The Left Has Lost Its' Moral Compass

Townhall.com | 10/28/2002 | John Leo

[JimRed]

Everywhere you turn these days, someone on the left is denouncing President Bush as Hitler, Satan, a terrorist or a tyrannical emperor. A Yale law professor said Bush is "the most dangerous man on Earth." A famous editor referred to Bush as "a lawn jockey" and "Pinocchio."

Some of the angry rhetoric flirts with the fringe idea that the United States planned the terrorist attacks. A Purdue professor said "there is no ground to be certain" that America and Israel aren't behind the 9/11 attacks. A Columbia law professor compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany -- Bush is not responsible for 9/11, he said, but he exploited a national disaster to suspend civil liberties, just like Hitler. A Berkeley professor helpfully pointed out that some Indonesian groups think the U.S. planned the Bali bombing.

The rhetoric accurately reflects the current condition of much of the left -- bitter, stymied, alienated, politically impotent, full of loathing for America and the West, and totally unable to address the crisis wrought by 9/11, except to imply (or say) that the U.S. deserved to be attacked.

The left has lost its bearings, Michael Walzer, the political philosopher, wrote in the spring issue of Dissent, the leftist magazine he edits. His article, "Can There Be a Decent Left?" deplored "the barely concealed glee" of the left's reaction to 9/11, and the lack of "any visible concern" about how to prevent terrorism in the future.

"Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens," he wrote, "refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as politically incorrect. That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of Sept. 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed."

The favorite posture of many American leftists, Walzer said, is "standing as a righteous minority, brave and determined, amid the timid, the corrupt and the wicked. A posture like that ensures at once the moral superiority of the left and its political failure." He said the left needs to discard its "ragtag Marxism" and its belief that America is corrupt beyond remedy.

Solidarity with people in trouble is the most profound commitment that leftists make, he wrote, but even the oppressed have obligations, and one is to avoid murdering innocent people. "Leftists who cannot insist on this point, even to people poorer and weaker than themselves, have abandoned both politics and morality for something else."

An example of that abandonment came two weeks ago (EDITOR: Oct. 12-14) at the University of Michigan's pro-Palestinian conference, which could not bring itself to criticize suicide bombings. Save us from moral appeals that leave room for blowing up families in supermarkets.

Journalist Christopher Hitchens caused a bigger hubbub than Walzer when he resigned from The Nation magazine after 20 years, citing its anti-war stance on Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote in his farewell column, is "a filthy menace" and "there is not the least doubt that he has acquired some of the means of genocide and hopes to collect some more." He thought The Nation had become "the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."

In another article, Hitchens wrote: "I can only hint at how much I despise a left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist. ... Instead of internationalism, we find among the left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism" and "a masochistic refusal to admit that our own civil society has any merit."

Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer said Hitchens' departure from The Nation was sad because he "forced a lot of people on the left to confront their blind spot, their on-bended-knee obeisance to anyone in the Third World who posed as a 'liberator,' from Mao to Castro to Arafat and the Taliban."

Rosenbaum's comments came in an article on his own defection, "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove me to Flee." One trigger: a well-respected academic said he welcomed 9/11 because it gave Americans a chance to reassess their past honestly, as Germans did in the 1960s. "I couldn't take it any more," Rosenbaum wrote. "Goodbye to all that ... the inability to distinguish between America's sporadic blundering depredations" and Hitler's Germany. Goodbye, he said, to the refusal to admit that "Marxist genocides" slaughtered some 20 million to 50 million people in Russia, China and Cambodia. And goodbye to the "peace marches" like the one in Madrid where women wore suicide-bomber belts as bikinis. "'Peace' somehow doesn't exclude blowing up Jewish children," Rosenbaum wrote.

We owe a debt to Walzer, Hitchens and Rosenbaum. Now will they make any difference to our hyperalienated left?

©2002 Universal Press Syndicate

[Andy from Beaverton]

They need to remove the magnet placed South of the compass by teachers, lawyers and unions.

[mc5cents]

Good quote. Sir Alex went on to say this:

"The world's greatest civilizations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complaacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back to bondage."

[KarlInOhio]

Here's just ONE indication of how much things have changed:

"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which has historically proved to be always possible." Senator Hubert Humphery (D- Minnesota)

The difference is that 30-40 years ago the left saw tyranny and arbitrary government as a remote possibility. Now they see that it is in their grasp.

