John Derbyshire remarks on Bill O’Reilly’s Michael Moore interview (a transcript of which can be found here)

Mulling over Michael Moore’s remarks to Bill O’Reilly, it occurs to me that they show up one aspect of the leftist mindset with special clarity. The philosopher David Stove had a phrase for all those theories that portray human beings as the helpless pawns of inscrutable, impersonal forces (“the rich,” “the powerful,” “history,” “stereotyping”). He called them “puppetry theories.”

That’s what you see with Moore. Ordinary people—people less enlightened than Moore and his pals—are clueless, helpless doofuses, being pushed around by sinister evil-doers. George W. Bush “sends” young people (Moore actually calls them “children, which is revealing in itself) to die in Iraq, as if the servicemen and -women involved had no volition at all! My reader from Iowa shows the absurdity and fundamental inhumanity of this point of view very well. His Ranger son is not a helpless infant being “sent to die” by an evil administration. He is an adult person who chooses, decides, and acts, according to his convictions, preferences, and free will.

The Left has never departed in any significant way from Leninist collectivism. Human beings are not autonomous spiritual beings, possessed of free will. They are mechanical units who need to be directed, governed, shoveled around like so many truckloads of concrete, socially engineered. Or they are “children,” to be scolded and directed and constantly supervised.

Evelyn Waugh once interrupted someone who was telling him something about “the man in the street.” Said Waugh: “There is no such thing as ‘the man in the street.’ There are only men, each possessed of an immortal soul, who from time to time feel the need to use streets.” I imagine that to Michael Moore, that remark is utterly incomprehensible.