Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist

Break-ChainsReprinted from The American Thinker.

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.

I voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It’s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors’ meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said “Yes” or “No.”

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. X.” Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists’ announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can’t climb stairs.

I appreciate Professor X’s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others’ pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this — “Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.” But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one’s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.

9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. “You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture’s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.”

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, “binders full of women.” He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their “war on women.”

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it.

The left’s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It’s an “I hate” phenomenon, rather than an “I love” phenomenon.

8.) It’s the thought that counts

My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: “Think Globally; Screw up Locally.” In other words, “Love Humanity but Hate People.”

It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:

“If you want your dream to be,

Build it slow and surely.

Small beginnings greater ends.

Heartfelt work grows purely.”

I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan’s San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.

Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that’s what we leftists do wrong. That’s what we’ve got to get right.

We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and “tolerance,” not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.

Peace Corps did not focus on the “small beginnings” necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. “Only intolerant oppressors judge others’ cultures.”

I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people’s clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.” Delousing homeless people’s clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.

Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state’s first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?

Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she’d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.

A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free.  In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton “took me through Hell” and “lied like a dog.” “I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all,” the woman said. “If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys.”

Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.

Hillary’s chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.

7) Leftists hate my people.

I’m a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.

Karl Marx promised the workers’ paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class — think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.

Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan’s 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.

In the end, though, we didn’t show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood — “Workers of the world, unite!” But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn’t adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. “Property is theft” is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.

Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn’t just ancient history. In 2004, What’s the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What’s the Matter with America?

We became the left’s boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we’d been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the “imperialist” war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.” Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.

Leftists freely label poor whites as “redneck,” “white trash,” “trailer trash,” and “hillbilly.” At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton’s advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

The left’s visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a “major shock” to discover “the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people.” The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists “hate-fuck conservative women” and denounces Palin as a “small town hickoid” who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.

Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald’s, must accept that he is a recipient of “white privilege” – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.

The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard’s George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called “America’s leading immigration economist.” Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America’s working poor.

It’s more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.

6) I believe in God.

Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a “dead Jew on a stick” or a “zombie” and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented “flying spaghetti monster.” You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

5 & 4) Straw men and “In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.”

It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.

“Truth is that which serves the party.” The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.

Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York’s WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn’t such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, “And you support that?”

Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.

On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post‘s credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a “family friend” of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, “making stuff up.”

Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents — including Muslims — from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.

2 & 3) It doesn’t work.  Other approaches work better.

I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.

Ouch.

I grew up among “Greatest Generation” Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, “As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit.” In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends’ parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.

Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state’s open wound.

I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.

Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don’t know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don’t realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don’t know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.

My students do know — because they have been taught this — that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know — because they have been drilled in this — that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.

In Dominque La Pierre’s 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. “In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you.”

That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.

After I realized that our approaches don’t work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue’s castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is “My God, he’s right.”

1) Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I’d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.

Before that I’d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.

In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.

If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you’d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.

One topic thread was entitled “What do you view as disgusting about modern America?” The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.

Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn’t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn’t hate Obama.

I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances — I had no right-wing friends — expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I’m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don’t know that they were. I’m speaking here, merely, about language.

In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn’t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.

A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as “Bushitler.” The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it’s not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.

I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would — car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my “eat the rich” lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.

In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn’t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.

I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone — even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health — meant a great deal to me.

Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, “No, I’m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.”

“Julie,” I said, “You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don’t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something — capitalism.”

“Yes, but I’m very nice about it,” she insisted. “I always protest with a smile.”

Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I’m sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don’t know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.

I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I’ve stumbled upon a left-wing website.

Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being “sex positive,” one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like “fag,” so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like “butt hurt.” Leftists taunt right-wingers as “tea baggers.” The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.

Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was “prone.” Carmichael’s misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist’s reply to a woman critic. “I will make you a rape victim if you don’t fuck off… I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I’m going to rape you with my fist.”

A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC’s Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment’s loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won’t repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir’s comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.

I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I’ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.

I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.

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  • Oysteria

    Welcome, Ms Goska, to the “I finally woke up” club. I too am a member. It’s never too late.

    • Peter Gorman

      I pity you both.

      • artfuldgr

        i dont think you actually know the meaning of the term…

  • http://bodycrimes.com Bodycrimes

    Good article, but from the point of view of someone from outside the USA looking in, you could have described the right as well. Politically engaged people on both sides of the divide seem very extreme, very unwilling to engage with another point of view, and very determined to see their adversaries as inferior humans. You can see it in the comments here, with people denouncing lefties as despicable, nihilistic, intolerant, stupid… well, you get the point.

    • PDQuig

      Well, perhaps, but the left has owned academia, K-12 education, the news and entertainment industries, the bureaucracy at all levels, and the legal system for 50 years in the US. The right’s response to the left’s cultural hegemony has been late in coming and comparatively weak tea (pun intended). The right is waking up–belatedly–to the clear reality of a left bent not just on political victory, but on the suppression if not actual destruction of their opponents.

  • Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus

    It sounds like the author is saying that being a Communist and being for the little guy are NOT the same thing. Very true.

    Welcome aboard, Danusha!

  • conservativeprof

    Nicely written article full of anecdotes that express the leftist mindset. I have been a university professor for 32 years so I have seen lots of the same arrogant, entitled mindset. Even in a business school, it is hard to find faculty members who do not have the entitled, leftist mindset. Faculty know who butters their bread so a large part of the mindset is maintaining their compensation and work environment. Universities have become obsessed with maintaining their pricing power. They are dead set against any movement and technologies to reduce their compensation and modify their working environment. They do not want massive economies of scale, increases in teaching loads (achieved by modifying workloads from research to teaching), reductions in student fee mandates, reductions in defined benefit pensions, …
    Even business faculty have anti-market mindsets. A business dean once lectured me on the virtues of socialized medicine, essentially arguing that markets do not matter for health care. I was highly amused by this distorted thinking process.

