From my perspective on the right I see three broad categories of leftist opposition. I believe the same three categories exist on the right from the perspective of someone on the other side.
I'm having a hard time understanding your argument. Your first category of principled opposition consists, I gather, of people you know, who don't share your views; the second category appears to consist of people you don't know who don't share your views. Would it be fair to say that if your wife disagrees with you about global warming, that's principled opposition, but if someone on this board does so, it's "looney left."
That's the first problem with the categories. The second is that you get awfully close to saying anyone who disagrees with you, from what you consider a "left" perspective, is part of the looney left. Let's take global warming as an illustration. The overwhelming accumulation of evidence is that global warming is occurring and human activities contribute, rather heavily, to it. Do you consider all that scientific evidence, "looney?"
The third problem with your categories is that, while you offer a slight phrase to say you think they characterize both right and left, you apparently only see them on the left. Thus, the phrasing of right and left looks gratuitous.
I assume you are serious about this. If so, it would be interesting to continue this conversation. My own view is that there are sins across the spectrum of political views (I have a hard time with the right-left distinction but will use it for short hand purposes), but those sins are human sins not ones derived from political views.
To illustrate that ever so slightly, I find folk with rigid commitments to ideological points of view to largely be very rigid in their approach to life. So it's a psychological predisposition well before it's a political point of view. |
