Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs.

The ideological leftist -- the real leftist -- would be somebody who understands that the state is fundamentally incompatible with the Marxist vision of communism. [...] So the state is, at its best, an inconvenient mechanism for facilitating the transition towards that society, which is something that I believe. I don't think we can just jump into statelessness, but I do think that the state should be treated with a significant degree of, like, scrutiny, you know? Because time and time and time again, we have seen socialist revolutions kind of, like, fall or cut under themselves because the people who ended up in charge just didn't do the socialism, they just empowered and enriched themselves at the expense of the proletariat.

"Words like "self-confidence", "self-reliance", "initiative", "enterprise", "optimism", etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone's problems for them, satisfy everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself."

New Leftists are not buying the collectivist doctrine of the established (Communist) organizations. They are quite simply libertarians, rebelling against unreasonable power and authority, whether it comes via established government or totalitarian (leftist) organizations.

Authentic leftism is populist. It is based in working-class style, working-class language, working-class direct emotion, in an openness and brusqueness of speech. Not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftist of academe, who are frauds. These people who manage to rise to the top at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton, how many of these people are radical? They are career people. They are corporate types [...] They love the institutional context. They know how to manipulate the bureaucracy which has totally invaded and usurped academe everywhere. [...] They love to sit on endless committees. They love bureaucratic regulation. Not one "leftist" in American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people.

What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

Generally speaking, the goals of today's leftists are not in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals... All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes) for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.

People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights—this is the true left in the United States. Whether they are anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left, and I feel much closer, ideologically, to such individuals than I do to the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.

Seizing upon anything but class, U.S. leftists today have developed an array of centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all.

The leftist is anti-individualistic... He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs.

[L]eftism is Protestantism and Protestantism is leftism.

I am a liberal of extreme left-wing.

Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.
But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.

[L]iberalism... has a left of center meaning in the United States. It has a slightly right of center meaning in much of continental Europe.