Leaving The Left

I don't know if I ever heard of writer Keith Thompson before today. He has recently published an article in the San Francisco Gate titled "Leaving the Left." I link his personal web page though, as I assume the Gate website will archive it in a few days.

My neo-libertarian views are clearly better identified with the "right" in today's political climate, but like Thompson, I used to think I was a liberal (except I liked capitalism in most things). Of course, in the 1800s, liberals were today's libertarians.

Anyway, like Thompson, I started out identifying mostly with the "left." But today, as the Left has proven, it hates George W. Bush more than it loves its own principles. The Left refuses to see that a sincere conservative will today carry the torch that used to rule the good parts of liberal thought in years gone by.

Thompson starts at the tipping point, then works backwards.

Nightfall: January 30, 2005. 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 never could understand why the Left could not celebrate the free elections finally enjoyed by Iraqis. The Left spent its time arguing (1) there were other dictators as bad as Saddam and (2) there were other threats, like Iran and North Korea. To which I thought, we can't take them all on at once -- and just because you can't do everything doesn't mean you must do nothing.

But after a while, you begin to see that the criticism is not about the goal, the results or the methods. It is about battling the enemy, even if the enemy is right.

Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World people because it hates George W. Bush more than it loves freedom. * * * *

The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years earlier.

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 . . . [W]hen 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 reserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my ten-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.

Speaking of mythologies, now lost is a little fact that the Democrats of the South were the oppressors. The Civil Rights Act was more strongly supported by Republicans in the Congress. Today, the mythology of one's political opponents is usually more cited than the facts.

Thompson's credentials as a Lefty are unquestionable.

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 '72 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, though I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.)

A problem I have with the modern politician is that no one rules on principals or philosophies of government. How do you predict a position of a politician? You can't really. First, you have to compare polls, then see how your opponent has approached the issue, then consider what compromises are available on other issues before staking your bargaining position. Thompson apparently sees similar problems.

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.

The biggest problem with the Left, however, is the refusal to see in black and white and call "evil" by its name. Thompson describes how he came to realize this problem.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the preeminent 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.

What a great line.

How surprised are conservative leaning people that Reagan is partly responsible for reaching the heart of the ideologically pure liberal?

Since 1980, the Left has continued on its decline away from anything moral or intellectually honest.

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 September 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 September 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 on 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.

The primary problem with the Left is that it has allowed its mighty goals to morph into a bastardized version of its former self. The stated goals of Martin Luther King, Jr. are now accepted by most of society. But those on the Left have moved the bar.

No longer is self sufficiency and being judged by the content of one's character the goal. In fact, people who propose those ideals, which the Left fought for and won, are now the enemy. Why? Who knows. Probably because a professional soldier requires a battle. Thompson is less charitable.

But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of Dr. 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.

So Thompson wishes to stay true to his ideals, and he has moved away from today's cultural left. I do not know anything about Thompson, and I have not read his other work, though I will over the next few weeks. But he argues convincingly that "liberalism" in its recent historic sense has parted ways with today's "liberals," or to keep terms that have meaning, today's Left. Thompson continues by attacking the substance of today's modern Leftist leaders:

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."

And so people move. When people move left, the press calls it progress. When people move to the right, as Zell Miller "appeared" to do when he was appointed to the Senate, he is called a senile old man. But sometimes moving really means just standing still while everyone else moves around you.

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 Dr. 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.

But, as I noted above, self-actualizing and responsibility are crazy, knuckle dragging Bible thumping talk. How can a liberal fall for this?

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.

I think all individuals "evolve" over time, even if we stay true to our core belief system. If for no other reason, our community evolves around us. If it improves and we do not, we reflect that. But if the community regresses and we do not, we need to see that as well and move on.

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.

I enjoyed reading about Mr. Thompson's journey. I share many of his core ideals. I hope we can get the mainstream Left, and even a few on the Right, to share in the core principles.