As jobs disappeared, towns deteriorated. Addiction spread like wildfire, churches closed and marriage rates plummeted. Crime and generational hopelessness was everywhere. When working-class Americans — black, white, and Hispanic — complained about rising crime and disorder, many progressive politicians sided not with law-abiding citizens but with theories about “root causes,” decarceration, and endless excuses for criminal behavior. Bail was reduced, repeat offenders cycled through the system, and ordinary neighborhoods paid the price, fading into oblivion.

Then came the economic disaster of the post-COVID years. Massive spending, easy money policies, and endless deficits fueled inflation that devastated working Americans living on wages while asset-owning elites became even wealthier. The rhetoric was all about “infrastructure” and “rebuilding,” but we all know the spending was political patronage not national renewal — consultants, activist groups, subsidized bureaucracies, and projects that somehow didn’t seem to materialize.

The result has been catastrophic for younger Americans. Home ownership — once the cornerstone of middle-class stability — has become almost unreachable for millions of people who simply want to work, marry, raise children, and live responsibly. Meanwhile giant financial firms bought up single-family homes and transformed themselves into corporate landlords, often with little criticism from the same politicians who lecture everyone else about inequality.

 And finally comes the insult layered on top of the injury. When working Americans complained about all of this, figures like Hillary Clinton dismissed them as “deplorables,” while Barack Obama often spoke about them with barely concealed contempt. At least someone like Michael Moore occasionally admits why the working class abandoned the Democratic Party in droves. That doesn’t mean he is going to do about it. He, like many progressive elites would rather watch the country burn than reconsider the ideological assumptions that helped create the crisis. Tear it all down, we hear, as if that will lead to something better.

So yes, everyday people are tired of it. We do not want more lectures from the Left about morality. They long ago abandoned any stable concept of truth while continuing to claim exclusive ownership over virtue. For those of us who still believe in responsibility, restraint, family, community, and reality itself, the wreckage is difficult to ignore. We know how we got here and their stewardship makes Thelma and Louise look like responsible drivers.

Donald Trump has not fulfilled every promise he made, and Republicans will ultimately have to answer for their own failures as well. But a political movement that celebrates abortion without limits, tolerates disorder, runs deficits that future generations cannot repay, destroys the middle class, and leaves young people without hope has very little reason to lecture the rest of the country about morality.

At some point, they should do everyone a favor and simply keep quiet.