Michael Ian Black Says He’s Going to Leave America Soon.
Why He — And So Many Other Celebrity Leftists — Never Will
And so the word has gone forth to a new generation of Americans. Ask not what you can do for your country; demand instead that your country do everything it can for you.
Somehow I don’t think if those had been the words of JFK in his Inaugural Address, he would be remembered as being an inspiring leader. Yet in a recent article by Michael Ian Black, not only did he argue that his address had been a lie but that was the attitude that America should have taken for all its citizens for his lifetime and before.
I have frequently thought that those on the left view so much of society — democracy, Republicans, even America itself — as little more than a starter apartment that they are living in while they wait for a home in their dream neighborhood to become available. They don’t know where it is exactly, nor how they can find a way to afford it, they just know they’re not living in it now. And until it becomes available, they have the right to give as many suggestions as possible as to make their residence more like the one they want. Usually they are complaints about how the place they live is inadequate and the way to make it better is to make sure is to make sure that the people who they have to live with — who they feel are beneath them — are quieter, more agreeable to how they live in the place, no matter how loud or unpleasant they are (while their neighbors loudness and unpleasant behavior can never be tolerated) and that eventually there are enough of them that they don’t have to listen to them anymore and they move into a different neighborhood ‘more suitable’ for them. None of this will make this home remotely like what they truly want and they will constantly complain until they decide to relocate to some place closer to what they want when all that’s different is that there are more people like them to complain how lousy this neighborhood is and how their waiting for a similar opening in ‘the dream.’
Black is, as some of you might be aware, a relative celebrity. Not much of a celebrity as celebrities go but he’s rich and famous and therefore qualified to talk about subjects that are beyond his intellect with authority. This is nothing new, the entire world is filled with people who claim to be experts on all things but whose only true expertise is wealth and privilege.
The reason Black might be listened to more by some then others is because in this article he parrots almost word for word what is leftist doctrine. America is a horrible nation that has failed its citizens. It never realized its potential; now it’s a failed state. (To the left all nations that do not fit their ideological bandwidth are failures, which is an irony I’ll explain later.) It is a racist, sexist, homophobic nation that can not keep its citizens safe. It’s political system is so frozen and backwards that it is incapable of ever fixing itself. And therefore people like him don’t owe America anything.
How do I put this mildly — you know how much so many leftists rail against the right for their fealty to Ayn Rand and her doctrine of selfishness? That it was the job of the individual to help themselves and not the nation, and it is on this policy a generation of conservatism was founded? Black’s message and the opinion of so many other leftists is the polar opposite of this. It is America’s duty to provide us with all of the necessities we need to get through life and the citizen does not owe the country anything. This is an argument so fundamentally ridiculous you wouldn’t consider it plausible — and yet I know the truth in it every time I ask a leftist author if they even vote and they never answer me. This is the polar opposite of the Grand Unitary Theory — the citizen believes the government owes them everything and they owe it nothing. This is the thinking of an entire generation of Americans and we are now beginning to see the effects.
Every time I make these arguments to leftists I am, naturally, accused of being a bigot, conservative, racist or any variation. So I’ll make it clear now if I haven’t before. I agree in principle with every single thing you stand for.
Absolute equality among races, genders and sexuality? Completely in favor of it. More income equality for all? Who could argue with that? A better educational system? I couldn’t be more in favor of it. The need for security from violence in all its forms? Perfectly acceptable. A better way of doing things according to our government? I fully agree its broken and needs repair.
I just have one question: how? How do you do this within the limits of reality? How do you afford it? How you do settle with the people who disagree with it? How do you maintain it? And what would it take for us to move towards it realistically?”
No one has an answer, certainly not Black. Because at the end of the day, they’re just as great with blanket pronouncements as everybody else. The messy, long hard work that it takes to get there — well, that’s for someone else to do. Certainly not them. Any idiot can point out the problems in today’s society; five minutes on the average cable news network will do this with no problem. And certainly anyone can look back and see what we’ve done wrong. But when it comes to concrete, abstract or even pie-in-the-sky solutions as to how to bring about change, the left not only has none but is incensed when you ask them for any.
They say that the repairs they suggest for their place will make things better for everybody but they have no idea how to do them; it’s the landlord’s job to make the improvements. And if their neighbors leave in frustration and choose to move in to a neighborhood that says the current tenants aren’t considering them, they’ll move in more to get away from their current neighbors.
This, just so I’m being clear, is how democracy works when the left is in charge. They don’t want anyone who offers anything resembling a differing opinion. So the people who tried to accommodate them and found it impossible will listen to people more on the right. Neither extreme really cares about the moderates wants but as we’ve seen over the last decade, the right has an easier time winning over the undecideds by saying the left is unreasonable.
You think I’m being crazy? When Barry Goldwater famously said in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in 1964: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” he terrified so many moderates that they ended up voting for LBJ. The idea of extremism was such a terrifying idea to the average citizen that they voted for a Democrat whose morals they didn’t trust because the alternative was terrifying.
These days I feel that Goldwater’s speech, if heard out of context, would inspire a whole generation of young leftists who never heard of him. They think moderation isn’t a virtue in any situation and to paraphrase Goldwater’s slogan “in their hearts, they know they’re right.” And no matter how many people they drive away, no matter how much their results end up making things worse for the majority of citizens, they will never think: “it’s not them, it’s us.” Claiming your on the right side of history is a wonderful talking point. But we all have to live in the here and now and we have to live with people who disagree with us.
This brings me to the point of Black’s article in which he claims he will someday leave America. I find this hysterical. Back in 2016, every major celebrity from Bryan Cranston to Susan Sarandon went on record multiple times that if Trump won that year, they’d leave America. (None, for the record revealed, where they’d go if he won, but never mind.) It’s been eight years and as far as I can tell, not one person who claimed they would did.
Now considering that, unlike so many of the unfortunate people they claim to be in favor of, they have the wealth and means to emigrate to a friendlier climate, the question is why didn’t they? The cynical answer is they are people of means and if they had to move to one of those friendlier countries, they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the tax breaks that so many of them rail against on television but I have little doubt they are all grateful for. There’s also the fact that, while America may be the failed state they think it is, it’s highly unlikely most of them would be able to get the kind of funding for the kind of films and television shows they’ve made their livelihoods in. And of course, no one ever lost money going on media and complaining how much the President is destroying the country as they know it.
All of these are the reasons and not the real one at the same time. See, if all of these people — in the John Galt sense of the word — decided to just leave America, where would they go? I ask this bluntly. That dream neighborhood they claim they’ve been looking for still doesn’t exist on any nation on Planet Earth. If it did, they’d have all moved there by now. The leftist utopia they have spent their life searching for couldn’t exist in reality any more than the conservative dystopia they claim we are marching towards. There’s no society on Earth that could check every single box they want, and even if it did, within a few days they’d invent a new one that they claimed it didn’t have.
That is why I am certain, despite all his bellyaching, Black has no intention of leaving America. Not if Trump wins in November, not in four years ,not ever. No leftist who lives here will.
It has nothing to do with America being more accommodating for them then other nations, or their lack of means, or any other reason. It’s because in their hearts that no matter where they go, it won’t be their dream neighborhood. And why do you want to go to another starter home when you keep doing what you really want to do? Keep bitching that nothing works right.
And as for this generation who wants everything but who doesn’t want to do anything for it. You get in this world exactly what you put into it and you’ve made it repeatedly clear just what you’re willing to put in. When you’re willing to do more than most endless screeds on social media or consider more than a hashtag an actual answer, we can talk. My door is always open. Of course we all know its in a neighborhood you’ve never deem worthy of you.