William Shatner has a great new talk show called “Raw Nerve.” Unlike Oprah, Shatner is an interviewer, not a flatterer (although Orpah only flatters those she likes). Recently, Shatner interviewed the talk show host Jerry Springer. Jerry Springer is that rarest of liberals–a conscientious and articulate one. I think he’s wrong about essentially everything political, but because he’s conceptual and articulate, unlike most liberals nowadays, at least you can see his chain of reasoning and identify his errors. In the interview (and I’m quoting from memory here), Springer said he supports socialism because “life is 99 percent about luck.” He cites his own experience as the son of Holocaust survivors and, later, the wealthy beneficiary of “a silly talk show” as evidence that most success is about luck.
Now think about this for a minute. Springer is saying that he has nothing to do with his own success. He’s implying that he finds his own television show disgusting (as many of us do). Instead of blaming this on the poor taste of willfully ignorant people, and at least giving himself credit for finding a way to make a profit during a comparatively depraved time in cultural history, he blames his self-loathing on the nature of reality itself. Reality, he insists, is all about luck. “Luck” is the secular liberal’s term for “God.” I have no more respect for a liberal than I do a religious person screaming platitudes about God’s will and other imagined nonsense. Based on Springer’s logic, it’s not fair that some have more than others since nobody in any way earned what they have, or what they produced. It follows, at least to Springer, that government must redistribute everything equally since nobody owns it anyway. He calls it “progressivism,” as all Obamaists do, rather than socialism, but we all know it’s socialism. Springer is more candid than most liberal politicians in that he openly admits he does not believe there’s such a thing as productive effort and honestly earned success–not for himself, and not for others.