quote:

My life as a leftist began with a May Day Parade in 1948, when I was nine years old, and lasted for more than twenty-five years until December 1974, when a mur- der committed by my political comrades brought my radical career to an end. My parents had joined the Communist Party along with many other idealistic Americans in the 1930s, before I was born. Just as today’s leftists believe that the seeds of justice have been planted by the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, my parents and their radical friends saw them blooming in Soviet Russia, which many of them visited during Stalin’s purges. Not even the testimony of a Bolshevik legend like the exiled Trotsky could persuade them that they were deceived about the “new society” they thought they saw under construction in the socialist state. Confident that their own ideals were pure, my parents and their political friends dismissed Trotsky and others whose experience had caused them to know better, smearing them as “counter-revolutionaries,” “anti-Soviets” and “renegades.”

Twenty years later, when my parents had reached middle age, their arrogance betrayed them and took away their self-respect. In 1956 power shifted in the Kremlin, and my parents along with the rest of the progressive left discovered that the socialist future they had served all their lives was a monstrous lie. They had thought they were fighting for social justice, for the powerless and the poor.

But in reality they had served a gang of cynical despots who had slaughtered more peasants, caused more hunger and human misery, and killed more leftists like themselves than all the capitalist governments since the beginning of time.

After Stalin’s death, it was the confrontation with this reality, and not Senator Joe McCarthy’s famous crusade, which demoralized and destroyed the old Communist guard in America. I was seventeen at the time, and at the funeral of the Old Left I swore to myself I would not repeat my parents’ fate. I would never be loyal to a movement based on a lie or be complicit in political crimes; I would never support a cause that required the suppression of its own truths, whether by self-censorship or firing squads or political smears. But my youth prevented me from comprehending what the catastrophe had revealed. I continued to believe in the fantasy of the socialist future. When a New Left began to emerge a few years later, I was ready to believe that it was a fresh beginning and eager to assist at its birth.

For a long time I was able to keep the promises I had made. As an activist and writer in the movement of the Sixties, I never endorsed what I knew to be a lie or concealed what I knew to be a crime. I never stigmatized a dissenting view as morally beyond the pale. At the same time, however, I closed my eyes to evidence that would have shown me the left had not really changed at all. Like the rest of my radical comrades, I welcomed Castro’s triumph in Cuba, which he proclaimed a revolution of “bread without terror” and “neither red nor black but Cuban olive green.” When Castro established his own dictatorship and gulag and joined the Soviet axis, I too blamed his dereliction on the anti-Communist phobia of the United States, and I averted my eyes from the truth.

A decade later, when the Vietnam War came to an end, there was a massive exodus from the New Left by those who had joined its ranks to avoid military service. I stayed. I had never been eligible for the draft and had joined the movement in order to serve the progressive ideal.

In 1974 I began a new project with the Black Panther Party, which the New Left had identified in the Sixties as the “vanguard of the revolution.” I raised the funds to create a “Community Learning Center” for the Panthers in the heart of the East Oakland ghetto. The Center provided schooling and free meals to 150 children, and community services to an even larger number of adults. The following year the woman I had hired as a bookkeeper for the Center was kidnapped, sexually tormented, and then brutally murdered by my Black Panther comrades.

When I first discovered what had happened, I was paralyzed with fear, a fear that grew as I learned about other murders and violent crimes the Panthers had committed—all without retribution from the law. At the time, the left saw the Panthers as a persecuted vanguard, victimized by racist police because of their role in the liberation struggle. The Panthers’ leader had found refuge from several criminal indictments in Castro’s Cuba; the Party’s spokesmen appeared regularly at progressive rallies to agitate against capitalist “repression” at home. In the eyes of the left, the Panthers were what they always had been: an embodiment of the progressive idea. To defend them against the “fascist” attacks of the police was a radical’s first responsibility and task.

