The death of Nelson Mandela will no doubt result in a sanctimonious circus for the usual suspects on the Left. These people cannot control themselves, so even at funerals they put on a show, intended to display their virtue. That’s how it goes with these things. It is a shame because Mandela’s death could be one of those moments to think about the realities of Africa, but the people who deified him really don’t care about Africa or Africans.

Instead, it will be a week of one-upsmanship on the Left, as they compete with one another to be the most worshipful of a man who was mostly a failure. Chris Mathews is a great example. He lives in one of the whitest neighborhood in America, which happens to be outside of Washington. The Baltimore-Washington area is close to majority black, so a white-only town stands out. Yet, Mathews will lecture the rest of us about race.

Mathews is emblematic of the Left’s relationship to blacks. For the Left, blacks are merely a totem. They are something one worships in the abstract because it riles the enemies of the Left. At least they think it does. In the fevered imagination of the Left, The Man hates blacks and is always trying to keep them down. Naturally, The Man is always a cartoonish version of the the WASP elite, rather than a liberal Jewish guy.

Of course, the Mandela worship has always been about the Left celebrating itself and this funeral will be another example. They love Mandela because they backed him against the bad whites, who were on the wrong side of history. If Mandela had died of a stroke before apartheid ended, he would have been forgotten. It was never about him or his cause. It was always about the narrative in which the Left is always operating.

It is a shame because Mandela really was an extraordinary leader by the standards of Africa. His coevals on the continent competed with one another to be the most maniacally murderous and destructive. Idi Amin was a cannibal, for example. No African country emerged from colonialism and then prospered, except for two. Rhodesia thrived for a time under Ian Smith. The other is South Africa, at least until now.

The fact that South Africa did not follow the same path as every other African state is due to Mandela, in no small part. That’s not to say he was a saint or even a moral person. It’s just that he was not like the typical African leader, who runs his country in the same way local drug lords runs their gang. There was a chance to make the Mandela model the minimally acceptable in Africa, but that never happened and never will now.

None of that will get much of an airing this weekend. Instead it will be the Left congratulating itself for opposing Apartheid and embracing Mandela. It will also be an excuse to revive their passion for Obama. You can be sure our African prince will be there talking about himself, not so subtly reminding the Left why they worshiped him up until last week. The only thing missing will be a wicker man full of white people to burn.

No one will dare mention the deteriorating conditions in South Africa as the black majority slip back into their natural state and set about murdering the white minority. Whatever legacy Mandela could have had will be forgotten after the Left is done with his memory this weekend. In a decade, when the white minority is fleeing South Africa, no one will look back and wonder if it was a good idea to oppose Apartheid. No one will care.

Something that jumps out when reading the chapter on Weather Underground in Destructive Generation, is that a big part of the attraction of radical politics in chaotic mayhem. Early on, the Weathermen did a lot or organizing. That required the leaders to travel around the country to visit other radicals. One of them was Bernadine Dohrn, Obama’s patron in Chicago. She was the main recruiter for the group.

In one passage, Horowitz described how she and her companion at the time liked to cause mayhem on airplanes, so the passengers would think they were crazy. The point, she said, was to “scare the shit out of the mother fucking honkies!” They would engage in raunchy behavior or dress in outlandish clothes, for no other reason than to irritate the other people on the plane. Their goal was to be disruptive just to be disruptive.

This is a major feature of radical ideology. The revolution is not going to start by itself, so the vanguard needs to first destabilize the system. The proletariat needs leadership, but they also need to be freed from the shackles of the system. The way to do that is to attack the institutions of the bourgeoisie. As faith in those institutions falters, the middle-class will be forced to choose sides. Those who side with the radicals will be rewarded. Those who side with the establishment will be killed along with the ruling class.

That’s why bombing campaigns were popular with the New Left here and in Europe. If the police and courts cannot protect you from the revolution, you’re not going to support the system. The point of this form of terrorism is to reveal the rulers as illegitimate, by making it seem  like their impotence is deliberate. Instead of blaming the bombers, the people begin to turn on their rulers, opening the door for the radicals.

Now, the New Left was not a real Marxist revolutionary group. They were just spoiled middle and upper-middle class kids from good families. They liked all the good stuff of the system, they just wanted to shortcut their way to positions of power. The Marxism language and radical politics were always a pose for people like the Weathermen. They just liked causing trouble. Most of their time was spent doing drugs and fornicating.

The few sober moments were spent screaming at one another about why they have done nothing but get high and fornicate like animals. A handful of hardcore nuts did some real damage, but most were just there for the party. Those nuts, however, were attracted to the cause for the opportunity to cause mayhem. By the time Dohrn and Ayers were running things, that’s all there was as the 60’s had petered out.

The way Horowitz describes these people, the impression is that their lust for mayhem was driven but a desire to get attention. One of the founders spent a lot of time cultivating an image suggesting he came from the lower-class, when he was a rich kid. Dohrn strutted around dressed like a hooker and banging men in public. Ayers worked hard to cast himself as a lady killer. The whole list of founders is distinguished by the amount of time and effort each put into crafting an attention grabbing image.

