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Leaving the Left (from the SF Chronicle on 5/22); Interesting editorial on man's journey!
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Topic Started: May 23 2005, 11:01 AM (400 Views)
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Admiralbill_gomec
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May 23 2005, 11:01 AM
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UberAdmiral
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I read this early this morning and found it fascinating.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c...INGUNCQHKJ1.DTL
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Leaving the left I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity
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.
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Dwayne
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May 23 2005, 04:31 PM
Post #2
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Profanity deleted by Hoss
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Great read. It's no surprise the resident leftist have avoided it like the plague. But I am surprised the non-leftists in the crowd haven't commented on it.
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Admiralbill_gomec
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May 23 2005, 04:34 PM
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UberAdmiral
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Perhaps it makes some look inwards, and they don't like what they see...
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doctortobe
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May 23 2005, 04:35 PM
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Speak softly, and carry a 57 megaton stick!
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Re: the non-left not responding. Perhaps it is because it is preaching to the choir?
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Dwayne
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May 23 2005, 04:37 PM
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Profanity deleted by Hoss
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^^^^ I think both of you are correct.
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Admiralbill_gomec
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May 23 2005, 04:38 PM
Post #6
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UberAdmiral
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I don't see it that way. Here is a man who spent 35 years as a Democrat, only to leave it after he found that it left him!
That isn't preaching to the choir to me, as I've never been a Democrat. But there are however, others on this site who have seen the light.
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Minuet
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May 23 2005, 04:40 PM
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Fleet Admiral Assistant wRench, Chief Supper Officer
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Administrative Response
If all you are going to do is bash the left leaning members of this board then this thread will see an early death.
Discuss the contents of the article if you wish - but no more lefty bashing will be tolerated.
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UncleSlickhead
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May 23 2005, 05:24 PM
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High Priest of the Church of the Blalock's Booty
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It's a pointless article, most likely written by a Republican. What? Am I to believe that the guy walked away from organized 'liberalism' because of idiots like Susan Estrich and Susan Sontag and Jesse Jackson? It's not like the 'conservatives' don't have their fair share of morons. Most notably the guy they made President. The implication here is that everything the Democrats claim to represent is only truly represented by Republicans. That's just a big load of crap. There's no real difference between the parties.
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Hoss
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May 23 2005, 05:44 PM
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Don't make me use my bare hands on you.
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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.
A Northern State, and not even in the Southern part of a Northern state? P'shaw.
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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. Certainly reminds me of some recent posts questioning Bush's diplomacy. Again, it is not diplomatic to kiss some jerk's butt.
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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. He didn't move right, the 'cultural left' to which he is refering moved lefter.
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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. Hi, welcome to the USA where 12 years ago the Democratic Party controlled the Legislature and Executive Branch of the US Govt. Now, not only are the roles reversed, but the Republican Party increased it's lead last cycle. And this doesn't mention state governments.
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Hoss
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May 23 2005, 05:47 PM
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Don't make me use my bare hands on you.
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- UncleSlickhead
- May 23 2005, 04:24 PM
It's a pointless article, most likely written by a Republican. What? Am I to believe that the guy walked away from organized 'liberalism' because of idiots like Susan Estrich and Susan Sontag and Jesse Jackson? It's not like the 'conservatives' don't have their fair share of morons. Most notably the guy they made President. The implication here is that everything the Democrats claim to represent is only truly represented by Republicans. That's just a big load of crap. There's no real difference between the parties.
Wow, name-calling, that should get your viewpoint across.
If there is no real difference, why are they fighting over nominees for every friggin' office? Why is there attacks on Republican policy by the Dems and vica-versa? Why gridlock? etc. I think that people make statements like that when they are frustrated and don't want to think about it anymore.
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Fesarius
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May 23 2005, 06:07 PM
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Admiral
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^^^ What? Slick ain't gonna answer more than 10% of what you ask him to answer, bubba! Ain't that right, Slick?
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Mainiac
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May 23 2005, 06:46 PM
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Lieutenant Commander
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- Dwayne Posted on May 23 2005
- 04:31 PM
Great read. It's no surprise the resident leftist have avoided it like the plague. But I am surprised the non-leftists in the crowd haven't commented on it.
Ooh! Cheerleading! Not so time-sensitive yourself there either Dwayne.
Could it be that some of us leftists actually work for a living? Actually I would have ignored this as an extremely wordy piece of obvious rabble-rousing by the SF Chronicle. They must be having a slow period on their letters-to-the-editor page. Is there any doubt as to their readership's probable political bias? Anyways, I didn't find it persuasive in the least. Sounds like this guy had a lot of idiot friends. They can be found at both sides of the aisle. The conservative movement is welcome to this one. He sounds like a born follower. We need leaders.
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UncleSlickhead
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May 23 2005, 06:53 PM
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High Priest of the Church of the Blalock's Booty
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Quite right. I'm required by law to answer no more than 10% of the questions I'm asked. This was determined by a special session of Congress called back in '97. Anyway... Name calling? I was unaware that the word Republican was considered pejorative. I apologize to any and all who were offended by my callous use of the word 'Republican', and commend myself to the violent thrashing I most assuredly deserve for being the knave I am.
There is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans. Consider: Their main point of contention is supposed to be the size and scope of government. The Democrats supposedly believe that government has a responsibility to stick its nose into its citizens lives. The Republicans supposedly believe in a smaller government that interferes in the lives of its citizens as little as possible. And yet Bush (a Republican, in case you didn't know) is creating new Cabinet Offices every other day. I've read reports that tomorrow he will announce the creation of the Department of Redundancy Department.
And you know the whole Tom DeLay travel scandal? The Democrats jumped on this like piranhas on a bloody capybara. And yet, DeLay isn't even in the top 100 in terms of his travel budget. In fact, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm pretty sure you have to go down like thirty or so spots before you find a non-Democrat.
There's been some kind of outcry recently involving the audiences at President Bush's public appearances. Apparently, they're handpicked by the Administration. Now, the so-called 'progressive' commentators are really going on and on about this. The way they're raving, you'd think they didn't know that Democrats do the same thing all the time.
I could go on forever. Both parties are rife with hypocrisy.
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Fesarius
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May 23 2005, 07:00 PM
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Admiral
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Quite right. I'm required by law to answer no more than 10% of the questions I'm asked. This was determined by a special session of Congress called back in '97.
Slick,
Thank you.
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Dwayne
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May 23 2005, 07:22 PM
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Profanity deleted by Hoss
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- Mainiac
- May 23 2005, 06:46 PM
- Dwayne Posted on May 23 2005
- 04:31 PM
Great read. It's no surprise the resident leftist have avoided it like the plague. But I am surprised the non-leftists in the crowd haven't commented on it.
Ooh! Cheerleading! Not so time-sensitive yourself there either Dwayne. Could it be that some of us leftists actually work for a living? Actually I would have ignored this as an extremely wordy piece of obvious rabble-rousing by the SF Chronicle. They must be having a slow period on their letters-to-the-editor page. Is there any doubt as to their readership's probable political bias? Anyways, I didn't find it persuasive in the least. Sounds like this guy had a lot of idiot friends. They can be found at both sides of the aisle. The conservative movement is welcome to this one. He sounds like a born follower. We need leaders.
It's the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE!!!
It is a liberal paper.
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