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May 22, 2005
"Think Kafka, Without The Bug."
I'm often utterly baffled by how the "progressives" continue to support the cause of dictators whose record of oppression and murder is beyond any reasonable doubt. And it is most gratifying when one hears of a brave soul who succumbs to empirical evidence, summons his courage and renounces his heartfelt convictions.
The Ten O'Clock Scholar focuses on just such a person: writer Keith Thompson explains in an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle how he came to leave the left, or rather how the left left him. Thompson writes of his metamorphosis ("Think Kafka, without the bug."):
My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.
A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.
All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.
Powerful stuff--the whole article is a equally as good. And Ten O'Clock Scholar adds:
It is precisely people like this that I look to as the vanguard of reform of the Democrats, in order to present a reasoned, loyal, and USEFUL opposition to the Republicans, because one-party rule is no nirvana.
Although I haven't yet laid it out in writing, this point is one of the primary ideas underlying this blog, and indeed my current sense of the political situation: Intellectual honesty demands support of basic human freedoms and rights. The Democrats, by allowing themselves to be hijacked by the anti-freedom, marxist-based left, have abrogated their vital role as one of the parties in our time-tested two party system.
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