While reading various blogs about the article by Keith Thompson in of all places, the San Francisco Chronicle, I noticed many titled their blogs after the title that Keith came up with, “Leaving The Left”. After reading the article I don’t think it’s so much that he is leaving the left, more like the left has left him and many many others….so instead of going over that cliff the left is heading towards it looks like Keith has come to his senses.
I was going to paste a few selected paragraphs and put my comments to them as I usually do but I just can’t do the piece justice that way. The whole thing needs to be read, so here it is:
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.
Bookworm had a paragraph about this article that I just had to put up:
The Left is a party of the past, blinded by 19th Century industrial horrors that no longer exist, antiquated Marxist economic notions that have long since proven to be wrong, and romantic fallacies about those in the world who are not white American males. It’s heartening to see that at least some on the Left are able to reorient themselves to the present — to its benefits and burdens — and to move forward with information about the world as it is, not as it was in some 20th Century Marxist demagogue’s worldview.
Man, if only I could write like you guys.
Keith has a blog also, wouldn’t you know it =):
So ? I write an essay called Leaving the Left, and what happens? I hear from lots-o-peeps ? several hundred. From far and wide. It is hard to describe the richness and, let me say, the beauty of the vast majority of the responses that showed up in my in-box today. The predominant theme: Welcome Home. “We left the light on for you,” said one writer.
Because the piece got picked up by several right-of-center online publications, it’s not surprising that my musings got a decided thumbs-up. Here’s what surprised me, and what I find heartening: A large number of self-described SF Bay Area readers (more than 200 at last count) said I had given voice to their largely unexpressed doubts about what the left has become. Frankly, I expected a lot of hostile responses from the San Francisco left. Accordingly, I braced myself.
To the contrary, here’s a passage that’s representative of what I heard from people who described themselves as actively engaged with left, liberal or progressive politics:
“Just because I disagree with the conduct of the Iraq war and oppose private Social Security accounts doesn?t require me to cheer a liberal-left agenda that?s clueless about the differences between the nihilism of Al Qaeda and the appropriate force of American self-defense. Bravo for saying what so many of us are thinking?” That theme was repeated over and over. Quick overview:
“I may not like all of Bush’s judicial nominees; I don’t think there needs to be a constitutional amendment on gay marriage; I don’t want drilling in the Arctic … But … I hate the academic left’s politically correct posturing; I can’t take another day of gender-feminist male bashing; if the GOP had the guts to condemn David Duke, why can’t the Democrats manage to send the same message to Al Sharpton?”
If you’re familiar with the resentment-driven politics of San Francisco’s hard left, you will probably be as amazed as I was that I received a mere handful of hateful (“compassionate”) messages. Five or six angry correspondants insisted I had sold out to the radical, extreme right wing of the Republican Party. I emphatically disagree. Still, I am decidedly grateful for the suitcases of cash that arrived during the day from Rupert Murdoch and Ken Starr.
Several writers who liked the thrust of my essay wondered how I “stayed on the left for so long.” Excellent question, given that I described the left’s mocking of the Iraqi elections as my breaking point. Where was I in the ’90s and ’80s?
I will end this with and excerpt from another article in the SF Chronicle from another former leftist which sums it quite nicely:
But more than anything, it was the left’s hypocrisy when it came to the war on terrorism that made me turn rightward after 9/11. I remember, back in my liberal days, being fiercely opposed to the Taliban and its brutal treatment of women. Even then, I felt that Afghanistan should immediately be liberated, as Malcolm X once said in another context, by any means necessary. But when it came time, it turned out that the left was mostly opposed to such liberation, whether of the Afghan people or of the Iraqis (especially if America and a Republican president were at the helm).
Indeed, liberals had become strangely conservative in their fierce attachment to the status quo. In contrast, the much-maligned neoconservatives (among whose ranks I count myself) and Bush had become the “radicals,” bringing freedom and democracy to the despotic Middle East. Is it any wonder that in such a topsy-turvy world, I found myself in agreement with those I’d formerly denounced?
The war on terrorism is nothing more than the great struggle of our time, and, like the earlier ones against fascism and totalitarianism, we ignore it at our peril. Whether or not one accepts that we are engaged in a war, our enemies have declared it so. It took the horrors of 9/11 to awaken me to this reality, but for others, such lessons remain unlearned. For me, it was self-evident that in Islamic terrorism, America had found a nihilistic threat that sought to wipe out not only Western civilization but also civilization itself.
The Islamists have been clear all along about their plans to form an Islamic caliphate and inhabit the entire world with burqas, stonings, amputations, honor killings and a lack of religious and political freedom. Whether or not to oppose such a movement should have been a no-brainer, especially for self-proclaimed “progressives.” Instead, they have extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists.
In the end, history will be the judge, and each of us will have to think about what legacy we wish to leave to future generations. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since 9/11, it’s that it’s never too late to alter one’s place in the great scheme of things.
It’s never too late.
Check out Powerline, Michelle Malkin, Roger L. Simon, Eclipse Ramblings, Redstate, Rightwing Sparkle, Baltimore Reporter, Ed Driscoll, Bookworm Room, Austin Bay, & American Future.
See author page