The trouble with the left
PAUL GREENBERG
The trouble with the left in American politics is that its first, instinctive resort
is to power rather than persuasion, to government rather than to liberty.
The trouble with the left is that it has fallen out of love with freedom.
The trouble with the left is that it has grown more interested in security
than liberty, and so risks both.
The trouble with the left is that it has come to believe in privileged classes
based on sex, race, and class. Wasn't that the problem with the right?
The trouble with the left is that it has confused fairness with political
correctness, and dialogue with rigged conversations. See the "national
conversation on race."
The trouble with the left is that, like the right, it confuses civility with
manners alone, not realizing that civility is the end, not just the means, of civil
society.
The trouble with the left is that it values civility mainly in the right.
The trouble with the left is that it can win only by ducking behind the
slogans of the right. ("The era of big government is over."--Bill Clinton)
The trouble with the left is that it represents a politics that no longer dares
say its name: liberal.
The trouble with the left is that, having managed to make Liberal a bad
word, it is now working on Choice.
The trouble with the left is that it has come to prefer power and patronage
to principle.
The trouble with the left is that it hasn't re-examined its basic premises in
decades. Instead, it stays busy trying to market them under more appealing
names.
The trouble with the left that it has lost its sense of humor. It confuses
sarcasm with wit, and bitterness with a cause. But that's the trouble with the
right, too.
The trouble with the left is that it has confused schooling with education,
spending with learning, and unionism with the teaching profession. What
more is there to say of a political philosophy that figures its best bet is to
dumb down the next generation?
The trouble with the left is that it has confused civility with the absence of
disagreement rather than a way to make it fair, productive, and interesting.
The trouble with the left is that it has lost touch with its religious roots and
rhetoric, and therefore with the faith that any political creed must depend on
in the end. (Recommended reading: Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats,
or Martin Luther King's sermons. One is struck, again, by their religious
imagery. Indeed, their religious substance.)
The trouble with the left is that it has grown tone-deaf to words and
therefore to meaning. If the right misuses words, the left avoids any
meaningful ones, substituting euphemism, doublespeak, and other
non-language. See the history of the term, Affirmative Action, and how its
definition went from broadening opportunity to imposing quotas. The right
respects words enough to hurl them like pointed objects; the left may only
shuffle them about, the way the wind does sand dunes, obliterating meaning.
The trouble with the left is that it is ideologically dead, and so has to
substitute reflexes for thought.
The trouble with the left is that it has a surplus of sentiment and a shortage
of common sense.
The trouble with the left is that its sense of compassion tends to be
confined to the abstract. The left loves The People, but it doesn't have much
use for the working stiff who's being taxed to death. It would rather have the
government spend his money rather than let him do it; he'd probably only
waste it on himself and his family.
The trouble with the left is that it is economically illiterate--and, worse, is
tempted to take pride in that handicap.
The trouble with the left is that, being intellectually bankrupt, it has had to
substitute moderation and maneuver for a program.
The trouble with the left is that it has run out of ideas and has decided to
settle for causes.
The trouble with the left is its addiction to victimization.
The trouble with the left is that it has come to see its basic constituency as
the poor, and is determined to enlarge and solidify its constituency.
The trouble with the left is that it hasn't had a new idea since the New
Deal and its pale imitations. The Fair Deal and the Great Society were only
repeats, and now the left has been reduced to instantly forgettable slogans
like the New Covenant.
The trouble with the left is that it cannot abide prosperity even when it can
take the credit for some.
The trouble with the left is that it has been so fortunate in its choice of
opponents that it is always flustered when it encounters a competent one.
The trouble with the left is that it overestimates its intelligence, and so
invites hubris.
And yet, even though liberal has been made a bad word, mainly by the
purblind policies liberals have supported, what is American conservatism but
a defense of a liberal revolution and a liberal tradition? For without a feudal
past--a monarchy and nobility, an established church--what else does
American conservatism have to conserve?
In America, the New World, both left and right revere the Constitution,
however differently they may construe it. Unlike the French or the Russians,
we're not still fighting over whether our revolution was justified. Here both
conservatives and liberals can identify with it. The classical liberalism of the
Founding Fathers with their belief in an ordered liberty should be every
American's heritage. What a pity today's liberalism has confused and
obscured it.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize- winning editorial page editor of
the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
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