  • TruthBeTold

    Great piece.

    I like your summation of ‘What’s Wrong With Kansas?’ (nothing). The people of Kansas aren’t voting to be oppressed by rich people who work to keep them down, they’re voting to remain independent and not dependent on a government for all their needs. They want to do for themselves and they’re proud to do so.

    I got a bit watery eyed reading about the rich man contemplating suicide. I followed a left-wing blogger who was a hopeless drug addict who blamed the Republicans and the Catholic Church for all the problems of the world. He loved taking drugs and the Church and Republicans believed it was wrong so they were evil. It never occurred to him that had he remained a practicing Catholic he likely never would have become a drug addict. He’s dead.

    The comments by ‘ progressive’ liberals are disturbing when you think about them. They’re consumed by hate; it’s all they have.

    And as you said about the radio show call in, there’s no talking to them. No matter what fact you give them, they will respond with hate.

  • Me Wise Magic

    Here is a fantastic documentary on aggressive leftism and how it is responsible or at the root of nearly every single problem America faces today. It is called “Grinding America Down.” Be sure to bookmark and share with family and friends over the holidays.

    Grinding America Down

    http://youtu.be/uDo8xAQGrI8

    • Peter Gorman

      It must be difficult to be both the in-charge majority race and faith, and yet still be oppressed by people you find to be impolite. I’ll carve you an ornate cross that you can nail yourself to at your leisure.

      • Me Wise Magic

        I’m Korean you mental midget. You have your pre-prepared remarks in your pocket that expired circa 1991. Time to checkout & reevaluate your existence for a little while.

        Good Day

        • Peter Gorman

          I suppose I should be happy that the US has gotten to the point where anyone can be fooled into revising history and thinking poorly of their fellow man.

          • Me Wise Magic

            Yawnnn.,….

            You need to leave your ivory tower sometime and get out into the real world. Typical progressive spoiled attitude of not appreciating what you have here in America. You are the definition of a hypocrite. You have a choice to live anywhere you wish in the world and yet are frightened to leave the comforts of a free nation that gives you everything & yet allows you to spew hatred at those freedoms. There isn’t a nation on earth where a minority like myself can achieve anything that I wish to achieve equally to that of the majority.

            Nothing in the documentary I posted is inaccurate. Point by point is fact. As hard as that is for you to accept. Truth isn’t meant to hurt; truth is meant to set you free.

            “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

          • Peter Gorman

            Standing for dignity of all US citizens comes from an appreciation and love of my country. The only difference between the parties is the dems don’t waste time passing judgment on the actions of people and instead just try to keep people alive and continuing in their pursuit of happiness. Step out of your iron tower and realize that people deserve respect regardless of who they are and what their opinions are. Don’t pretend that your philosophy is based on anything more than a fear and distrust of your fellows. Just let it go, man. We’ll be over here waiting for you, with open arms.

          • jonno99

            “…dems don’t waste time passing judgment on the actions of people and
            instead just try to keep people alive and continuing in their pursuit of
            happiness. ”

            You are either ignorant, naive or a liar – I not sure which one is worse.

            Passing judgment is part & parcel of democrat / leftist politics. I don’t know that I’ve EVER heard this president give a single speech where he wasn’t either demonizing his political opponents or blaming them for his failures.

            Go find for me an article – written by a democrat – on the virtues of Mia Love and her recent electoral victory. If there is one out there, it is one positive note in a sea of vitriol.

          • Peter Gorman

            mudslinging is a bipartisan endeavor. There is a difference between what someone stands for and what someone does to survive in a political fistfight. I don’t like the way our politics have slid into meaningless turf wars and pointless jabs. Unfortunately both sides do this, and both sides have people on them that speak badly for the party itself.

            The only real difference in the parties lie in what they try to do, and why. This pertains to the bills they try to pass, and why they do so. Us on this side champion various issues in protection of vulnerable classes. Conservatives, depending on ideology waste time deregulating businesses whose binding charters are founded only on the amoral accumulation of wealth, or try to push religious practices into public areas. Libertarian stances lead to the freedom to be more likely to die in public, one way or another. What’s the worst case scenario if a dem bill is wrong? Did we accidentally protect trees too much? Gave too much away to charitable organizations? Favored lower classes with too many benefits? Those are mistakes a person can live with. What happens when the other side makes a mistake? Golden parachutes bankrupt pensions. Arrest procedures become more painful for whoever is under scrutiny. Wars are encouraged. People die from needless things.

            It’s easier to sleep at night when you know you haven’t doomed anyone because of something you said or did.

          • jonno99

            “What’s the worst case scenario if a dem bill is wrong?”

            Really? I don’t know if I can take you seriously.

            How about we start with 50+ MILLION human beings dead from elective abortion. Or is that not “wrong”? Planned “parenthood”, black genocide, Margaret Sanger, eugenics – study it.

            My favorite quote from dem LBJ: ‘I’ll Have Those Ni@@rs Voting Democratic For The Next 200 Years’.

            BTW – I’m still waiting for the article on Mia…

          • Peter Gorman

            1 in 3 women miscarry during pregnancy, seems like nature/god ends more prospective lives than the impartial policy laid out by the US Supreme Court.

            LBJ was a republican who carried on democratic policies in the name of the then-deceased JFK. Maybe his interpretation of what liberals wanted was flawed, but either way he didn’t speak for the party because he literally wasn’t in the party.

            I’ll not be digging into this Mia business because the dust has yet to clear, so anything posted would be meaningless anyway. I would assume, though, that some dems are reacting to the historical revisionism that comes with such an election. Abe Lincoln is the party founder, and yet at the time the republican party was the progressive party. Eventually the ideology swapped places when the dems no longer supported racist policies. Having him as the “party founder” of today’s republican party is like having people say Gandhi founded the Hindu civil war between Pakistan and India.

