Thoughts About Differences Between the Right and Left

"It's my job to have kids, Mr. Mayor, and your job to take care of them."
Left wing woman on welfare yelling at Mayor Lindsay of New York

A Conservative is a Liberal who's been mugged

A Hawk is a liberal who's been targeted for death by al Qaeda
John Podhoretz referring to anthrax packages sent to the media in Oct, 2001

A liberal is a man with both feet planted firmly in the air.
Winston Churchill

Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart.
Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.
Winston Churchill

A liberal is "so broadminded he won't take his own side in an argument."
Robert Frost

Nature forms a hole to swallow money
Me.

What does this quote of mine have to do with differences between the right and the left? When the government makes money available the services for which the money is made available have a tendency to become more expensive. If the government makes money available to help students pay University tuition the University can raise its tuition for example. In fact I read an article which said the money the government paid was proportional to the cost of tuition and so Universities had the incentive to charge very high tuitions so as to get more government money and then to give out aid to students in effect decreasing the tuition. The students thing they are getting a great deal and they thing the University must be very prestigious if it is so expensive. Another example of where costs increase to meet the money available is in the adoption industry. To adopt in 2004 cost usually about 25K. The social workers get a large chunk of this money. People are so desperate to have a child they'll mortgage their houses to pay these costs so the social workers charge. The Left likes to throw money to help the unfortunate, one thing they need to keep in mind is that when you throw money at something the need will increase as the prices go up to meet the increased available money.

An interesting difference between right and left is their approach to dealing with evil. We can see this in a clip from the Hannity and Colmes show in which incitement of children to hate by using cartoons of lovable creatures is discussed. Lagnado posed the question of how to deal with the incitement by Hamas.

LAGNADO: Because I guess I keep thinking, how do we deal with it?

HANNITY (right wing): How do you deal with it? I think you go to war with them. With people like this, I think you've got to go to war.

COLMES (left wing) : If you go to war you're only creating more hate and continuing the cycle of hate.

Can Hamas hate Israel or the United States any more than it already does? Does war only create more hate? Is it possible that if those doing the inciting or hatred are thrown in prison that the result might be less hate? The result of the war of the United States against Germany and Japan in World War II was to turn two enemies into two allies.

Further listening to the discussion reveals that left wing Colmes attitude is to minimize how evil it is by saying it’s a known procedure that others use and that the approach should be to talk to Hamas about it in order to stop them. Right wing Hannity’s approach is to say that anyone who does this is really evil and talking won’t do any good and we should fight them. I think that underlying these attitudes is the left wing attitude to avoid fighting at almost any cost as opposed to the right wing desire to fight evil. The desire to avoid fighting leads the desire to believe that the evil isn’t as evil as it seems and that talking will solve the problem. This difference in outlook between right and left has been perceived by others. Jennifer Lazlo Mizrahi of the Israel Project in a speech mentioned how the left looks at the Middle East as something that can be solved by Dr. Phil ie talking whereas the right wing does not.

A basic difference between the right and the left in the explanation they give to criminal and hostile behavior. The right wing is likely to see the criminal as responsible for his actions and those who are hostile to them as being evil, the left wing is likely to see the criminal and those who are hostile as being victims of their society who if only given more money, food and in some cases land, will become good. This left wing mentality goes a long way to explain Jimmy Carter's words of support for anti-American dictators, or Clinton's attempt to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons with financial aid. The right wing outlook would be that financial aid props up the evil regime of North Korea and should be stopped in fact all financial transactions with the regime should be stopped which is exactly what the Bush administration was trying to do with North Korea (2006). The left wing is likely to see sanctions as antagonizing North Korea and being the reason North Korea developed nuclear weapons in the first place. The right wing is likely to believe that North Korea would have developed nuclear weapons even without hostile statements by the United States. Similarly in the war with radical Islam the left sees U.S. military actions against radical Islam as antagonizing the Muslims whereas the right wing sees the radical Islam as hostile whether the U.S. fights them or not.

When a Republican and a Democrat see a beggar on the street they both have different views as to who he is and how he got there. The Democrat is likely to view the beggar as an innocent victim of social injustice and the Republican is more likely to view him as someone who is to lazy to work and who is living off the hard work of others. The liberal is more likely to see the beggar as equal morally to the man with money and equally deserving of money. The Democrat is likely to think giving money to the beggar will help him get fed whereas the Republican is more likely to believe that the money he gets will be spent on liquor and prostitutes. The Democrat is more likely to think giving the beggar money will make the world a better place whereas the Republican is more likely to think giving him money will just encourage him to avoid working for a living and will make the world a worse place. In other words what the Democrat believes to be compassionate policy the Republican may see as ultimately hurting people.