In reality the Panthers were a criminal gang that preyed on the black ghetto itself. With the weapons they had justified as necessary for “self-defense” against “racist authority,” they pursued various avenues of criminal violence which included extortion, drug-trafficking and murder. Not all the murders they committed had a monetary rationale. Some were merely gratuitous, as when they killed a leader of the Black Students Union at Grove Street College in Oakland because he had inadvertently insulted one of their enforcers. The Oakland police were aware of the Panthers’ criminal activities; but were rendered powerless to stop them by the nationwide network of liberal and radical Panther supporters who sprang to their defense.

With community fronts like the school I had created, with lobbyists in the state house and activists in the streets, with million-dollar defense funds and high-powered attorneys, with civil liberties organizations ready with lawsuits and witnesses ready to perjure themselves, the New Left provided the Panthers with an Achilles Shield that protected them from the law. All the celebrated “Cointelpro” programs of the Nixon White House and the anti-subversive campaigns of the FBI, all the alleged wiretaps and infiltrations of the Panther organization, could not provide the means to sustain a single legal conviction against the Panthers for their crimes, or prevent the 20 or more murders they committed, including that of the woman I had hired. During a decade of radical protest as reckless in its charges as it was indiscriminate in its targets, the left had made civil authority in America so weak that the law could not punish ordinary criminal acts when committed by its progressive vanguard.

Because of what I knew, I myself now lived in fear of the Panther terror. In my fear, it became impossible for me not to connect these events with the nightmares of the radical past. Just as Stalin had used the idealism and loyalty of my parents’ generation to commit his crimes in the Thirties, so the Panthers had used my generation’s idealism in the Sixties. My political odyssey had come full circle. When I was beginning, I had promised myself that I would never be silent when confronted by such misdeeds; that I would fight within the left for the same justice as the left demanded of the world outside. But now I discovered that I could not keep my promise and remain a part of the movement I had served. Because a progressive vanguard had committed the crime, my duty as a progressive was to defend the criminal. As a result, the left suddenly became a hostile terrain for me. I had already been threatened by the Panthers to keep silent about what I knew. The facts I knew would not be conclusive evidence in a court of law; but they posed a threat to the Panthers’ political shield. If their criminal acts were exposed to the left, the Panthers might lose their protection and support.

But even if I told what I knew, the Panthers might have little to fear. The whole history of the radical past, from Trotsky on, warned that my individual truth would have little effect on the attitude of the left. Confronted by such a truth, the left would seek first to ignore and then to discredit it, because it was damaging to the progressive cause.

At the murdered woman’s funeral, I had approached her daughter, who was 18 and a radical like me. On the way to the graveside, I told her that I was convinced the Panthers had killed her mother. The daughter’s grief for her mother was great, but so was the solidarity she felt for black people who were oppressed and for their revolutionary vanguard. When later she was asked publicly about the tragedy, she said that as far as she was concerned the Panthers were above suspicion. To suggest the contrary was racist.

What the daughter of the murdered woman did was “politically correct.” I knew at the time that if I were to step forward and publicly accuse the Panthers of the crime, I would be denounced by my own community in the name of the values we shared. All my previous life of dedication and commitment to the radical cause overnight would count for nothing. My own comrades would stigmatize me as a “racist,” shun me as a “renegade” and expel me from their ranks.

My dedication to the progressive cause had made me self-righteous and arrogant and blind. Now a cruel and irreversible crime had humbled me and restored my sight. I had started out with others of my generation confident that we were wiser than our parents and would avoid their radical fate. But all our wisdom had been vanity. I could no longer feel superior to the generation that had been silent during the years of Stalin’s slaughters. The Stalinists and the Panthers may have operated on stages vastly different in scale, but ultimately their achievements were the same. Stalin and the Panthers were ruthless exploiters of the radical dream; just like our forbears, my comrades and I were credulous idealists who had served a criminal lie.

Years later Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, came to the conclusion that the Panthers had murdered her mother. With the help of friends, she hired a private detective who had worked regularly for leftwing defense attorneys to investigate the case. His report concluded that the Panthers were responsible for the murder of Betty Van Patter.

Through this microcosm I saw what I had failed to see 18 years before, at the time of “de-Stalinization,” when the New Left was born. The problem of the left was not Stalin or “Stalinism.” The problem was the left itself.