          • Peter Gorman

            Actually I take that back, the current rhetoric of the republican party has finally caught up with the then-progressive notions of 1862. I didn’t even know who this Mia person was, but I did a little googling and found a Huffington post article that notes Love’s Utah election as a historical positive.

            http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/05/2014-midterm-election-history-firsts_n_6107384.html

            We’re all happy that her and the other guy got elected, but most are still stuck slinging mud because that’s how our politics seem to work.

          • jonno99

            “1 in 3 women miscarry during pregnancy,”

            “Elective” was the operative word I used.

            50+ MILLION dead; not through miscarriage – MOST because of the inconvenience of the child.

            To make it worse, the left works VERY hard to convince women that the murdering of their inconvenient children is natural – another “health care” option. Increased suicide, depression, coercion – none of this is good.

            I get the sense this is all a game to you, that you’re a dilettante; and I doubt you missed the word “elective”.

            This article was written because of individuals like you.

            Thanks for the object lesson…

          • Peter Gorman

            It makes me sad that you didn’t even consider anything I said.

          • Peter Gorman

            Dilletante? Haven’t heard that word in a while. I double majored in Political science and Criminal Justice. I am currently pursuing a juris doctor. I’m not sure who would be an “expert” in abortion law, but I have studied all of the relevant Supreme Court rulings. As such I know how they came about, why, and who was responsible for it.

            It was a bipartisan ruling initially in Roe v. Wade and has since been regularly upheld by additional bipartisan rulings, albeit with a more strict standard for proving access to abortion was obstructed. Republicans in court have consistently upheld a woman’s ability to terminate a pregnancy because it was reasoned that the abortion issue is both eternal and also unsolvable. This was not the product of the democratic party. This was the bipartisan decision that ultimately a woman must have the privacy right to decide her own destiny up to a point in a pregnancy, with that point moving around a bit over the course of several rulings.

            Quite frankly I think the issue is brought up again and again because intelligent conservative strategists realized that they could flog this unsolvable problem forever to win easy points with a certain portion of their electorate. You know someone has nothing to say when they bring up abortion because it’s literally unsolvable. “We want no abortions” “well what about when a woman is raped, or the fetus is deformed, or the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother, or the baby is already slowly dying for natural reasons…” the list goes on. If the solution was simple, the Supreme Court would have come to it by now. Think what you will of them, they are a clever bunch.

            I take my stances very seriously, and I wanted to actually answer the questions you had for me. If I come off as too flippant, it’s because some of your assertions do not even occur to the other side.
            If you were to bring up Margaret Sanger as an advocate of black genocide, you would get blank stares from disinterested or liberal parties. Only conservatives believe such things, Margaret Sanger started off with radical views, but eventually moderated her stances as she got older and did more research. Most sociologists of the time were quite racist, and studied sociology as a means to prove white superiority. This was a popular, superficial trend at the time, it had no connection to the democratic party, and was later dismissed by Sanger. Essentially it is an irrelevant point to make such an emphasis of an idea someone had that they later changed their mind about.

            Such issues take a bit more time for me, or anyone else, to digest such strange claims and then come up with an answer that doesn’t simply brush it away too dismissively. I did not mean to talk down to you, but someone should have told you about this sooner. I do not like it when political parties knowingly toss around false facts to engage their electorate.

          • Parshandatha

            To your point. Here is a sensational documentary on abortion called “180.” By the end of the film all of the people interviewed go from being pro-abortion to pro-life in under 30 minutes. Hence the name “180.” Well worth bookmarking.

            http://youtu.be/7y2KsU_dhwI

          • Parshandatha

            Great Post. 100% Accurate

          • Me Wise Magic

            “The only difference between the parties is the dems don’t waste time passing judgment on the actions of people and instead just try to keep people alive and continuing in their pursuit of happiness.”

            Dems the party of: Slavery, Eugenics, Segregation, Jim Crow, Jim Wallis, Abortion, Racism, Hurt, Poverty, KKK, Shouting Down People, Deceit, Misery, Internet Trolling, Darwinism, Celebrating Immorality, Kicking People When They’re Down, Arrogance, Marxism – you mean that party? The ignorance is more than I can bear; i am moving on now.

            There’s a reason you haven’t ever had a real ‘upvote’ on your comments since joining Disqus. Most people would try to understand why and reevaluate their positions. Not Peter apparently. He’s the one that is right & the rest of the world is wrong. So much wasted

            Goodbye

          • Oysteria

            People deserve respect you say? Not according to what I’ve heard you say here. “I pity you both.” That’s not respect. That’s condescending, snide and about 10 other less-than-flattering adjectives.

            Your characterizations of the right are laughable. Polite but secretly terrified children of the right? That, among many other things you’ve said in this thread are ridiculous. This kind of rhetoric is what drove me away from lefty thought 30 years ago. I never went back.

            You sound much like a young lady I knew a few years ago.

            She was standing with a group having a heated discussion and as I drew nearer I realized it was political. I tried to veer away to avoid it (I was at work and I don’t engage in politics at work) but she reached out to me and said, “Maybe you can help decide this. You’re liberal.”

            I smiled and politely said that I tended to lean right.

            The look on her face was absolute confusion. She shook her head and said, “What? But … you’re so nice….”

            Misconceptions. You’re full of them.

          • Peter Gorman

            Misconceptions are a two-way street.

  • bmmg39

    Danusha, I hope your health is better now. Illuminating article.

  • Bandit

    She forgot the lefts incessant conformity and sanctimony. There is zero tolerance of independent thought and the basis of. Their hatology is just based on giving themselves a sense of unwarranted moral superiority.