Dennis Prager, in an article published in frontpagemag in 2006 wrote:

[O]ne way to describe the moral divide between conservatives and leftists is whom they blame for acts of evil committed against innocent people, especially when committed by non-whites and non-Westerners. Conservatives blame the perpetrators, and leftists blame either the victims' group or the circumstances.

We Americans are used to this. For decades, leftists have blamed violent crime in America on racism and poverty, i.e., on American society far more than on the murderers, rapists, arsonists, and muggers themselves. Conservatives blame the criminals...

Since examples of leftists refusing to blame criminals and terrorists for their behavior are legion, let's try to figure out why this moral inversion is so common.

Here are three hypotheses:

One is that leftists tend to blame outside forces for evil. This emanates from the secular humanistic view of people as basically good -- and therefore human evil must come not from the bad choices and bad values of the evildoer, but from the unfortunate socioeconomic and other circumstances of the person's life.

The second explanation is that as you go further left on the political spectrum, it becomes increasingly difficult to blame the "weak" for any atrocities they commit. The Left does not divide the world between good and evil nearly as much as it does between rich and poor, and between strong and weak. Israel is stronger and richer, so Palestinian terror is excused. White America is stronger and richer than black America, so black violence is excused. The West is stronger and richer than the Muslim world, so Muslim violence is explained accordingly.

And third, liberals tend to be afraid of the truly evil. That's why the leftist newspapers of America refused to publish the Danish cartoons, probably the most newsworthy cartoons ever drawn, but have never had any hesitance about showing cartoons and photos that mock Jewish and Christian symbols. Christians and Jews don't kill editors.

We don't know who will be the next target of Islamic or other murderers from poor or non-Western or non-white groups. All we can know is that liberal and leftist thought will find reasons to hold the targeted group largely responsible.

Dennis Prager wrote another article titled “If It’s Bad For America It’s Good for Democrats” (frontpagemag.com 8/14/07) in which he showed that the better off people are and the more they idenitfy themselves as Americans the more likely they are to vote Republican. This make sense when one considers that the reasoning of the Democrats leads them to support groups who are not well off and who are hostile to the United States.

Ed Koch in an article called "Democratic Defection" (Forward 1/12/04) explained that he was a lifelong Democrat and he wrote that the Democratic philosophy is:

If you need a helping hand, we will provide it.

and that the Republican Party's philosophy, can be summed up as:

If I made it on my own, you will have to do the same.

It is interesting that this is the same Ed Koch who said something to the effect of, "The more money you put into outstretched hands the more outstretched hands there will be." That is why the welfare system ballooned into a crime ridden dead weight pulling the economy down. Also when Koch said the Democratic philosophy is "If you need a helping hand, we will provide it, he did not say how we will provide it. Perhaps the democratic philosophy could be better stated,

If someone needs a helping hand we will put our hand in your pocket and provide it.

The liberal ideology is that all people are equally deserving and that therefore there should be equality in wealth and that they should enforce that equality of wealth. Dennis Prager wrote an article titled The Left Hates Inequality, Not Evil, about this.

George Will wrote an article about the consequences of the sweet compassion called Bye, Sweet Jobs (New York Post 2/12/2004). In this case the Republican Bush Administration as well as the Democrats, in order to protect American jobs supported an import quota on sugar. One consequence of the sugar quota is the cost of sugar in the United States is higher than elsewhere leading candy makers to move their factories outside of the United States with the resulting loss of jobs. George Will wrote that:

Saturday, Valentine's Day, sweets will be showered on sweethearts - a bonanza for candy makers. But the very next day all 242 Fannie May and Fanny Farmer chocolate candy stores will be closed.

This is one example of sweet compassion leading to a bitter aftertaste.

Another example of compassion that hurts is the subsidies the U.S. gives to American farmers. Those subsidies makes farmers from poorer countries less able to compete so that their countries remain poor. In addition they take money away from taxpayers.

If a country is hostile to the United States, left wingers are likely to take the view that the U.S. is responsible for their hostility because they oppressed them in some way and that the leaders of the hostile country are just as good if not better than the U.S. government. Right wingers are more likely to see the hostile country as bad people who hate the U.S. because they're evil.

