Leaving the Left: Moments in the News That Made Me Ashamed to Be a Liberal

Keith Thompson began his political career as a liberal. Back in the early 70s, he saw that it was a great time to espouse liberal causes, especially when Richard Nixon was the prototypical anti-liberal. But somewhere in between the Sandinistas blowing up churches in Nicaragua and Iraqis waving purpled fingers in death-defying elections, Thompson had a philosophical change of heart. In LEAVING THE LEFT, he details the evolution of a twenty year personal voyage of self that caused him to re-evaluate his stands on diversity, compassion, inclusion, tolerance, fairness, and equality. Thompson grew disenchanted with the very same causes that used to bind him to the Left. Where race had formerly been a marker used to change society for what he had believed was the common good, he now sees affirmative action policies as counter productive in ways that he had never seen but now bother him as intrusions on the original intent and meaning of the constitution. He uses a biblical metaphor to illustrate how two sentient beings must have reacted at the Big Bang creation of the universe. The conservative being would look at the inchoate chaos and say, "What a remarkable place--how can I participate?" The liberal being would say, "This looks rigged, whom can I sue?" This is Thompson's way to express two incompatible worldviews, with the former "teeming with opportunity" and the latter as a "world made up of undeserved inequalities to be remedied." (Page 13) Thompson views feminism as a catch-all philosophy that cries out for far more than equal pay for equal work. Instead, he notes that feminists become enraged when they are told that "oppressive" restrictions are concretized by a patriarchal hegemony (which gets them angry anyway) rather than by biological limitations (which gets them angrier still). Thus, according to feminists, whatever holds back women can never be due to immutable laws of DNA but rather must continually point toward male-dominant brutality. Thompson also grows upset when feminists excuse female on female abuse as nothing more than the "aggressor female taking on the dominator male role, while the victim is assuming the posture that our society demands of the female role, namely victim status." Thompson accuses the Left of outright fraud and lies in other hot-button areas such as the Clarence Thomas vs. Anita Hill televised lynching of Thomas' Supreme Court nomination hearing. What becomes clear after reading how the Left blamed America for 9/11 or defends the right to abort fetuses even in the last trimester is a world view that has not changed since Thompson's hypothetical first meeting of sentient creatures at the Big Bang. Conservatives now as at the Moment of Creation think of justice and equality as works in progress to be aimed for but probably never achieved. Leftists might view them as pre-existing concepts that need no more than legislative fiat to guarantee a redistribution of wealth to transform these attrib

For those of you who do not know, Keith Thompson's first draft or "Leaving the Left" was a column in the San Francisco chronicle (easily found on your favorite search engine). I thoroughly enjoyed the original essay. I printed it out, read it to my wife, forwarded it to friends. A copy of it has set on my desk for the better part of two years - mostly in the way, but also as a reminder of my own personal journey away from the Democrats (my first 4 votes in any sort of Presidential race were proud votes for Jesse Jackson, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas and Bill Clinton). Really, though, it's not so much that I've moved from them as they have moved from some of their core values to new core values. Political parties, like people, evolve in their thoughts. Keith Thompson, like many others, discovered that the political party of his youth had become something different. (Can you imagine Harry Truman working better with John Kerry or George W. Bush?) Thompson describes the values of his youth, how they mathched up with Democratic Party policies and positions and then tells how he believes the Democrats have moved away from those policies. His assertion is that he is still a liberal, but not liberal with a capital "L". Rather, he is a traditional political liberal, the type of liberal that Adams, Jefferson, Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers were. (If you do not know the difference, write your college poli-sci professors a nasty note for neglecting your education - you paid a fortune for it, they should have done a better job! - and then start brushing up on the political philosophies of the Enlightenment.) Thompson's book is an elaboration on his original essay. I think it would have been better if Thompson had included his original essay as a starting point, but he does quote from it in an unnecessary picture section in the middle of the book. His 10 chapters cover a variety of topics: 1. Affirmative Action; 2. Eminent Domain; 3. Neo-Feminism; 4. Clarence Thomas; 5. Abortion; 6. Bill Clinton's Perjury; 7. Columbine; 8. the Extreme Left's reaction to 9/11; 9. Displaced Dads (fathers in divorce); 10. Euthanasia. Some chapters are very strong (Clarence Thomas, 9/11, Eminent Domain and Affirmative Action) but others feel hurried and underdeveloped - almost like the publisher thought the book was too short and asked him to add a couple of more chapters in a hurry (Euthanasia, Displaced Dads). For example, the Euthanasia chapter focuses on Terry Schiavo but does not include a backstory explaining the situation. I give the book a grade of B-. Mostly good, but there are weak spots, especially towards the end. It leaves a poor impression - especially when the start was so strong. But, I do heartily recommend reading his original column. If you love it, you'll like this book.

One of the strangest notions in our political system is that the parties "Stand for Something". No. They don't. They are large competitive organizations that are working hard to gather 50.1% of the voters to their side. So, they present "positions" that they believe will get them to that number. Sure, some of the politicians believe in the causes they espouse just as some actors actually believe the ethos behind the lines their character says. But it isn't a requirement. What is required is to get your audience to believe in what you say and believe in it so much that they get out and vote for your position. This competition is not just between the parties, but also within the parties. Whatever the strong issues of the day are requires that the parties adapt and evolve into positions that matter to the electorate of that election. In order to be credible, the parties tend to hold the same (or mostly the same) positions over time. But if you look over time, you can see that our two party system has had our parties hold seemingly opposite positions to what they hold today. And both of our parties try to smear the present party for those past positions. This changing and adapting over time will also find some portion of the electorate finding themselves outside the current positions of their party, and so they change. Or they become energized to motivate some kind of change within the party. Keith Thompson is a journalist who now lives in San Francisco. He began his political life in the Democrat camp largely because of his environmental passions. This led him to be a delegate for George McGovern in 1972. Later, Thompson was a staffer for Senator Howard Metzenbaum. Then he began to see how politics begins to work up close. This book takes us through ten big media events and their related fallout that moved him, slowly, from being a liberal (never a radical) to being a liberal in the classical sense. He eschews the term conservative, but rather hangs on to the term liberal in its classical sense. While he doesn't recount the change of the term over the decades in American political life, it is indeed true that what is called conservative in politics today was actually the original liberal (not left wing) position in the past century and half. It was the rise of socialism and other left wing ideologies in American political life and the terms they co-opted in order to dress themselves in acceptable clothes that required the change of terminology to distinguish political groups sufficiently. But that is another story. The point is that his maintaining and emphasizing that he is still a "liberal" (classical liberal) makes clear the kind of change and evolution I described in opening this review. It is possible to find yourself in a different camp without even moving your feet. Thompson starts with the need to end affirmative action, the injustice of seizing private property simply because some bureaucrat wants to, extre