  • Finchy74

    Danusha, thank you for such a well written and dare I say, emotionally vulnerable article. We should all be so open about the mental roads we’ve travelled. And we should all be so open about the future roads we travel, both in what we say and how we think.

    Politically, I’m a small L libertarian. I have friends who are Democrats, most of which I would categorize as extremely left wing. I have friends who identify as Republicans that inhabit a fairly broad spectrum of political beliefs.

    I love my left wing friends dearly, but their lives are so myopic in contrast with my Republican friends. Their beliefs utterly and completely define what they do and who they are, and not in a noble fashion. My right wing friends have their beliefs, but don’t define themselves by them. They care about their partners, their children, their friends and their goals and everything is a distant second. There’s no nihilism, which I cannot say for my left wing friends.

    Danusha, I think you defined the difference between the two in a most elegant fashion. You’re either interested in building something you love or you’re interested in tearing down something you hate. The distinction between the two is stark.

    • Danusha Diane Goska

      Thanks.

  • PaulS47

    Living at ground zero for the Left for many years, I’ve seen that belief fueled by emotion and “good intentions” trump reality’s feedback.

  • L.B.

    I wish you all the best Danusha Goska! Since you are Catholic, a teacher and a former Leftist I recommend you read “School of Darkness” by Bella Dodd.

    Communism 101 in a nutshell – “We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed.”

  • Peter Gorman

    I’m sorry that the lefties he knew were apparently meanie-heads to him, and that he never checked out the kinds of “hate” that also appears in Right wing websites.

    If he had grown up with right-wingers he’d undoubtedly have a similar laundry list of uncomfortable moments and remarks. That being said, there is a behavior difference between members of the two parties. Conservatives win on personal niceness, formality, physical contact, eye contact, and social tact. They lose on their intolerant, or impliedly intolerant policies. It is strange that they are so polite in person but cannot extend that sort of behavior to people when they want a major bill passed.

    The writer wrongfully equates progressives to communism, maybe that made sense in the past but that is certainly not the face of the left. I don’t think he knew who he was when he was younger. Now that he’s older he has a more stringent fixation on personal niceness, personal responsibility (I don’t know why one can’t just advocate for that in a bipartisan manner is beyond me, it isn’t opposed by lefties, anywhere) and a healthy disrespect for anecdotal accounts of cities ruined by democratically run policies. Was Newark some kind of definitive way to prove being politically nice to everyone somehow ruined their city economically? How?

    It’s a rambling account. I feel sorry for the guy, I wish he had met me before he decided to write this sloppy mess.

    • PaulS47

      “anecdotal accounts of cities ruined by democratically run policies”

      Detroit, controlled by Democrats for over half a century, is not an anecdote. The over $22 trillion spent since 1964 on a War on Poverty sees poverty at similar levels today. In California, a state run by a supermajority of Democrats, Mammoth Lakes, Stockton, San Bernardino and Desert Hot Springs all declared bankruptcy. California and Illinois received the nation’s worst credit ratings and have the nation’s highest burden of unfunded public sector pension obligations.

      Meanwhile, a Republican governor in Wisconsin got the cost of government under control and saw a $3,600,000,000. deficit transformed into over $900,000,000. in surplus. The bottom line is that big government dependency politics can’t produce this kind of prosperity, because it’s a Take philosophy, not a Make strategy; it empowers and enriches the givers, not their dependents.

      “We measure success by how many people are no longer dependent on government.”
      Scott Walker
      4 November 2014

      Finally, I’m sorry you can’t appreciate that income redistribution is the essence of Marxism.

      • Peter Gorman

        Detroit is rather anomalous because of the huge shift from America as a manufacturing hub to America as a technology hub. Much of Detroit’s spending is on infrastructure that no one even occupies, such as roadwork and lamp posts for huge empty city blocks. This doesn’t minimize the problems of Detroit, but rather that they are more indicative of a nonpartisan economic turn.

        This is similar for places around the great lakes and Illinois, the loss of manufacturing industry has never been fully recovered from. Luckily GM was not allowed to fold up its tent or the problem would have been exasperated further (sorry just had to stick my little partisan dagger in there for a second). There are still many places that have been consistently worse off than the midwest, the south most notably, but also some of the appalachian states such as West Virginia, which has been hopelessly mired in povery for generations despite governance under “maker” politicians rather than “takers”. If one were to lump all the republican economic failures next to the dems, it’d probably be a fairly even pile. Nobody’s political guess on how the market will react is infallible.

        The attack on California’s economy is a more convincing issue, and you should explore this more, as California is almost a country unto itself and should, in better times, be a beacon for what the rest of the country does. While I would not attribute the problems they are facing to an overabundance of “entitlements” or a lack of productivity, or whatever conservatives think dems aren’t doing, there is clearly some problems that need to be addressed. I don’t know enough about their plight to give a valid response, but I am interested in that.

        “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” ~ Mahatma Ghandi

        Near identical sentiments also utilized by:

        Bill Federer
        Pearl S. Buck
        Dietrich Bonhoeffer
        Lord Acton
        Samuel Johnson
        Cardinal Roger Mahony
        Pope John Paul II

      • JeffreyRO55

        Not really buying that the decline of American manufacturing might is to be blamed on Democrats. Not much evidence that Democrats are to blame for jobs being shipped to China. If anything, it’s Republican-lead corporations insisting that consumers should value lowest price (and hence Asian-manufactured) goods over all else that could be the real problem.

    • Danusha Diane Goska

      She not he. A rather significant error on your part.

      • Peter Gorman

        Yeah I should’ve used an indefinite article as to gender, I wasn’t sure about it.

    • SJS

      You are the slime she’s talking about.

      • Peter Gorman

        If you were correct about your stances I suspect you wouldn’t feel a need to toss insults at strangers. Is this how you demonstrate the kindness of conservatism?