It’s easy to understand why these people were fond of declaring that all politics is personal. For them, it was literally true. The lust for mayhem became a part of these cultivated images. All politicians are in it for personal reasons, but most are defined by things outside of politics. Radicals are only defined by their politics. They have no true self that can exist outside their current politics. It’s why they are so angry and violent. Any push-back to their program is a personal attack, as it literally is personal for them.

It reveals something about all radical politics, regardless of the age or the issue. These people define themselves by their politics, which are by nature in opposition to the normal social order. They have to both attack that normal order, trying to overturn it, but also do so in a purely personal way. The effort they invest into “being different” is not really about the thing they are pretending to be. It is about that which they are rejecting.

A topic that will come up here regularly is that the American Right has never understood the nature of the American Left. In fact, using the terms Left and Right in the political context is a category error. The American Left is nothing like the European Left . It is a radical religion that seeks salvation by purifying the community of heretics. That’s why they are immune to facts and reason. There’s not talking a fanatic out of his fanaticism, anymore than you can talk a Muslim out of his religion. This post is a good example.

Nevertheless, the president of the United States is not amused. We read our government is secretly “reviewing” our support of Egypt. They are urging the Egyptian military to negotiate with the Brotherhood, the same religious fanatics who evidently just told 24 Egyptian policemen to lie face down in the Sinai desert and summarily executed them, the same madmen who are running all over Egypt burning down Christian churches.

What is the explanation for this absolutely self-destructive, even idiotic, policy on our part?

There can be only one — the president of the United States is actually psychologically disturbed. He does not react in a normal manner. I know that’s a vicious and importunate thing to say, but the reaction to Egypt (and to Benghazi, for that matter) is not one of a psychologically healthy human being.

It’s more than the narcissism of which he is often accused, as bad as that is. It’s a form of extreme neurotic attraction to (notably Islamic) religious fascism. Obama is not a Muslim, but he has these deep feelings about it (some of them related to imperialism, others to his absent father, no doubt) that allow him to overlook, or rationalize, all that hideous misogyny, homophobia, and jihadist fanaticism, that loathing of democracy and freedom, even when it could not be more obvious. To Obama, those abhorrent — monumentally illiberal — behaviors and ideologies almost seem irrelevant. But they are the most relevant of all.

There you have it, The President, in the face of all those facts and arguments still embraces radical Islam, so he must be crazy. What passes for the Right in America is trapped in this mode of thought that says the Left is rational, so if they embrace rationality, it’s not their liberalism, but some mental disease or possible diabolical plot that has yet to be revealed. In other words, Simon simply rules out the possibility that Obama believes what he says and is motivated by a moral framework that structures these beliefs.

The Left in America is a religion. They have decorated their religion over the years with stuff from Continental radicalism and, of course, Jewish radicalism, which is the source of the rabid anti-nationalism. That was the lesson from the two last wars, allegedly, was that nationalism, German nationalism specifically, but nationalism in general, is the source of war on the continent. The American Left imported that idea in the 1960’s, first as anti-colonialism and now as a hostility to the very basics of citizenship and country.

Obama is a prime example. Every normal person has a copy of their birth certificate out of necessity. They have a social security number issued in their youth that they used for an ID number since kindergarten.  They know their religion, even if they never have attended church. Of course, they know the place and circumstances of their birth. Obama has none of those things. He has never seen a reason to have them. He is a citizen of the world and his identity has nothing to do with his nation of origin. His tribe is his class and status.

It is why Obama struggles so much with odd subjects like how many states there are in America. He has said Hawaii is in Asia. He has mistakenly said he is a Muslim. These are not things that have been important to him. He was raised to eschew these proletarian interests. To American liberals like Obama, the idea of a nation and a national people is as outdated as the buggy whip. He sees himself as a holy man, whose task is is to usher in the age when there are no borders and no national governments.

Therefore, when he looks at the anarchy and chaos of Egypt, he does not see the things Simon thinks are important. He sees people he generally admires, engaged in the same task in which he is enraged. Islamist dream of world after the fall of countries. Their vision of the future is not a lot different from some Italian fascists, who imagined their political cause was linked with the restoration of the Catholic Church in Europe. For the Islamist, “Egypt” is an outmoded concept, so toppling it over is a service to their cause.

For dilettante like Obama, and he is fairly representative of the modern Left in that regard, he has not thought much about what comes next. The post-national paradise is just going to be better. Further, his innate hatred of white people and what he imagines as white culture, motivates him to oppose those things he associates with the West. For Obama and the modern Left, the glorious future is something like a college campus run by women and non-whites, with white males on the lowest rung of the social ladder.

The point here is that there is no reasoning with these people. That’s where guys like Roger Simon slam into a brick wall. He simply cannot accept that Progressivism is free of rationality. it is a secular religion that is esoteric and mystical, especially to the adherents, who are drawn to it out of self-loathing. Marx allegedly said religion was the opium of the masses. Progressivism is the methamphetamine of the American ruling class. The more they use it, the less rational they become and their craving for the drug only grows.