[KeyBored]

We're witnessing a total meltdown of the Left. But while they don't presently have the House of Representatives or the White House, they still wield plenty of power. And like a cornered bear, they can still do plenty of damage to what's left of our Republic.

Limbaugh says the the left "does funny things" when they are out of power (i.e. when they don't have the White House). Well Rush you'll have to excuse me if I don't laugh along with you.

I don't find people who's goal is a society modelled after Cuba to be in the least bit funny.

[Dick Bachert]

Yes. And to have their statist/elitist way with the great unwashed (that's US!), we must be disarmed lest the mortality rate of our would-be masters increase alarmingly.

The road to their idiotic socialist utopian paradise is far too dangerous with an ARMED POPULACE!

[Jabba the Nutt]

Left and Right are terms that go back to the French Parliament in the years after Napoleon. At that time, The Left meant Laissez-Faire Liberals, ie libertarians. The Right were the reactionaries, who wanted to re-install the Monarchy and the old feudal regime. They opposed business, they opposed the free market and they opposed free speech.

In the 1840's the socialists insisted on being seated on the left, indeed the far left. They appropriated the moral stature of the pro-freedom folks.

The Left actually smashed any moral compass they had at exactly the time they adopted socialism. Socialism had to enslave people in order for it to work. They always maintained their claim to moral superiority and the Right ceded that claim out of stupidity and cowardice. Gee, that sounds just like Trent Lott. Nothing much as changed.

Ayn Rand was for me the first anti-leftist, who challenged their claim to morality and sought to reclaim morality for the pro-freedom folks. She insisted on the importance of arguing for the morality and not only pragmatically.

[Lilly]

"The Left has lost it's moral compass"

..um, you gotta have it to lose it.

Since Lefties don't obey the Lord Jesus, and there is no morality outside of God's Word, they're living in their own delusions, deceiving and being deceived.

[Roscoe]

"-- bitter, stymied, alienated, politically impotent, full of loathing for America and the West, and totally unable to address the crisis wrought by 9/11, except to imply (or say) that the U.S. deserved to be attacked."

Several of those on FR, sad to say.

[retiredtexan]

You are as full of it as the rest of the democraps.

[Noumenon]

The Left actually smashed any moral compass they had at exactly the time they adopted socialism. Socialism had to enslave people in order for it to work. They always maintained their claim to moral superiority and the Right ceded that claim out of stupidity and cowardice.

Precisely.

[paul51]

internal aliens = fifth column

[Billthedrill]

There are any number of persons on the left that have maintained their moral compass, notably those, such as Hitchens and Rosenbaum, who have discovered that it won't do to define your politics by reflexive opposition to what you have defined as the "other side." The tendency here is to reduce politics to an easy-to-comprehend shorthand: "there is evil in the status quo, I'm against evil, so I'm for changing the status quo. Those not for changing the status quo are so because they support evil." It is a child's argument, and its currency is due to a profoundly anti-intellectual tendency on the left and a propensity for mass appeal by dumbing-down. Change "evil" in the above credo to "class self-interest" and you have the totality of the postmodern roots of current leftist doctrine - something so oversimplified it would gag even Marx. Theorists love it.

[Nebr FAL owner]

You are correct that the political left in this country is having something akin to a nervous breakdown ,and you are also correct that since they are "wounded" they in fact are even more dangerous . Give it a couple of years & a few more terrorist incidents say a suicide bomber at a mall a week or so before Christmas the peoples reaction will be one thing the political leftist reaction wll be just the oppisite & the use of violence against political opponents will not be beyond the left.

[Charles Martel]

How can you lose something that you deliberately threw away 30 years ago?

Exactly. This bit of "news" reminds me of those letters that occasionally are delivered by the USPS - decades after being postmarked.

[John Lenin]

Gee, can you tell me when the last time the left even had a moral compass ?

[lonestar]

Lost their moral compass? How do you lose what you've never had?

[RipSawyer]

Humphrey and McGovern, the wild-eyed radicals of their day, now they seem like such well-mannered guardians of the constitution by comparison with today's nutcases of the Demoncrap party.

[RipSawyer]

If old Hubert were still around he would probably switch to the Republican party.

[Lancey Howard]

"...with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship."

Which is why the 1st and 2nd amendments are the 1st and 2nd amendments, and why protecting them from the onslaught of the Democrat Party and their scumbag allies on the left and in the press is the most critical element of this nation's ongoing culture war.

Regards,
LH