Leftists at Calvin:
JohnC
Kieth Thompson, to take a good, hard Christian look at what you
support, and why? Do you hate George W. Bush more than you love
freedom?
Are you suppressing that "insistent inner voice"?
The single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now
is walk away from the house the left has built.
LEAVING THE LEFT
Keith Thompson
http://www.thompsonatlarge.com/work22.htm
Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than
three decades, yet refused to truly see
* * *
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 choose today 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 people because it hates George W. Bush
more than it loves 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 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, 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
ten-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 '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.) 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 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.
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. 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.
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 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.
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.
(San Francisco Chronicle May 22, 2005.)