The primary subject of this book is the reality, nature, and source of the leftist compulsion to act in direct opposition to the values the person believes in, but its purpose is to help restore sanity to American politics, education, and journalism by breaking past the boundaries of politically correct discourse to reveal some simple truths.
Progressive insanity is ultimately a way of handling the contradictions between belief and reality. Thus socialists reject the idea of God but feel, as almost everyone does, that some things or actions are morally right, others wrong. Christians describe that feeling as the voice of God in us while social scientists who understand Festinger see it as the essence of cognitive dissonance; but, labeling aside, almost everyone agrees on the obvious: the feeling is real, and acting on it by doing the right thing is the path to sanity and happiness, while trying to silence it by claiming that wrong is right and then doing more wrong, is the path to insanity, bitterness, violence, and the retreat to authoritarianism.
Thus democrats say they believe strongly in the rule of law and most actually do, but the opinions of almost all senior court judges nominated and appointed by democrats can be reliably predicted entirely through political, not legal, analysis. Democrats say they hate racists and oppose book burning and most believe it, but the same people want to ban, burn, or rewrite an American parable, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which an unprivileged white boy overcomes cultural prejudice to see an escaped slave as human first and black second.
Open any major independent or conservative magazine or website and you'll find serious people baffled by democrats who say one thing but mean and do the opposite. Whether it's the liberal perversion of history in Common Core, Obama/Clinton corruption, or the vicious personal attacks progressives launch at anyone daring to criticize their frequent recourse to the ad hominem diversion, the conservative reaction to what is seen as leftist hypocrisy is the same everywhere: anger, confusion, and vacillation produced by a complete inability to understand how people who appear perfectly sane can seem to sincerely believe in a set of principles, and yet almost always act in direct opposition to them.
Progressive insanity is real and beyond parody: just recently a woman who is sane, reasonable, loyal, and very smart went purple faced and apoplectic to scream that I cannot condemn Islam's treatment of women as property to be violated at will, because some Republicans in Texas want women to see an ultrasound of their baby's heart beating in the womb before they can legally order the child killed.
Worse, progressive insanity has become so widespread, and so overwhelming in its certainties, that its believers bypass critical thought and the need for real world validation to uncritically accept almost any nonsense consistent with their world view: so Venezuelan socialism has been a humanitarian success; climate change will kill most humans on earth by 2010; Biden got eighty million votes; President Trump is a totalitarian racist; and, placing metastasizing colonies of uneducated and assimilation resistant migrants from various shithole countries around the world in the United States will strengthen the body politic.
Similarly, most democrats sincerely believe they abhor violence but support both defunding the police and Antifa - a direct descendant of the anti-fascists Hitler organized in the early 1930s to hound and denigrate German bolsheviks favoring Stalin over himself as international socialism's thought leader. Like its ancestor, today's Antifa is a creation of the progressive left: fascist in nature and wholly dedicated to using violence and third parties like the BLM movement in the suppression of non conforming views - and defunding the police is just another way of supporting an organization whose actions every progressive disapproves of.
Thus when people can't attend a Trump rally in Minneapolis without passing through a cordon of hate filled rioters on their way into, and out of, the stadium we're seeing 1932 Germany all over again. When a high performing CEO can be fired for attending a Christian conference, when tenured professors can be fired for questioning warmist doctrine; when abortion "rights" are sacrosanct and the President can be prosecuted in secret, we're seeing Russia circa 1917, Germany circa 1932, China in 1947 - we're seeing the evolution of a world of fear and political correctness that has to stopped. In the 1930s reining it in took a world war, today it will take a deep understanding of what makes people behave this way if we're to have any chance of saving them before their degradation goes too far and pressures already building toward some future bloodbath become unstoppable.
That, and nothing else, is what this book is for - helping you understand why left leaning liberals become caricature right wing fascists when given the power to act is the first step toward saving the left's believers: your husband, your wife, your kids, and your country.
Getting there will not be easy because progressivism branched from Christianity due to nothing more than a misunderstanding - but understanding and correcting that mistake requires us to re-evaluate our common understanding of economics, human behavior, and the boundaries between good and evil.
Thus the basic plan for the book spreads five parts over seven chapters:
- part one provides background essays defining terms, setting the context, and summarizing the conclusions arrived at;
- part two rehearses an endless litany of contradictions between leftist belief and leftist action;
- part three asks where and how socialist thought diverged from Christian thought and what the consequences of that schism are;
- part four consists of several essays repeating, exemplifying, and supporting the core ideas in the book; and,
- finally, there's a short essay, largely quoting other people, on the meaning and history of the words "Useless Eaters" in the title.