        • SJS

          Sir, I assure you, you re not worth my time.

          • Peter Gorman

            Of course not. But browse down a bit anyway, you might find some of my other discussions intriguing.

  • Peter Gorman

    Weird, I took the article as a sad account of a man who went from one unacceptable extreme (communist activist) to another unacceptable extreme (conservative sock puppet).

    • Dip

      That’s because your worldview is inherently negative. Plus, if you judge a mainstream conservative as being the right’s analogue to a communist activist, then it is also bat-shit crazy.

      • Peter Gorman

        There’s nothing inherently negative about lefty philosophy, or at least no more negative than the other guys. When was the last time you watched Fox news? Do they seem like a joyous bunch to you? Progressives are stuck with the thankless job of having to agitate for change/awareness, etc and that certainly rubs people the wrong way. Couple that with the loosey-goosey way in which lefty kids are raised and that means that you are more likely to hear from a rude lefty child than a polite but secretly terrified child of the right.

        If you want to say kids of the left are too rude and boorish, I might agree with that, but it’s unfair to extend that to the philosophy itself, which is about the celebration of all people and cultures. Furthermore, the values instilled for conservative kids are somewhat arbitrary and often hurtful. The left’s response is to decades of oppression that came out of the 1950′s regressive social movement towards total conformity. It’s an interesting social landscape, but I feel pity that this article writer swapped sides because she made the same mistake you are now, taking the isolated accounts of a few personal jerks to represent a whole party. This is called stereotyping. It’s that thing you guys pretend you don’t do anymore.

        • Dip

          @Peter Gorman: You won’t be surprised to know that I disagree with some of the basic premises in your response, but it was thoughtful and reasonable and I appreciate that you took the time to write it.

          I’d be truly interested in hearing more about how you define some of the left’s basic values, but I won’t drag you into that long discussion here. I will just say that your celebration of all people and cultures looks a lot like a sense of moral superiority and intolerance to me. That, combined with the left’s unquenchable thirst for more government in peoples’ lives and a “win at any cost” approach sets a trajectory that runs counter to a free society. In that light, and stepping back a bit from US domestic politics, it is no coincidence that history’s most murderous tyrants have been statist leftists.

          I think that your throwaway line at the end (about stereotyping) is grossly unfair. Casting conservatives and Republicans as racists is a despicable liable. This country, as great as it is, does not have a proud history when it comes to race. But the left in general, and the Democrats in particular, have been at the vanguard of racism from the country’s founding until today and Republicans have fought against them (and in favor of racial justice) the entire time. Yet, in true Orwellian fashion, they have flipped the accusation to shift responsibility for their dark past to conservatives and Republicans. And it’s a shameful lie.

          A brief vignette: I was listening to an NAACP meeting on CSPAN radio–John Lewis was there and he silently sat by as one of the moderators repeated the libelous charge that TEA Partiers shouted racial epithets at John Lewis, Maxine Waters, and others as they walked past. It has been proven (with contemporaneous video) that that incident did not happen, yet John Lewis sat quietly by and let the smear be repeated again. He knew it didn’t happen but he didn’t say anything as thousands of decent Americans with no racial animus were accused of such vile behavior. Because the ends justify the means. Win at any cost.

          So we just disagree. But I do appreciate the (mostly) respectful way that you made your case. I tried to follow your example here.

          • Peter Gorman

            Thanks for the civility of the response Dip, despite my jab at the end. To clarify I wasn’t making a claim about racism when I mentioned “stereotyping”, I actually intended the term in a broader sense, the taking of anecdotal accounts to somehow represent the entirety of the opposing party. Both sides do this to some extent, because it’s easy to get caught up in the tribal aspect of personifying unitary simplistic traits on one’s opponents. I’ll go over my thoughts on your points in the order you presented them. This post is far too long, but I hope it has some rewards within it.

            It certainly is difficult to encapsulate some of the
            positions that it has taken most of my life to have arrived at, and perhaps here is not the place to do so, but much of what I believe will probably peek through during the course of this post. One can look at the positions of the left towards minorities two ways: proponents see it as the continuing progress towards acknowledging the fallibility of humans towards one another and generating increasing levels of sympathy and understanding through temporary ameliorative measures and a steady increase of the quality of US citizen’s lives. Opponents see distended bills full of earmarked pork that hands out free lunches to the undeserving as either a shameless ploy to woo ignorant voters or as naïve paternalistic gobbledygook with no eye towards the economic sorrows that such measures could or would bring. It’s a little of both, because the Democratic party, like the republican party, is a huge umbrella that holds the best and brightest of the ideology as well as opportunistic fools. This broadness of the umbrella also means that I can only take your stance that dems would do anything, or say anything, in order to win, as a pointless argument because there are just as many instances of republican gamesmanship. I won’t go into the endless video clips of Fox news mixing up editorials with actual news broadcasts for reasons of brevity.

            Dems don’t have an “unquenchable thirst for more government’, as they do take strong stances against police state actions, and other “crackdown” measures that cast too wide a net and catch the wrong fish in the process. Granted this varies depending on the issue, such as gun rights, but one has to remember that there are pro-gun democratic candidates throughout the party, they just aren’t the majority opinion of late. Dems instead look at the expansion of the federal government (besides being inevitable because the modern era is incredibly complex in scope) as a way to fix inherent problems that are only slowly becoming visible in the modern era, usually civil rights, the environment, and the freer exchange of information or transparency (though this last issue can be somewhat bipartisan). Essentially stains on the carpet that weren’t cleaned because someone never lifted up the furniture to look, we interpret the conservative response as a curmudgeonly arm-folding that comes with anyone in a home who suddenly has to do a new chore they weren’t expected to do before. Dems cast their eye farther afield, not just to past societal wounds (the “victim” stance that is so detested by opponents) but also to the future. Science, invention, new forms of communication and understanding to increasingly shrink the world. So in this respect there is some truth in Danushka’s article, Dems generally do have less care for the present, living like mad scientists in disorganized houses; as compared to conservatives, who tend to savor the sweetness of the present more and delight in formality and personal affection, as well as honoring someone who has already done something. In this I personally think the ground-level humanity of conservatives are quite admirable and should be extended to my party, if possible. One has to understand that in the process of challenging the formalities of the past, doubt is cast on the reasoning behind much of the associated social graces as well.