Although the Panther vanguard was isolated and small, its leaders were able to rob and kill without incurring the penalty of law. They were able to do so because the left had made the Panthers a law unto themselves—the same way the left had made Stalin a law unto himself—the same way the left makes Fidel Castro and the Sandinista comandantes laws unto themselves.

By crowning the criminals with the halo of humanity’s hope, the left shields them from judgment for their criminal deeds. Thus in the name of revolutionary justice, the left defends revolutionary injustice; in the name of human liberation, the left creates a new world of oppression.

The lesson I had learned for my pain turned out to be modest and simple: the best intentions can lead to the worst results. I had believed in the left because of the good it had promised. Now I learned to judge it by the evil it had done.

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ORIGINAL: Marini

This triggered me to listen to "My Sweet Lord" George Harrison, great song.
Which leads me to listening to the Beatles.

What happened to the "Left" of the 60s and 70s?
THAT was the LEFT that I could admire and respect, when did we sell ourselves out to the man?

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A Guide to Basic Differences Between Left and Right

Source of Human Rights
Left: government
Right: the Creator

Human Nature
Left: basically good (Therefore, society is primarily responsible for evil.)
Right: not basically good (Therefore, the individual is primarily responsible for evil.)

Economic Goal
Left: equality
Right: prosperity

Primary Role of the State
Left: increase and protect equality
Right: increase and protect liberty

Government
Left: as large as possible
Right: as small as possible

Family Ideal
Left: any loving unit of people
Right: a married father and mother, and children

Guiding Trinity
Left: race, gender and class
Right: liberty, In God We Trust and e pluribus unum

Good and Evil
Left: relative to individual and/or society
Right: based on universal absolutes

Humanity's Primary Division(s)
Left: rich and poor; strong and weak
Right: good and evil

Ideal Primary Identity of an American
Left: world citizen
Right: American citizen

How to Make a Good Society
Left: abolish inequality
Right: develop each citizen's moral character

View of America
Left: profoundly morally flawed; inferior to any number of European countries
Right: greatest force for good among nations in world history

Gender
Left: a social construct
Right: male and female

Most Important Trait to Cultivate in a Child
Left: self-esteem
Right: self-control

Worth of the Human Fetus
Left: determined by the mother
Right: determined by society rooted in Judeo-Christian values

Primary Source of Crime
Left: poverty, racism and other societal flaws
Right: the criminal's malfunctioning conscience

Place of God and Religion in America
Left: secular government and secular society
Right: secular government and religious society

American Exceptionalism
Left: chauvinistic doctrine
Right: historical reality

Greatest Threat to the World
Left: environmental catastrophe (currently global warming)
Right: evil (currently radical Islamist violence)

International Ideal
Left: world governed by the United Nations, and no single country is dominant
Right: world in which America is the single strongest entity

Primary Reason for Lack of Peace in Middle East
Left: Israeli settlements in the West Bank
Right: Palestinian, Arab and Muslim denial of Jewish state's right to exist

Purpose of Art
Left: challenge status quo and bourgeois sensibilities
Right: produce works of beauty and profundity to elevate the individual and society

Guns
Left: ideally universally abolished, except for use by police, the armed forces and registered sportsmen
Right: ideally widely owned by responsible individuals for self-protection and the protection of others

Race
Left: intrinsically significant
Right: intrinsically insignificant

Racial, Ethnic and Gender Diversity at Universities
Left: most important
Right: far less important than ideological diversity

Black America's Primary Problem
Left: racism
Right: lack of fathers

Greatest Playwright
Left: entirely subjective; there is no greatest playwright
Right: Shakespeare

War
Left: not the answer
Right: sometimes the only answer

Hate
Left: wrong, except when directed at the political
Right: wrong, except when directed at evil

Cultures
Left: all equal
Right: some are better than others

America's Founding Fathers
Left: rich white male slave owners
Right: great men who founded the greatest society

Purpose of Judges
Left: pursue social justice
Right: pursue justice

National Borders
Left: a relic of the past
Right: indispensable for national survival

View of Illegal Immigrants
Left: welcomed guests
Right: illegal immigrants

Nature
Left: intrinsically valuable
Right: made for man

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Differences Between Left and Right: Part I

Most Americans hold either liberal or conservative positions on most matters. In many instances, however, they would be hard pressed to explain their position or the position they oppose.

