Seeker Blog

Neo-Neocon has written a very thoughtful, useful piece on the philosophy observed in today’s liberal left (ranging from the Hard Left to the Soft Left). If you are puzzled and dismayed that a class bearing the label “liberal” has come to be allied with 21st century Islamo-fascism, then read on:

Most liberals and those on both the soft and hard left have acquired an attitude of great cynicism and distrust towards their own country and the motives of its politicians. This has led them to have a virtually automatic assumption that the government (especially any Republican government) is guilty until proven innocent. Motivated by this belief, which is held as an article of faith, most on the liberal/left side of things totally discount all the rhetoric of the Bush Administration as just that–rhetoric–and believe that the real motivation for the war is greed and power, rather than freedom and democracy.

This belief system of distrust (the template of which was formed, for a great many people of Sheehan’s generation and older, during the Vietnam and Watergate eras) is the operative one for most liberals and soft leftists, rather than any real antipathy towards the concepts of freedom and democracy themselves. The government (again, most particularly Republican governments) is not seen as allied with those abstract notions, but as deviously and clandestinely antagonistic to them, and thus betraying them.

Of course, there are some, mostly on the far left, who really don’t believe in freedom and democracy. But it’s not my impression that they constitute the majority of the opposition, although they may at times be the ones pulling the strings, and the ones most in the media (I’m not yet clear whether Cindy Sheehan is one of them, or is simply someone whose strings they are pulling at the moment).

In addition to this distrust of the government and its motives, there seems to be a knee-jerk negativity towards military action in general on the part of many liberals. Most people–even on the right–tend to see military action as a last resort; but those on the right regard the military as a necessary and integral part of keeping us free, rather than an incidental one. How is it that liberals, on the other hand, can believe (or believe they believe) in freedom and democracy, and be so reluctant to fight for it?

In addition to the aforementioned distrust that freedom and democracy are what we are fighting for, I think that many liberals have a sort of a blindness to the way that freedom and democracy actually work. The hard truth of the famous quote (often attributed to Orwell but whose origins are actually unclear), “Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf,” is one most liberals and leftists, as well as all pacifists, would prefer to deny–too messy, tragic, sad, and morally compromising. The quote is, once again, considered to be “mere rhetoric”–and inflammatory, bloodthirsty rhetoric, at that.

What is the sort of war a hard leftist might support, if a leftist was going to support a war? Again, the answer flows from distrust of our government (and in the case of hard leftists, the west in general), so the answer is pretty simple: any war waged by a third-world nation against a Western one, especially the US or Israel, with the leftists taking the side of the third-world nation.

But a liberal is different; liberals sometimes support US military action, provided it is waged by a Democratic administration (inherently more trusted by liberals to be telling the truth about its motivations for the war) and is waged for strictly and solely humanitarian aims, and thus presenting less messy moral ambiguity.