There’s an amazingly good article by Keith Thompson at the San Francisco Chronicle today about how far the liberal left has come since the days of “I have a dream” and championing the causes of the oppressed the world over. To be blunt, this (and probably little else) is why Bush won a second term. Sure, sure… it manifested itself as Kerry being weak on foreign policy issues, and it manifested itself as “personal responsibility”, and probably a dozen other things, but those are direct results of where the left has gone… and Thompson does a fantastic job of articulating that.
There are a lot of spots that need to be excerpted, but I’m just going to toss a few out.
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.
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.
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.
If I didn’t already have a set of beliefs wholly independent from a political party, this would probably make me re-think my allegiance, regardless of which side of the fence I was sitting on.