But if you can’t explain both sides, how do you know you’re right?

At the very least, you need to understand both the liberal and conservative positions in order to effectively understand your own.

I grew up in a liberal world — New York, Jewish and Ivy League graduate school. I was an 8-year-old when President Dwight Eisenhower ran for re-election against the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. I knew nothing about politics and had little interest in the subject. But I well recall knowing — knowing, not merely believing — that Democrats were “for the little guy” and Republicans were “for the rich guys.”

I voted Democrat through Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. He was the last Democrat for which I voted.

Obviously, I underwent an intellectual change. And it wasn’t easy. Becoming a Republican was emotionally and psychologically like converting to another religion.

In fact, when I first voted Republican I felt as if I had abandoned the Jewish people. To be a Jew meant being a Democrat. It was that simple. It was — and remains — that fundamental to many American Jews’ identity.

Therefore, it took a lot of thought to undergo this conversion. I had to understand both liberalism and conservatism. Indeed, I have spent a lifetime in a quest to do so.

The fruit of that quest will appear in a series of columns explaining the differences between left and right.

I hope it will benefit conservatives in better understanding why they are conservative, and enable liberals to understand why someone who deeply cares about the “little guy” holds conservative — or what today are labeled as conservative — views.

Difference No. 1: Is Man Basically Good?

Left-of-center doctrines hold that people are basically good. On the other side, conservative doctrines hold that man is born morally flawed — not necessarily born evil, but surely not born good. Yes, we are born innocent — babies don’t commit crimes, after all — but we are not born good. Whether it is the Christian belief in Original Sin or the Jewish belief that we are all born with a yetzer tov (good inclination) and a yetzer ra (bad inclination) that are in constant conflict, the root value systems of the West never held that we are naturally good.

To those who argue that we all have goodness within us, two responses:

First, no religion or ideology denies that we have goodness within us; the problem is with denying that we have badness within us. Second, it is often very challenging to express that goodness. Human goodness is like gold. It needs to be mined — and like gold mining, mining for our goodness can be very difficult.

This so important to understanding the left-right divide because so many fundamental left-right differences emanate from this divide.

Perhaps the most obvious one is that conservatives blame those who engage in violent criminal activity for their behavior more than liberals do. Liberals argue that poverty, despair, and hopelessness cause poor people, especially poor blacks — in which case racism is added to the list — to riot and commit violent crimes.

Here is President Barack Obama on May 18, 2015:

“In some communities, that sense of unfairness and powerlessness has contributed to dysfunction in those communities. … Where people don’t feel a sense of hope and opportunity, then a lot of times that can fuel crime and that can fuel unrest. We’ve seen it in places like Baltimore and Ferguson and New York. And it has many causes — from a basic lack of opportunity to some groups feeling unfairly targeted by their police forces.”

So, poor blacks who riot and commit other acts of violence do so largely because they feel neglected and suffer from deprivations.

Since people are basically good, their acts of evil must be explained by factors beyond their control. Their behavior is not really their fault; and when conservatives blame blacks for rioting and other criminal behavior, liberals accuse them of “blaming the victim.”

In the conservative view, people who do evil are to be blamed because they made bad choices — and they did so because they either have little self-control or a dysfunctional conscience. In either case, they are to blame. That’s why the vast majority of equally poor people — black or white — do not riot or commit violent crimes.

Likewise, many liberals believe that most of the Muslims who engage in terror do so because of the poverty and especially because of the high unemployment rate for young men in the Arab world. Yet, it turns out that most terrorists come from middle class homes. All the 9/11 terrorists came from middle- and upper-class homes. And of course Osama bin Laden was a billionaire.