            Your last point about the makeup of Republican policies is interesting, but is ultimately a bit of historical revisionism. The only way to explain why is to walk through the history a bit.

            Both parties were pretty racist, though the Republican party was less so for the first few decades of its existence. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, he was a third-party candidate that succeeded in part because the northern whigs would not abide the Kansas-Nebraska act that seemed to disrupt the Missouri Compromise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery states and they flocked to the new party. Lincoln emancipated the slaves, and his party passed the 14th amendment and the civil rights act of 1866. After that, both parties were fairly mum on civil rights for quite some time. Democrats of the time were small-government populists with a strong white, racist constituency. Then, beginning around 1910 the traditional stances of the Democratic party were overturned by an increasing need to cater to the desires of the newly inducted western states into the US. William Jennings Bryan changed the philosophy of the Democratic party (first only in rhetoric) by advocating for the intervention of the government into social issues. Republicans continued to advocate for big government on pro-business issues (this is the only party position that actually stayed consistent in the Republican party from its inception until today). FDR made good on Bryan’s rhetoric in the midst of the Great Depression with huge, sweeping social reforms, safeguards, standards, regulations, governmentally sponsored jobs, and much more. The strength of FDR’s positions essentially obliged Republicans to begin to take increasingly anti-government stances and antagonistic stances towards social reforms. Racists remained within both parties from the 1930’s until around the 1960’s, when the democratic platform finally and completely no longer represented the interests of white southerners. Southern states have been largely red ever since. Parties represent the interests and concerns of those who vote for and support them. So while outright racism was not the public platform of the Republican party, their opposition to social rights movements of women and minorities, claims that various problems are overstated or don’t exist at all, and “equality measures” meant to take something away from a group it felt undeserving have been hallmarks of the Republican party for the last fifty years. Present day dems do not identify in the least with their past incarnations, the party completely flipped stances and has never looked back.

            While I am supremely happy that there is increasing
            diversity and youth amongst today’s Republican party, these are recent developments. One cannot forget about the curious lack of representation of these interests in the party if Republicans truly were representatives of civil rights this entire time. The assertion that Republicans are subject to unfair smear campaigns on this matter are, unfortunately, false. Perhaps the rhetoric against them is too hyperbolic at times, but the facts are what they are. Here’s a few articles on the matter. The last one is an article that supports your position. Believe what you will, but it is unconvincing to objective scrutiny.

            http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/reversal2.pdf

            http://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html

            http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/edgeofthewest/2010/05/20/when-and-to-an-extent-why-did-the-parties-switch-places/

            http://freeplanetickettonorthkorea.tumblr.com/dixiecrat-myth

            As to your vignette, there isn’t much proof either way what John Lewis heard, but I’d agree that he probably misheard. Although note that signs in the crowd did mention death threats to healthcare supporters, but just not in a racist manner. I’m not inclined to believe that is much better, and I do not think the news reports were a conscious lie by anyone. It was a mistake. A counterexample might be when Fox news reported Obama and Michelle’s fist bump during their primary nomination as “a terrorist fist jab” as part of their list of possible interpretations of what a potential presidential candidate meant to convey to the world. Someone at their network wrote that down, the pundit then read the teleprompter without wincing or hesitating.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_vmQrTi3aM

            My point is cable news does not represent either party very well.

            While it’s a shame to end a well-meaning article on such a sour note, that’s where I have to leave it.
            (Also: apologies for the weird edit stream, but this thing ruined my margins so I had to go in by hand and correct it)

          • artfuldgr

            Dems
            don’t have an “unquenchable thirst for more government’, as they do take strong
            stances against police state actions, and other “crackdown” measures that cast
            too wide a net and catch the wrong fish in the process

            really? gun control is not a strong stance aginst a police state, its a strong stance FOR a police state. which is why it was a dem who asked to translate hitlers laws so they could copy them and use them here. Thomas J. Dodd (D-CT)

            you need to read more history… i am not going to spend the time, as your just going to call me names and other slights.

            those who come from the workers paradise have a better education in such matters than useful idiots such as yourself.

            you should learn more about FDR… and other dems

            “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s not a n*gger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a White man from dust, a n*gger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, Yellow men in Asia and White men in Europe and America.”

            -Harry Truman (1911) in a letter to his future wife Bess

            “You cannot go to a 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian Accent.” -Senator Joe Biden

            Mahatma Gandhi “ran a gas station down in Saint Louis.”
            -Senator Hillary Clinton

            “You’d find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they’d just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva.” — Fritz Hollings (D, S.C.)

            which senator was a grand leader of the KKK? oh yeah, democrat byrd..

            Blacks and Hispanics are “too busy eating watermelons and tacos” to learn how to read and write.” — Mike Wallace, CBS News

            “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.” — Former Klansman and US Senator Robert Byrd, a man who is referred to by many Democrats as the “conscience of the Senate”, in a letter written in 1944

            “I am a former kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County and the adjoining counties of the state …. The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia …. It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state of the Union. Will you please inform me as to the possibilities of rebuilding the Klan in the Realm of W. Va …. I hope that you will find it convenient to answer my letter in regards to future possibilities.” — Former Klansman and current US Senator Robert Byrd

            “These laws [segregation] are still constitutional and I promise you that until they are removed from the ordinance books of Birmingham and the statute books of Alabama, they will be enforced in Birmingham to the utmost of my ability and by all lawful means.” — Democrat Bull Connor (1957), Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, Alabama

            a lot of those quotes are half a century past the time you said they changed…

            “I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” — Lyndon B. Johnson to two governors on Air Force One according Ronald Kessler’s Book, “Inside The White House”.

