Hate to break it you, but Hobbes, along with Rousseau, laid the intellectual groundwork for modern liberalism.
Hobbes describes men as being naturally vain and selfish. He declares that “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion, evil; and of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil and contemptible are ever used with relation to the person that useth them…” In other words, men by nature perceive a thing as being good or evil not in terms of how it may affect the interests of others, but in terms of how it affects their own self-interest.
Sounds like something Tahini Coates would write, or at least agree with. Similar misanthropic vitriol can be found in other contemporary work, such as the late George Carlin, another liberal who hated humanity. Many liberals can be described as humanists who hate humans.
From: Thomas Hobbes and the Seeds of Liberalism
Rousseau viewed humans as being corrupted by all aspects of modernity (with the ideal state of man being the ‘noble savage’), a view the welfare left endorses. Theodore Kaczynski, a hero of the anti-establishment left, harbors this view. The modern leftist Luddite movement blames technology for job loss, wealth inequality, and man being separated from the ‘means of production’. Liberalism comes in many flavors. In agreement with Hobbes, the the welfare left also believes that humans are inherently corrupt and selfish, too. This is in stark contrast to libertarians and conservatives, who argue that self-interest benefits society. In either case, for the left, it’s the role of the state to rectify these imagined imperfections so that man and society can be perfected, with the state superseding the role of biology. Liberals blame external factors (racism, greed, cronyism, etc) for imperfections that are internal (laziness, bad choices, low IQ, etc) in nature. Thus, society bears a collective ‘guilt’ for its losers, or the onus is on the successful to pull these losers out of their self-inflicted or biological ditches. This means more welfare spending, higher taxes, etc.
Liberals, being the conspiratorially minded people they are, always assume (as Hobbes did) the worst of human nature – that everything is a scam, racism, or a conspiracy. Yeah, there are conservatives who believe in conspiracy theories, but not exclusively so, and liberals have done a good job at perpetuating the stereotype that it’s republicans who are the most conspiratorially minded – nevermind the left’s own conspiracies, like the left’s belief in ‘institutional racism’ that is the cause of poverty, not bad genes or bad work ethic.