Material poverty doesn’t cause murder, rape or terror. Moral poverty does. That’s one of the great divides between left and right. And it largely emanates from their differing views about whether human nature is innately good.

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The difference between Right and Left addressed in this column concerns a fundamentally different method that each utilizes in order to improve society.

Conservatives believe that the way to a better world is almost always through moral improvement of the individual — by each person doing battle with his own moral defects. It is true that in particularly violent and evil societies such as fascist, communist and Islamist tyrannies the individual must be preoccupied with battling outside forces. Almost everywhere else, however, and certainly in a free and decent country such as America, the greatest battle of the individual must be with inner forces — that is, with his or her flawed character and moral defects. (See Left-Right Difference Part 1 concerning their differing perceptions of human nature.)

The Left, on the other hand, believes that the way to a better world is almost always through doing battle with society’s moral defects (real and/or as perceived by the Left). Thus, in America, the Left defines the good person as the one who fights the sexism, racism, intolerance, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and other evils that the Left believes permeate American society.

That is one reason those on the left are more preoccupied with politics than those on the right. A simple example should make this point clear. Whenever the term “activist” or “social activist” or “organizer” is used, one infers that the term refers to someone on the Left.

One consequence of this difference is that conservatives believe that good is achieved far more gradually than liberals do. The process of making a better world is largely a one-by-one-by-one effort. And it must be redone in every single generation. The noblest generation ever born still has to teach its children how to battle their natures. If it doesn’t, even the best society will begin to rapidly devolve, which is exactly what conservatives believe has been happening to America since the end of World War II.

The Left does not focus on individual character development. Rather, it has always and everywhere focused on social revolution. The most revealing statement of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, the most committed leftist ever elected president of the United States, was made just days before the 2008 election: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he told a large rapturous audience.

Conservatives not only have no interest in fundamentally transforming the United States, but they are passionately opposed to doing so. Fundamentally transforming any but the worst society — not to mention transforming what is probably the most decent society in history — can only make the society worse. Of course, conservatives believe that America can be improved, but not transformed, let alone fundamentally transformed.

The Founders all understood that the transformation that every generation must work on is the moral transformation of each citizen. Thus, character development was at the core of both childrearing and of young people’s education at school.

As John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

And in the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

Why is that? Because freedom requires self-control. Otherwise, external controls — which means an ever more powerful government — would have to be imposed.

The more that Leftist ideas influence society the less character education there is. Instead, children are taught to focus on social issues. For example, The Wall Street Journal just reported that Common Core, the federal standards program for elementary and high schools, has unveiled a new K-12 science curriculum, the “Next Generation of Science Standards,” which will indoctrinate young Americans concerning global warming from kindergarten on.

And when they get to college, American young people will be taught about the need to fight such things as “white privilege” and the “rape culture” on their campuses.

At the same time, as a professor of philosophy wrote in The New York Times, fewer and fewer young Americans believe there are any moral truths.

Meanwhile, at home, fathers and religion, historically the two primary conveyors of moral truths and moral self-discipline, are often nonexistent.

As a result of all this, we are producing — indeed, we have produced since World War II — vast numbers of Americans who are passionate about carbon emissions and fighting sexism and “white privilege” who are also cheating on tests at unprecedentedly high levels.

But the age-old wisdom embraced by conservatives remains as true as ever: Before you fix society, you must first fix yourself.

quote:


Likewise, many liberals believe that most of the Muslims who engage in terror do so because of the poverty and especially because of the high unemployment rate for young men in the Arab world.

quote:

A fundamental difference between the left and right concerns how each assesses public policies. The right asks, “Does it do good?” The left asks a different question.

One example is the minimum wage. In 1987, The New York Times editorialized against any minimum wage. The title of the editorial said it all — “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.”

“There’s a virtual consensus among economists,” wrote the Times editorial, “that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market . … More important, it would increase unemployment. … The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable — and fundamentally flawed.”

Why did The New York Times editorialize against the minimum wage? Because it asked the conservative question: “Does it do good?”