            “Jews — that’s J-E-W-S.” — Democratic state representative Bill McKinney on why his daughter Cynthia lost in 2002

            back to FDR

            FDR’s New Deal pretty much completely ignored and neglected Black individuals. 50% of Blacks were unemployed (compared to a high point of slightly over 20% of the nation as a whole). 65% of Blacks who were allowed to continue working were domestic or agriculture workers. The Social Security Act did not cover these jobs. Wages for Blacks were three times less than for Whites during the 1930s. “Black jobs” became “White jobs.” New Deal recovery programs were generally limited to
            Whites. And FDR had no desire to challenge segregation.

            With Executive Order 9066, FDR authorized en masse discrimination against Japanese Americans. The Department of War initially ordered all Japanese Americans living on the west coast to leave immediately. Relocation was not possible because of rampant discrimination around the nation. Idaho’s governor declared: “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats. We don’t want them. Ultimately, voluntary measures failed and over 100,000 Japanese
            Americans were forced to live in internment camps. While these were no
            where near as inhumane as the death camps in Germany, these camps
            (sometimes called concentration camps) were surrounded by barbed wire
            and provided vastly inadequate food, shelter, schools, and medical care.

            In the 26 major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80 percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of the votes.

            it was the dems that opposed civil rights legislation. shall i list out who did vote for it?

            your just a troll… ignorant troll at that…

        • artfuldgr

          Then you actually dont know lefty philosophy… its the left that wants revolution… thats negative… it was the left that used the gillotine, till they murdered how many, including their own? it was hitler who murdered those who would not change their culture… it was the left in russia, china, and other places that murdered millions of their own by starvation, working them to death, and more… the left who champions abortion… its the left who thinks eugenics is great… it was the left that invented the holocaust (except that engels called it a conflagration). the leftists are not discussing post birth abortions (infanticide). they are the ones that champion forced sterlization, including today (see gruber quotes). it was trotsky who invented the term racism to describe the slavic people who loved their way of life, and would not give it up and so were slavophiles, racists…

          by the way… my family is from the workers paradise…
          i have read more leftist philosophy than you ever will.

          did you know that the man who designed the final solution wrote for margeret sangers birth control review? that hitler praised her? that social justice was the name of a newletter paper that the anti semite priest father coughlin published?

          it was the founder of the fabians, a very leftist thing, that invented the gas chambers… his name was George Barnard shaw… you can see him talk about it on film, not to mention his comment that peoplel like you and me should stand before a tribunal every five years and justify our existence (or guess what).

          the most polluted places on the planet are run by the left… (see chinese cities and things like russian norilsk nickel)

        • artfuldgr

          The left’s response is to decades of oppression that came out of the 1950′s regressive social movement towards total conformity.

          you mean that the leftist democrats werent the bull dozers? that they did not murder blacks to get them to stop voting radical republican? that during hayes tilden they sided with the knights of the white camelia and murdered hundreds of blacks. that the left was on the side of white man union.. it was the left that roused the long shormen to murder blacks in ny as part of the draft riots and force them out of business and to the north in harlem… then there was sanger who said her neg ro project was to exterminate blacks. that she hated chinese the way the left hates them today, trying to prevent their being educated in favor of less able ‘races’.

          your quite ignorant of actual history…

          Bull Connor was a democrat…
          George Wallace was a Democrat also

          the CPUSA stopped putting up comminists for president saying that they could not distinguish their party platform from the democrats.

          and remember, the left fights always for a DICTATORSHIP, not a free state..

  • soupcity

    Thank you. Well written and spot on. This used to be me. Your evolution shows growth in every way as a human being. Bravo.

  • JeffreyRO55

    I found this caricature of a leftist amusing. No less amusing than caricatures of rightists.

  • richard40

    Great article, you nailed the numerous pathologies of the left perfectly. I have taken to making a distinction between old time FDR era liberals, and todays leftists:
    1. Liberals used to be for the white working class guy, todays leftists hate them.
    2. Liberals used to believe in civil liberties, free speech, and due process, todays leftists only believe in those things for other leftists.
    3. Liberals used to do good things for poor people, leftists talk about doing good things for poor people, but never actually do, other than keeping them dependent on the leftists.
    4. Liberals used to talk about love, leftists talk about hate.
    5, Liberals used to strive for justice, leftists strive for social justice, which is not just, and not very social.
    6. Liberals believed in education, leftists believe in indoctrination.
    7. Liberals used to want to provide opportunity and upward mobility. Leftists tell people why the evils of America ensure nobody can ever get opportunity and upward mobility.

  • akulkis

    Oh god, Yet Another Woman who can’t understand the concept of a generalization, and how the rare exception does NOT disprove the general rule.

    Seriously, NAWALT (Not All Women Are Like That) is getting old, tiresome, and in fact, it’s just a downright rude attempt to sidetrack a discussion.

    So, unless you have something constructive and pertinent to add to the discussion, sit down and shut up.

    • artfuldgr

      The exception proves the rule… otherwise, what is it then an exception to?

  • maxomai

    “I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant
    leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing,
    sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip.
    Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I
    never saw it.”

    http://bit.ly/1xdS3Kb

  • Jesse

    This is pure conservative clickbait, seriously, this reads like verbatim conservative talking points about liberals. The author was never a leftist, the “facts” about liberals in this article are provably and demonstrably false. I’ll also add that this comments section is being edited to remove dissenting views. We’ll see how long this post lasts.

