“My mother is not expendable, and your mother is not expendable,” said New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo at a recent news conference on the Wuhan coronavirus. “And our brothers and sisters are not expendable. And we’re not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable. And we’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life. The first order of business is save lives, period — whatever it costs.”
Noble words, though some may say that our brothers and sisters certainly are expendable, by Cuomo’s lights, if they happen to be in a womb. This is the governor, do note, who last year signed into law a bill that can allow prenatal infanticide (abortion) up till birth.
It’s not just prenatal infanticide, either, points out American Thinker’s John C. Greene. Asking, “Hasn’t putting a dollar figure on human life always been fundamental to progressive ideology?” he writes, “Speaking at Berkeley in 2007, [ex-Secretary of Labor] Robert Reich stated that if a Democrat presidential candidate were honest, he would say, ‘If you are old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you going for maybe another couple of months. It’s too expensive. So we’re going to let you die.”
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Greene also quoted Barack Obama’s response to a woman who asked if her elderly mother would receive a pacemaker under ObamaCare. “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller,” the then-president concluded at a longer answer’s end.
Then there’s Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel, ex-Chicago mayor and Obama underling. He suggested in 2014 that we’d all be better off if everyone died at 75, espousing a theory that the Week called “eugenics induced by narcissism.”
In fairness, Emanuel’s essay wasn’t malicious but philosophically juvenile, and Obama’s full answer had none of the coldness of Reich’s. But are they, as Reich suggested, simply not being “honest” Democrats?
The reality is that this leftist “life ethic,” boiled down, smacks of something the Nazis quite honestly asserted: that there is “life unworthy of life.”
Greene points out that Cuomo is of a kind with the aforementioned individuals and asserts that, regarding Wuhan flu woes, the governor is only feigning respect for life. These men “are leaders of a political party that refuses to vote to mandate life-saving health care for infants who have survived abortion. For them, human life is disposable,” writes Greene.
“No, Cuomo and his fellow progressives will wear the mask of ‘we’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life’ only until it has served its purpose. Then they’ll toss it away. Because it is, after all, only a mask,” he continues.
In fairness again, Cuomo might have been sincere, at the moment, when speaking of concern for the Wuhan flu victims (I say “might”). I learned long ago that man has an extraordinary capacity for the worst kind of deception — self-deception — and the governor is no exception. Or it could be what Greene suggests, that the world’s Cuomos are driven here by the desire to plunge us into recession (with their lockdown policies) and defeat President Trump.
Then again, it could be both.
A child has, understandably, a childlike view of honesty: Did you or did you not tell someone the truth about, let’s say, whether you stuck your hand in the cookie jar? But then there’s the matter of being honest with oneself.
We all have a moral duty to scrutinize our world view, to attack it from all angles better (hopefully) than any ardent adversary would in order to ensure its validity. This can prevent us from falling victim to, and then spreading with “sincerity,” destructive falsehoods and fallacies. Failure to do this can cause descent into leftism (and other lies).
Self-deception takes another form as well. When hearing a proposal (e.g., lockdowns to combat a virus) that serves some cherished, emotionally appealing goal (e.g., defeating Trump), it’s easy to convince oneself that arguments in favor of the proposal and that don’t explicitly address the goal are valid whether they are or not. To present a corollary of a principle Upton Sinclair articulated, it is easy to get a person to accept something when his pocketbook, power, privilege, or passions are imperiled by not accepting it.
As to the life issue, a deeply honest analysis reveals that what’s called “leftism” is atheistic at its core and that a corollary of this worldview is that people are just organic robots. For without a spirit world man can have no spirit (a soul), and then what is he (it?) but some pounds of chemicals and water? And then, of course, what could be “wrong” with the ceasing of a robot’s function — or with the proactive termination of it?
So Robert Reich is wrong in a way. If an intelligent leftist Democrat were truly honest, including in the deepest sense — with himself — he would say, “It makes no difference if we lose a few million organic robots. There are plenty more where they came from.”
But that kind of honesty doesn’t give those bent on living a lie a reason to get out of bed, nor would it win elections.
Photo of Gov. Andrew Cuomo: AP Images
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