But 27 years later, The New York Times editorial page wrote the very opposite of what it had written in 1987, and called for a major increase in the minimum wage. In that time, the page had moved further left and was now preoccupied not with what does good — but with income inequality, which feels bad. It lamented the fact that a low hourly minimum wage had not “softened the hearts of its opponents” — Republicans and their supporters.

As second example is affirmative action. Study after study — and, even more important, common sense and facts — have shown the deleterious effects that race-based affirmative action have had on black students. Lowering college admissions standards for black applicants has ensured at least two awful results.

One is that more black students fail to graduate college — because they have too often been admitted to a college that demands more academic rigor than they were prepared for. Rather than attend a school that matches their skills, a school where they might thrive, they fail at a school where they are over-matched.

The other result is that many, if not most, black students feel a dark cloud hanging over them. They suspect that other students wonder whether they, the black students, were admitted into the college on merit or because standards were lowered.

It would seem that the last question supporters of race-based affirmative action ask is, “Does it do good?”

A third example is pacifism and other forms of “peace activism.”

The left has a soft spot for pacifism — the belief that killing another human being is always immoral. Not all leftists are pacifists, but pacifism emanates from the Left, and just about all leftists support “peace activism,” “peace studies” and whatever else contains the word “peace.”

The right, on the other hand, while just as desirous of peace as the left — what conservative parent wants their child to die in battle? — knows that pacifism and most “peace activists” increase the chances of war, not peace.

Nothing guarantees the triumph of evil like refusing to fight it. Great evil is therefore never defeated by peace activists, but by superior military might. The Allied victory in World War II is an obvious example. American military might likewise contained and ultimately ended Soviet Communism.

Supporters of pacifism, peace studies, American nuclear disarmament, American military withdrawal from countries in which it has fought — Iraq is the most recent example — do not ask, “Does it do good?’

Did the withdrawal of America from Iraq do good? Of course not. It only led to the rise of Islamic State with its mass murder and torture.

So, then, if in assessing what public policies to pursue, conservatives ask “Does it do good?” what question do liberals ask?

The answer is, “Does it make people — including myself — feel good?”

Why do liberals support a higher minimum wage if doesn’t do good? Because it makes the recipients of the higher wage feel good (even if other workers lose their jobs when restaurants and other businesses that cannot afford the higher wage close down) and it makes liberals feel good about themselves: We liberals, unlike conservatives, have soft hearts.

Why do liberals support race-based affirmative action? For the same reasons. It makes the recipients feel good when they are admitted to more prestigious colleges. And it makes liberals feel good about themselves for appearing to right the wrongs of historical racism.

The same holds true for left-wing peace activism: Supporting “peace” rather than the military makes liberals feel good about themselves.

Perhaps the best example is the self-esteem movement. It has had an almost wholly negative effect on a generation of Americans raised to have high self-esteem without having earned it. They then suffer from narcissism and an incapacity to deal with life’s inevitable setbacks. But self-esteem feels good.

And feelings — not reason — is what liberalism is largely about. Reason asks: “Does it do good?” Liberalism asks, “Does it feel good?”

quote:

Here’s a difference between Left and Right that is rarely noted despite the fact that it is at least as important as any other and even explains many of the other differences.

At the core of left-wing thought is a rejection of painful realities, the rejection of what the French call les faits de la vie: the facts of life. Conservatives, on the other hand, are all too aware of these painful realities of life and base many of their positions on them.

One such example was the subject of my first column on Left-Right differences: whether people are basically good. When liberals blame violent crime in America on poverty, one reason they do is that liberal beliefs since the Enlightenment have posited that human nature is good. Therefore, when people do truly bad things to other people, liberals believe that some outside force — usually poverty, racism and/or unemployment — must be responsible, not human nature.

Liberals find it too painful to look reality in the eye and acknowledge that human nature is deeply flawed. This is especially so because left-wing thought is rooted in secularism, and if you don’t believe in God, you had better believe in humanity — or you will despair.

Another fact of life that the Left finds too painful to acknowledge is the existence of profound differences between men and women. There is no other explanation for the rejection of what has been obvious to essentially every man and woman in history. It is certainly not the result of scientific inquiry. The more science knows about the male and female brain, not to mention male and female hormones, the more it confirms important built-in differences between the sexes.