  • Jesse

    Shocker, my comment was deleted. Conservatives who don’t allow dissent… hmm what might that be called?

    Whoever is moderating this comment thread, kindly go fuck yourself.

    Hugs & Kisses.

  • Fraga123

    “A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.”

  • spiderbucket

    Me too. First time GOP voter since I started in the 1984 election. The intolerance, censorship, denials, conspiracy theories, race-baiting, cultural appropriation, white privilege, rape culture, etc. – it all changed my views.

  • Danusha Diane Goska

    ” I’m surprised a man of your obvious intelligence”

    I’m not a man.

  • AlexCristo

    There is no question, no doubt in my mind after years of perusing great publications in North America, time spent in University, debating and discussing about politics, history and life in general with people of all walks of life; that the most optimistic, introspective, and interesting people with a knack for abstract thought generally always ended up being a libertarian (classical liberal) or conservative or independent free-thinkers. Few were left-wing. The “liberals” and progressives in university were angry, myopic, whiny, and smug to the point of being insufferable often not offering, when it came down to it, anything of substance. It was all vapid and superficial ‘catch phrases.’

  • Harley Waddell

    I am not a liberal. I am a libertarian, which still means that I agree with not much on this website generally speaking.

    I
    do agree with much of this article, but I take issue with part of the
    last reason. Specially the one about the split in the atheist movement. I
    believe this is mischaracterized by the author. I can explain as I have
    followed it from the start.

    There was a small split in
    the atheist movement several years ago when a woman named Rebecca
    Watson made a big deal about an incident where a man asked her out. What
    happened was a number of people at an atheism conference were out
    drinking at a hotel bar and when Rebecca Watson left at around 4AM a man
    was in the elevator with her and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way,
    but I heard you speaking and I find you really interesting. Would you
    like to go back to my room and maybe have coffee?”, Watson declined and
    the guy said okay and that was it. Now, that is Rebecca Watson’s own
    account of the event. This isn’t me downplaying anything or toning down
    what he said to her. Watson mentioned in video she thought it was creepy
    and in a number of other speeches she kept bringing up the incident and
    how it illustrated how much sexual harassment she faced. A number of
    prominent atheists made fun of her (Richard Dawkins being the most
    notable) for turning a guy politely asking her out into a harrowing
    ordeal. The Feminists and Progressives in the atheist movement lashed
    out and said they were creating a new movement called “Atheism Plus” or
    A+heism which meant they were atheists plus Feminists and progressives.
    The explicit goal was to change the focus of atheist movement from
    skepticism, freethought, discussion of relligion, and so on to
    specifically about Feminism, Social Justice, and political correctness
    and to purge the atheist movement of libertarians, conservatives, and
    most liberals. Yes, the leaders of Atheism Plus specifically targeted
    liberals as targets of their attempted purge.

    Their
    argument was that the existing atheist movement was filled with misogyny
    and racism and so on. So they ended up looking up the posts and videos
    and writings of the critics of Atheism Plus to make their argument. That
    is where those Rape Baiting lines come from. They were written by a
    YouTube personality known as “The Amazing Atheist” and they were written
    I think it was well over ten years ago. The Amazing Atheist admitted to
    making those posts, explained why he made them, and apologized for some
    of his comments. What happened was he made a post on a forum (I think
    it was Reddit) where he said he never understood why people say rape is
    worse than murder because that is like saying you would rather have a
    loved one die a horrible death than put up with a horrible assault. He
    also said the term “Rape Survivor” is a BS term because “It’s not like
    he raped you with a chainsaw”. He admitted that his first argument was a
    little simplistic and his attempt at humor in regards to “Rape
    Survivor” was in very bad taste and he apologized for it on both the
    video and later on that thread. What ended up happening was a woman
    claiming to be a rape victim took issue with his statement and ended up
    harassing and insulting and threatening him over the course of several
    days. He said there were a number of victims of rape that did make him
    see things different in that thread, but this one woman took it
    extremely personally and started saying that she wished his wife would
    get raped, wished that his children would get raped and murdered in
    front of him, that he should kill himself, that she hoped he would be
    convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and get raped in prison and so on.
    He attempted to apologize to her several times, but that just got her
    angrier and he eventually responded with comments mentioned in the final
    reason. He even explained that his full quote was, “The guy who raped
    you should have got a medal because he is the only person who could
    stand being around you”

    The Amazing Atheist said that
    he should have not made those comments, but if she gets a pass for
    saying some extremely ugly things (including advocating the rape of his
    children who had nothing to do with anything he said) that he should at
    least be given some leeway with his responses and the fact that it was a
    10 year old argument taken out of context to prove his existing
    misogyny.

    The reason why I find it ironic is because the whole incident is not so much a response to misogyny
    in the atheist movement, but a bunch of ultra-left activists who left
    the mainstream atheist movement because it was not left-wing enough and a
    conservative writer is taking their side.

  • andrewsc

    Most lefties I know have retreated into sour isolation, as fellow countrymen turned against Left here in Australia. I’m glad to read about the intellectual journey of a person who found the inner resources to see beyond the hatred. Congratulations!

  • seantulien

    Really? My impression of right-winged folks is that they seem to think they’ve got the inside track to special, secret knowledge that others aren’t smart enough or capable of understanding. Meanwhile your representation of “leftists” is so laughably skewed that anyone who values objectivity will immediately identify this piece as a circlejerk for conservatives. They’ll thank you for the talking points and pat each other on the back for being “right.” Rhetoric without reasoning.

    Everybody wants to pick a side and confirm their beliefs; the firmness of your conviction does not bolster the accuracy of your beliefs.

  • http://schnitzelrepublic.blogspot.de/ Ripley

    Thank you….one of the top ten essays of the year, and blunt to the point.