Senator Kerry's plan to deal with the impending threat of mass production of nuclear weapons by Iran was to offer to give them nuclear fuel in return for a pledge that it would not be used for weapons production and in return for inspections. If that failed he would go to the security council. Bush's approach was not to view the United Nations as a good group that the U.S. can rely on and to develop nuclear bunker buster bombs that could destroy hardened targets. Senator Kerry said that he would end the nuclear bunker buster bombs. His idea was that the U.S. should not be developing nuclear weapons while asking other countries not to. The right wing outlook is probably that Iran will develop those weapons anyway and if the U.S. is to have any chance at preventing terrorists from setting off Iranian nuclear weapons in American cities they better preemptively destroy them and not wait for a hostile U.N. to agree to such a preemptive strike an agreement that is unlikely to ever happen.

Bill Clinton addressed his view of the differences between the left and right in a speech he gave at the Democratic National Convention in Boston (7/27/04) in which he said:

Democrats and Republicans have very different and deeply felt ideas about what choices we should make. They're rooted in fundamentally different views of how we should meet our common challenges at home and how we should play our role in the world.

Mr. Clinton gave the following examples:

Now -- now, at a time when we're trying to get other people to give up nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, they are trying to develop two new nuclear weapons, which they say we might use first...

For the first time when America was on a war footing in our whole history, they gave two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top 1 percent of us...

Now, look at the choices they made, choices they believed in. They chose to protect my tax cut at all costs, while withholding promised funding for the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving 2.1 million children behind. (Cheers, applause.) They chose to protect my tax cut while cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of their job- training programs, 100,000 working families out of their child-care assistance, and worst of all, while cutting 300,000 poor children out of their after-school programs when we know it keeps them off the streets, out of trouble, in school learning, going to college and having a good life! They chose, they chose to protect my tax cut while dramatically raising the out-of-pocket costs of health care to our veterans, and while weakening or reversing very important environmental measures that Al Gore and I put into place, everything from clean air to the protection of our forests.

On homeland security -- on homeland security, Democrats tried to double the number of containers at ports and airports checked for weapons of mass destruction. It cost a billion dollars. It would have been paid for under our bill by asking the 200,000 millionaires in America to cut their tax cut by $5,000. Almost all 200,000 of us would like to have done that, to spend $5,000 to make all 300 million Americans feel safer. The measure failed. Why? Because the White House and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives opposed it. They thought our $5,000 was more important than doubling the container checks at our ports and airports.

Clinton in his speech did not mention the vast support of the Bush Administration for the Leave No Child Behind Act and the Bush Administration's proposal for large scale funding of job training programs. Clinton did not mention in his speech the reason Bush proposed cutting after school programs. That reason was the results of a federally commissioned evaluation of the after schools programs which found that test scores of federal program participants were no better than those of students not involved in the programs and that student behavior appeared to worsen among program participants. Clinton didn't mention the environmental measures that the Bush administration has taken. Clinton didn't mention that the Container Security Initiative that he argues the Bush administration does not fund sufficiently was launched by the Bush administration. So what can we learn from President Clinton's arguments? His argument basically is if we Democrats won the election we would tax the rich more and give that money to important programs.

There is a price however to taxing that Clinton does not mention. If you tax the rich, the rich may leave to other shores where they are taxed less. Those that don't leave may lose incentive to work hard and build up a money making business because of the increased taxes that would result. Rich people buy goods from others less fortunate than them and if they are taxed more they buy less good and the less fortunate have fewer customers. One example I read about was boat builders many of whose businesses drowned when the taxes on wealthy clients were increased. Wealthy companies usually make a lot of money because they are efficient and produce a good product, taxing them will reduce their money available for investments in research and development and other money making projects that benefit consumers as well as the company employees. If the companies make less money than even if they are taxed a higher percentage the end result may be less and not more taxes available for needed social programs. Another price is that when the government taxes it is taking power away from the wage earners and giving it to itself. Equalizing and totalitarianism go together which is one reason communist regimes have historically been totalitarian.

Don Feder wrote an excellent article about liberal policies that were not mentioned at the Democratic convention called (What the Democrats Won't Tell You, frontpagemag.com 8/5/04)

Andrea Peyser wrote a column in the New York Post 6/7/04 about her conversion from a liberal to a conservative and in the process revealed a lot about liberal thought. She wrote:

It hardly seems conceivable today. But back in 1980, I was an eager, uncompromised leftist - or so I thought...In many political lives, there comes an epiphany in which your nonsense rises to the surface and laughs in your face. War. Injustice. For me, it came down during a Women's Studies class at SUNY Albany where, each week, I dutifully indoctrinated myself into the methods by the patriarchal, capitalist society to disenfranchise women and people of color. One day, the professor decided to give virtually every student a failing grade.

