What, Then, is leftism?

Leftism is the attempt to destroy the past — every value and every institution, the good as well as what it regards as the bad.

That is why leftists, by definition, hate conservatism. Conservatism seeks to conserve the best from the past. The Left seeks to destroy the past, including the best.

The first of the modern left-wing revolutions, the French Revolution, quite consciously sought to destroy every major institution and value of French society — not just the monarchy but God, religion, the legal system, traditional notions of good and evil, the calendar, the old way of telling time, the old weights and measures, and even the names of the days of the week. In other words, the past. Just like the Left in contemporary America, the leftists of the French Revolution toppled statues — in their case, the statues of every king of France.

The next major left-wing revolution, the Russian, did the same. As the Soviet dissident joke went, “In the Soviet Union the future is known; it’s the past which is always changing.”

Now you can begin to understand leftism.

Dennis Prager, Can You Define Leftism?