Leaving the left

“This guy has written a very thoughtful piece about his journey away from the Left. He has many parallels with my own journey in that regard. Yes, I once was a 'Liberal'.


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/22/INGUNCQHKJ1.DTL

Leaving the left
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity
Keith Thompson

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.

Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years before.

I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").

The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.

Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown.

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.

Keith Thompson is a Petaluma writer and the author of "Angels and Aliens" and "To Be a Man." His work is at www.thompsonatlarge.com.”

“No Stovie, you can't have been a liberal once upon a time! That is so sad, now that you have admitted to this you can never be trusted by true conservatives again. We'll never know when you might be tempted again by the dark side of the force.

I'm afraid you will have to be destroyed. sorry.”

“funny.

i used to be right o' center.

now i'm slightly left.”

“LOL Bison.

To my everlasting shame, I even voted for Clinton (the first time).
I didn't make that mistake twice. ;-)”

“You're gettin' old SS, your brain has rotted.”

“Geez, Stove, don't admit that, you're just digging the hole deeper. For all we know, now you're just some lib at heart who's trying to buck up their conservative credentials for a Presidential run. From now on I'm afraid that when I think of you I'll be seeing your head on Hillary Clinton's body (Where's Bitpusher when you need him?)”

“From snivelling "lefty" to goose-steppin' reactionary, WOW!!”

““funny.

i used to be right o' center.

now i'm slightly left.”
sacco

Me to Sacco, I still registered as and consider myself as Republican, but I have moved a little left as I've aged. One would think as I have moved closer to the haves versus the have not's, I would be going the other way. I'm still and always will be a fiscal conservative. Unfortunately there aren't many of those around Washington.
last edited: 5/26/05 2:33:24 PM”

“MarkO, thanks for your usual thoughtful insight.

Proverb - Better to remain silent and appear a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”

“ditto bat. i've stayed mainly a fiscal conservative, but in most other areas i've grown more liberal.”

“i really question those who are completely on side of the fence on all issues; those who've never even wavered.

i think only the truly stubborn and narrow minded never change or grow.
last edited: 5/26/05 2:34:00 PM”

“Stoveman, if you're gonna dish out this kind of propaganda you ought to at least be able to take what crap flings back at ya.

Now who iz zee dikhead?


"Proverb - Better to remain silent and appear a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Think about that proverb.
You remove doubt every time you post something as inflammitory and propagandistic as this piffle.

By posting this crap you are obviously lookin' for attention.
I have resisted responding lately, but here I am.
I toss the mudball back your way and you sit in the corner and cry.”

“I'm still all over the place.”

“MarkO, thanks for your usual thoughtful insight.”

“I am with you Nigal”

“I think only the truly stubborn and narrow minded never change or grow.

sacco
2:32:53 PM
5/26/05

Truer words have never been spoken.

I expected the usual comments from the peanut gallery, but I also knew a few thinking people might understand.
I guess my journey really started after Clinton. He was such a disapointment to me on so many levels.”

“stomper, i guess we're similar in that regard too, 'cept for me it was bush- who i voted for the first time, to my everlasting shame.”

“Funny - I found Clinton distasteful from the start. He was just too slick and seemed to cater to everyone. And then he was so halfway about everything - resisting the draft, but not resisting the draft, smoking pot, but not inhaling (kind of a precursor to having an affair with Monica, but not shtupping her - as if that would make it not alduterous and thinking he was not really lying because he was playing word games). Despite my gut distaste for the guy, I have to admit he was highly competent and effective. Peace, prosperity, reducing the size of government. Successfully stopping terrorist threats on the eve of the new millenia (Kenneth Clarkes book is highly educational on that).

IMHO: Not bad for a lying slut!”

““I am with you Nigal”

No you're not! You're in Indiana silly! I did look behind me though.”

“my biggest beef with the clintons is whitewater.

IMO they both belong behind bars for it.”

“they should take Hillary and put her in the pokey and then poke her in the putty.”

“nigal, please report to the florida psycho thread for rehibilitation”

“Never voted for Clinton and Never voted for Bush. Voted for daddy Bush in 1988 but not in 1992. Seems I run contrary to the crowd.”

“Ahh, so bateaux voted for Perot. I thought long and hard about it and wound up going Bush more as an anti-Clinton vote.”

“Yep! I voted for the little feller with big ears twice!”

“I voted for Perot the first time, Clinton the 2nd time.
I still wish Perot had picked a better VP than that dofus. God he was pathetic.
At least Perot knew that NAFTA would screw this country. Bush Sr and Clinton either had no clue or didn't care.


Can't ever remember voting for a Republican for President but I have for Gov, Senator and Representative”

“SNL did a skit with Perot letting Stockdale out of the car for some reason and he drove off. Stockdale gave chase. Perot says to himself, Dang, the Medal of Honor winners don't give up, and then Perot floors the gas.”

“Yep, I believed the lies the Clintons told to get elected that first time.”

“and you did it again with Bush.. you old ex liberal...lol”

“I started off thinking I'd vote for Clinton. My gf, now wife, opened my eyes to basically what all ped described. Once I finally saw it, I saw it.”

“Much of that was due to my being disengaged from open mindness at the time, Ewker. I was Liberal so I already knew how I was to vote. Reps were EVIL. Everyone knew that.
The Clintons and their antics made me think, much like this guy that wrote the article above.”