Why? I'd worked hard on a paper detailing how our consumerist culture negated the gifts of females and nonwhites, taking care to omit the pronoun "he" from each sentence. But the the professor was disappointed because, during a group project - something about the rape mentality behind rock music - two students became too busy or lazy to participate in this important work.

The no-show students were granted "A"s. Then the professor laid a tear inducing guilt trip on the rest of the class, declaring that those who actually did the work had clearly failed to bring our recalcitrant sisters into the fold.

Underlying this professors thinking is the liberal assumption that all people are morally equal (except Republicans) and that if someone does wrong he is no worse than we are and we are equally responsible for his actions. If we apply this thinking about criminal behavior than the liberal view would be that society made the criminal who he is and so is guilty for his crimes. A conservative would view the criminal as responsible for his crimes. A Republican would want the criminal punished and kept off the street. A liberal is more likely to want to release him since it wasn't his fault that he committed the crime.

There is no question that injustices in society can contribute to criminal behavior just as there is no question that individuals have responsibility for their behavior. So in a way both the conservatives and the liberals are right. The question is in a particular case how much is the responsibility of the criminal and how much isn't. Clearly Andrea Peyser's professor had extreme views in this regard. The professor rewarded the students who did no work with the likely consequence that they didn't do their next assignment. In fact I wonder if any of the students did their next assignment.

Recently there was an election in my home town. I looked up the records of the various candidates and found that both the left wing (liberal) and right wing (conservative) candidates were campaigning to lower taxes. They had different approaches however. The liberal's plan was to ask the state government to provide more funds. The conservative's plan was to audit spending in the town and find programs that could be cut. It seemed to me unlikely that asking the State Government for money would result in the state government being overwhelmed with charitable impulses. Also in the unlikely event that the state government was overwhelmed with such impulses in order to support a mayor from their party, it occurred to me that money that they would fork over would have to come from somewhere and that somewhere was the taxpayer. The conservative's plan seemed more realistic and since my town was paying the second highest taxes in the county I decided to support him. I had a liberal friend and I told him my reasons and his reply I think was revealing about what liberalism is about. He told me that he never concerned himself with taxes. He said that if the conservative made cuts it would be in needed social programs. He felt that conservatives cut money from those who really need it and that conservatives supported the powerful at the expense of the weak.

His arguments showed one clear difference between the left and the right. That difference is that the left focuses more on obtaining support from the poorer segments of society than the right. The left does this by supporting legislation that transfers money from the middle and upper classes to the poor. The term "Tax and Spend Democrat" comes from this tendency.

One can get an idea of the differences between right and left from the campaign accusations that candidates level against one another. The general accusation by the Republicans against the Democratic candidates are that that the Democrats raise taxes. The general accusations of the Democrats against the Republicans are that the Republicans cut funding for needed social programs for the elderly, the poor and the sick.

Liberalism has at it's heart, compelling the haves to fund the have nots. Liberalism is an equalizer that forces the haves to make sacrifices to help the have nots.

On the surface this is wonderful. Certainly those who really need help should get it. The rich who don't really need the money should help those in need. What could be wrong with that? I think the answer is that certainly assistance to the poor is necessary but one carry that too far with destructive consequences to both the haves and the have nots.

The answer to what could be wrong with liberal ideals comes from examining what has gone wrong with programs that fund the poor such as welfare. In the United States increased funding of welfare did not solve the poverty or crime problem. The welfare roles increased as did crime. People lost the incentive to work. Often they were better off financially when they were on welfare. Mothers on welfare had more and more babies since each baby bought in government money. Often that government money was spent on crack and the babies grew up in a violent criminal environment and turned to crime. As welfare and overcrowded prison costs drain society, corporations have less money to invest and eventually there is less corporate money to tax. So in the end liberal policies may lead to less funding for the poor.

Democrats overlook that taxes hurt the elderly and sick since they also pay taxes. In my home town taxes have gone up so much that elderly townfolk complained to the liberal mayor that they couldn't afford living there any more. The mayor said to them "So leave." The liberal mayor's compassion to the elderly vanished when it came to reducing their taxes.

