Conflict

The election is barely over and the Left immediately runs into the traffic. Why is this? What is this animosity that the Left always displays in every conclave, every meeting, every event? Why does the Right so often seem to be overwhelmed, barely hanging on, before the Left's outraged and ceaseless challenges? Even now, with an astonishing election over for a just few days and everyone barely able to catch their breath, the Left is growling on the TV and in the street.

There are many characteristics the Left has--sincere belief in un-provable things, a main one--but the significant distinction of the Left is its heritage of the belief in progress in conflict. Ever since Hegel, the Left has seen the present and the future as a product of an unseen thread of history made flesh by conflict. The present and the future is the result of the defeat of the tired and completed icons of the past. But, while that defeat is inevitable, it is always incomplete. And, as the purges, violence, executions, mass murders, burnings attest, this is a death march, a constant flint-eyed execution of the present to create the future. The dialectic is more than a method, it is a state of being. The present is a crucible. Conflict is all.

And with conflict as the mid-wife, compromise is a true waste of time.