Leaving the Left

Keith Thompson, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, pens one of the finest essays I've read about the disintegration of the left in the US. Liberalism in the US is currently at its lowest point ever. That is why the Republicans hold all branches of government.

Does that mean that ex-liberals agree with Bush? No way. It means that liberals are taking a hard look at themselves and where the left is headed in a post-9/11 world. The honest ones are seeing where the left in this country is currently positioned and not liking at all what they see.

Thompson truly writes from his heart. He traces his final break with leftism to the day of the Iraqi election:

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.

The ferocity of the left when someone breaks ranks is palpable. I hope he's ready to get slammed with every epithet he's imagined. This anecdote is quite telling of the beginning of the decline of modern liberalism:

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.

As I've said on many an occassion, the country as a whole has tilted to the left. Conservatives as a group and Neocons in particular are centrist, while the left has drifted farther to the left. The Republican voters are not just Christians, they are Libertarians and social moderates who try but can't vote Democratic.

As they say, read it all.

Update: Oops! There goes another one.