“I still don't like Clinton but I don't dislike him as much as I did back in the 90's. Bush has turned out to be just what I expected. The little voice that we all have was screaming red alert way back in 2000. I was sitting there with groups of fellow Republicans, who thought this loser had not a chance against John McCain. That was before Karl Rove did his black magic.”

“I guess I'm the only one who votes libertarian... lol.

Didnd't vote for bush, clinton, or perot, or nadar, etc.
last edited: 5/26/05 4:06:24 PM”

“What's interesting is the way diffferent people respond to things. The "rap" on libs is that they have no creative solutions, just #&%!$es about the status quo. Well, whether you agree with them or not, the author of the above article gave some intelligent, insightful reasons for his change in thinking. There was no "name calling" or distasteful stone-throwing in his article, just an explanation, with numerous examples, of why he believed the left was drifting away from reality.

So, the response from one of TT's leading leftists, MarkO, contains the following:

"Now who iz zee dikhead?"

"“From snivelling "lefty" to goose-steppin' reactionary, WOW!!”

"Proverb - Better to remain silent and appear a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

"Think about that proverb.
You remove doubt every time you post something as inflammitory and propagandistic as this piffle.

By posting this crap you are obviously lookin' for attention.
I have resisted responding lately, but here I am.
I toss the mudball back your way and you sit in the corner and cry.”



Just because he doesn't agree with the authors' view, NOW it's propaganda?

MarkO, you have, in my book, reached a new pinnacle: I used to think Violin was the most narrow-minded, shallow-thinking poster on TT, you now have overtaken him. Your lack of thought-process, your inability to read anything that isn't in sync with your own preconcieved beliefs and understand how some may actually come to conclusions different from yours, puts you in your own, "elite" category.

YOU are now the ultimate TT lefty. Don't respond to issues, don't intelligently debate the issue at hand, don't respect anyones' views except your own. And, when all else fails, call other people names, make slanderous acqusations, & then try to make them defend their statements rather than respond to the original question / issue.

Please prove me wrong... I challenge you to draft an insightful, articulate response to the original article.”

“b - that about sums it up for me. Clinton was Klinton to me. He's not so bad in the rear view mirror. The first time I heard W was running my reaction was that we'd never of heard from this guy if his last name was anything else than what it is.”

“Against the wind?

Voted against Reagan twice
Voted for Pappy Bush
Voted for Clinton the first time
Cast a write-in for my boss the second time Clinton ran (against Bub Dull).
Voted for Baby Shrub
Voted for Kerry

Of course, that all makes me a left wing bleeding heart liberal commie pinko socialist leftist, right Stovie?”

“Geo - Are we still going hiking sometime??

Several of you made comments that if you don't change your beliefs at some point, at least on some issues, you're not thinking. I disagree. (let me preface by saying I was a bleeding heart liberal most of my life, to my shame, but have since seen the light)

People can put thought and attention into political matters and have a set of morals/ethics by which they subscribe and stick with them throughout their lives and still be very deep thinkers, free thinkers, and not be "stubborn and narrow minded".

That's one of those "feels good" or "sounds good" on the surface relativist myths. It simply isn't true.”

“Never voted for Clinton and Never voted for Bush. Voted for daddy Bush in 1988 but not in 1992. Seems I run contrary to the crowd.”
bateaux

ditto, ditto, ditto and ditto.”

“Nothing worse than born agains.”

“i voted bush, perot, abstained, brown (libertarian), abstained”

“I liked it when Clinton’s book came out and it seemed that he was coming clean on Monica (HA! Good one Nig old boy!) and when asked by Oprah why he did it he said, “Because I could. Because the republicans shut down the government we were there alone and did it.”. Bawhawhahahahaha! I wonder where he falls on the laws of fidelity concerning separation from one‘s spouse? Same time zone? Area code? Zip code? Address?

“It’s OK baby. My wife and I are separated. [inside voice] By about 10 miles! LOL!”


Clinton is smart and funny. I do give him that. I'd love to play golf with him or drink a few beers.”

“Nigal, chances are he hadn't done anything with Hillary in a long time. She might have a bigger set of balls than he does...lol

So why not bang Monica. How many guys in their 40's have a 20 something yr old offer it to them. It wasn't like he had to work for it.”

“"So why not bang Monica."

Well, he was MARRIED. Even Hillary deserves the respect a spouse is due.”

“that does bring up a funny point.

if ya hate her so much, why are you so mad he cheated on her?!?! ya cant have yer cake and eat it too

~end sarcastic rhetorical question font~”

““that does bring up a funny point.

if ya hate her so much, why are you so mad he cheated on her?!?! ya cant have yer cake and eat it too

~end sarcastic rhetorical question font~”

I don't hate her. I just don't want her to be in power. It's not so much a defense of her but of marriage. I generally don't like when marriage is made to be some type of flimsy, abstract thing.

It’s funny how those who have been married a long time are the weird ones now. “you’ve been married for 20 years? Ah, I’m sorry. What happened?” LOL!”

“rhetorical question
n.
A question to which no answer is expected, often used for rhetorical effect.


Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.


rhetorical question

A question asked without expecting an answer but for the sake of emphasis or effect. The expected answer is usually "yes" or "no." For example, Can we improve the quality of our work? That's a rhetorical question. [Late 1800s]



Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.


rhetorical question

n : a statement that is formulated as a question but that is not supposed to be answered; "he liked to make his points with rhetorical questions”

“Nigal

n.

A pantless menace from Ohio

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.”

“Damn…I think I’ve just been owned…”