Why then would people actually believe that girls are as happy to play with trucks as are boys, and boys are as happy to play with dolls and tea sets as are girls?

Because acknowledging many of those differences is painful. For example, feminists and others on the Left do not want to acknowledge that sex between two people who are not committed to each other usually means much more to women than to men. It is too painful to acknowledge that men are far more capable of having anonymous, emotionally meaningless sex than women. Therefore, feminism has now taught two generations of women that they are just as capable of enjoying emotionless sex with many partners as are men.

That the great majority of women yearn to bond with a man — more than they yearn for professional success — is another fact of life that the Left wishes not to acknowledge. Thus, feminism posited the silly false motto, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” — because the reality is that most women without a man feel a deep hole in their soul. And that is too painful to acknowledge. (This hole also exists in men, but most men have no trouble acknowledging it.)

The entire concept of “political correctness” emanates from the Left’s incapacity to acknowledge painful truths. The very definition of “politically incorrect” is an idea or truth that people on the Left find too painful to acknowledge and therefore do not want expressed.

Why are so many young black males in prison? The reason is politically incorrect, meaning too painful for the Left to acknowledge: Black males commit a highly disproportionate amount of violent crime.

Why are there speech codes on virtually all college campuses? Because Leftists — who control most campuses — do not wish to hear discomforting facts or opinions with which they differ. That causes them pain.

That is the Left’s own language. Leftists constantly speak about people being made “uncomfortable” and about feeling “offended” (conservatives almost never react to an idea with which they differ by saying, “I’m offended”). If a man has a “cheesecake” calendar hanging in his car repair shop, the Left regards him as having created a “hostile work environment” — meaning some women might find it painful to see a woman presented as a sexual object.

Avoiding pain at almost all costs is at the heart of left-wing ideas and policies. That’s why kids can no longer run around during recess at so many American schools. They may get hurt. That’s why child protective services take children away from parents who allow their children to walk home alone or even play alone in the family backyard for 90 minutes without a parent at home.

Or take the left-wing bumper sticker idea: “War Is Not the Answer.” Of course, war is often the answer to great evil. Nazi death camps were liberated by soldiers fighting a war, not peace activists. But having to acknowledge the moral necessity of war is too painful a truth for many on the Left.

One might say Leftism appeals to those who wish to remain innocent children. Growing up and facing the fact that life is messy, difficult and painful is increasingly a conservative point of view.

quote:

ORIGINAL: CreativeDominant

Leaving the left

Before 9/11, I was liberal-left.
After 9/11, in the winter of 2001-2, like thousands - maybe millions - of others, I converted to libertarian-right.
Above all else, I was shocked by the left's response to 9/11. I was so naive as to think that the left I had grown up with hated fascism, especially religious fascism, and would be the first to join a war against it.
Instead they have emerged as the war's opponents, often with open sympathy for the fascists.
Secondly, I was impressed by the neo-conservative right's analysis of the problem (that it was not caused by poverty, for example), their understanding of human nature and of the mind of the enemy. Leaving the left is not about "selling out" to mortgages and money, or anything so mundane. It is about growing up and understanding better unchanging human nature and the bleak tragedy of the world.

There's much more to be found here:

http://markhumphrys.com/leaving.left.html

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This morning on the radio show, Dana Loesch filled in for Glenn who is away on vacation. Many of you may know her from CNN, Breitbart news, or even her guest spots right here on GBTV, but Dana wasn’t always the strong conservative that she is today. In fact, prior to September 11th, Dana was a pretty hardcore liberal.

“I’m a reformed liberal,” Dana said this morning while introducing herself to the Glenn Beck radio audience.

She continued, explaining that she had her “come to Jesus moment” on 9/11 as she watched the towers falls on her television. She realized in that moment that the ideology which she had believed in doesn’t work in reality – there are repercussions....

“Conservatives didn’t take the streets and protest,” Dana recalled....