Leaving the Political Faith

This article is the transcript to a fascinating symposium entitled "Leaving the Political Faith," which involves a panel of several former leftists discussing their intellectual journeys. The article is rather long, but extremely enlightening and worthwhile when you have the time. Some parts of the discussion were especially interesting to me because they explore the issue of idealism vs. realism, which I touched on in a previous post. I try to abstain from long posts, but these excerpts are so good, I just had to post them.

From John R. Bradley:

...the Left never offers any kind of practical solution to the world's problems. It's all deferred until the day of global revolution and the establishment of the Socialist utopia. So when the Iraq war came, there was all the predictable criticism -- the West was friends with Saddam, the West continues to support Arab dictatorships despite the pro-democracy rhetoric. And they are right. But what did the Left ever propose that would help solve this problem? And what did the Arabs ever do to address the issue of Saddam's vile regime? What are they proposing now? To withdraw the troops from Iraq? And then? Practical solutions would necessitate abandoning their false idealism. Better, for the Left, to render people victims, because it also renders them helpless. Then they become lost souls in need of saviour-- the hard-Left's fantasy come true.

From Michael Lopez-Calderon:

Also what I saw happening to those of us on the left was the growth of an unexpected elitist hostility to ordinary folk. Many of my leftist friends and a few colleagues adopted the position that the masses were not only deceived, but had also played a willing role in their deception. Here we were, the harbingers of an ideology that purported to stand with the ordinary folk, and yet we despised practically everything they embraced, e.g. family, faith, consumerism, money-making, patriotism, and so forth. We did not live in a world where most lived, ensconced as we were in universities.

Near the end of my university years, I began to notice this strange contradiction of “loving humanity but hating people.” I’ve realized since that it was part of the stock-in-trade of the unrealistic vision of the left, and blaming the failure of that vision not on the flawed assumption of the ideology but rather on the ingratitude of the “great unwashed” that we sought to liberate.

From Tammy Bruce:

And why do [Leftists] hate America the most? Specifically because, despite our many imperfections, we do serve as an example of the goodness and decency of humanity. Our existence proves that happiness, hope and decency can and do exist. For a leftist, the values of this nation, and the nature of her people, is a constant reminder by counterpoint of what they are not—happy, industrious, hopeful, and truly free. For the leftist and Islamist, hatred of this nation, and humanity is personal. It’s that simple.

From Jamie Glazov:

I find it incredible that after a whole century of leftists supporting and venerating one mass murderer after another, one genocidal killing machine after another, that somehow, when the new killing machine is born, and the Left ecstatically jumps to wholeheartedly support its vicious path, we are somehow supposed to believe that, once again, most leftists are somehow acting out of some kind of good-hearted and naïve wish for a better world.

You witness Stalin kill millions, you witness Mao kill millions, you witness Pol and Mengistu and Castro and North Vietnam engage in mass murder. You witness 100 million human corpses sacrificed on the altar of utopian ideals. And yet, when you jump to support the next totality that is operating on the same principles that engendered the mass murder you just witnessed, you are somehow not entertaining any kind of malicious agenda; you are just naïve and misguided.

And now, a new totality emerges as the top enemy to freedom in the world, this time Islamism, and you know full well that it operates on the same totalitarian impulses that motivated the mass killers you supported throughout the 20th century. And it is massacring innocent human beings right before your eyes. And somehow, again, your support of this ideology and the terrorists who act in its name only involves some kind of naïve and misguided agenda.

From Keith Thompson:

Any given era is dominated by certain modes, styles, structures of consciousness. America in the 1950s, for instance, was a steady-state period in which conventional, conformist values were prominent: family, suburbs, Horatio Algier, I Like Ike, and so forth. All of this began to shift in the 1960s. I believe there’s something historically significant about the psychological dynamics of the American Baby Boom generation. At its best, the Boomer generation ushered in values that had never been explored on a large scale basis: pluralism, egalitarianism, diversity, non-institutional spirituality, multiculturalism — hence, a greater concern for marginalized perspectives and groups, civil rights, feminism, ecology, cross-cultural studies. But there was a hidden toxic undercurrent to this otherwise healthy shift: a runaway relativism that went beyond respecting previously marginalized groups, to declaring that all forms of hierarchy, all conventional norms, all established structures of authority — especially Mom and Dad — are necessarily and intrinsically oppressive. We can all giggle at newsreels of this anti-authority, anti-hierarchy, anti-modernity worldview at Woodstock, but the problem is that the meme became a virulent ideology that today goes by the pretentious name of Deconstructive Postmodernism.

Here’s what matters. The contemporary moral-equivalence movement can be traced to these developments. The catechism goes like this: “Cultures different from America’s must be judged in their own terms because there is no basis for making distinctions between cultures, because distinctions are judgmental and hierarchical and based on hidden power advantages enjoyed by mainstream, dominator cultures.” This is absurd on its face, because the assertion that there’s no basis for universal value judgments is itself a universal value judgment, pretending not to be.