The left wants to build safety nets to protect those who have trouble finding jobs etc. The right focuses on providing incentives to people to work by not providing safety nets since safety nets encourage dependence and reduce the incentive to work. The right wing approach has the problem that if there is no safety net those who don't find work could find themselves in a very difficult situation. The left wing approach has the problem that the safety nets encourage growth of the number of people relying on them. As this population grows so does the number of voters who support the laws transferring money into these nets. This can lead to self reinforcing cycle of increasing spending. Eventually the safety nets may not be able to protect the increasing burden so that more people are at risk than if there had been less of a safety net to begin with.

The left and right differ on how to deal with discrimination. It is likely that this discrimination led to crime which in turned led to more discrimination thus creating a crime discrimination cycle. Should the government intervene in these situations to force employers to hire a certain percentage of minority groups? What if these minority groups don't have the skills. What if these minority members already had criminal records? The left wingers are likely to say force employers to hire them anyway.

The left are much more likely to promote forced social engineering such as school bussing. The idea of school bussing is to bus children from poor areas into more well to do areas so they get an equal education. The result often is that the people in the better areas get poorer education's as a result of the violence and strife introduced by the children who are bussed in. The Democrats probably oppose school vouchers because they want an equal opportunity for all children and are concerned that vouchers will allow more talented children or children with richer parents to go to better schools than poorer or less talented children. The Republicans favor school vouchers because that would create competition among schools for students and is likely to lead to better standards for schools. My own experience has been that I have worked harder and come closer to reaching my potential when I've been in a more competitive environment. There are two consequences of keeping students of different levels of ability and motivation in the same class. One is that the students with the higher levels of ability don't work to live up to their potential and get a poorer education. The second is that the students with the lower levels of ability don't have their needs met as the teachers strive to challenge the motivated students.

The left is more likely than the right to sacrifice the wellbeing of the middle and upper classes in order to promote the wellbeing of the lower classes although often the social engineering involved doesn't help the lower classes either. Increased welfare spending may result in increased drug use and crime and worse conditions for the poor.

There is a fundamental difference between the way the left and the right view crime. The right winger is likely to divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys and the left winger is more likely to see the world in terms of moral equivalence and to believe in moral relativism. The right is likely to see a criminal act as the responsibility of the criminal and to believe that the appropriate response is to lock up the criminal. The left is likely to see the behavior of the criminal as the fault of society. The left is likely to believe that society is responsible for the conditions that created the criminal. The response of the left to criminal behavior is likely to be efforts to improve the environment in which the criminal lives. For example the left might want to increase welfare payments so that the poor would be less likely to turn to crime. The left is likely to improve the conditions in prisons and even to release dangerous criminals from prisons to avoid overcrowding.

This attitude toward the left toward individual criminals also extends to countries that engage in criminal behavior. For example after news broke that the Palestinian authority had spent money donated by the Europeans on luxury apartments (November 1998) the left wing president of the United States (Bill Clinton) offered 100 million dollars of further assistance to the PLO. Mr. Clinton probably believes that poverty is what has caused Arab animosity toward Israel and even the criminal tendency to embezzle funds. He probably believes that giving more money to the Arabs will improve their conditions to the point where they will no longer wish to destroy Israel.

Another example of this is a Democratic scheme to become popular in the Muslim world by throwing money at it (USA Today 4/27/04). Since Muslim morality is at least equal to ours according to the liberal mindset that other cultures our equal to our own, they must be doing bad things only because we have done bad things to them. The liberal conclusion is that we must not be giving them enough money. If poverty is the source of Muslim hatred toward the U.S. than why does the London Arabic-Language Daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat report that Iran is providing Iraqi insurgents 70 millions dollars worth of military aid every month to fight the United States? Any country that can provide that kind of aid is certainly not poor. If the Democratic assumption that money will buy Islamic love is correct, than why, inspite of receiving over 100 million dollars in annual U.S. aid, did Palestinian Arabs celebrate on Sept 11, 2001? Why inspite of the 1.3 billion of annual aid to Egypt by the United States, does the government controlled Egyptian newspapers write that "Rumsfeld is a new Hitler" and write that "Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld are the Axis of Evil" and claim that American planes over Afghanistan dropped "genetically treated food" into areas full of land mines in order both to lure the population to their deaths?

Lawrence Auster wrote in (frontpagemag.com, 8/11/04, How To Oppose Liberal Intolerance) about how the left wing belief in equality translates itself into whitewashing of Islam. He wrote:

the belief in equality requires leftists to be indifferent or hostile to Western culture, regardless of its virtues, and to excuse and celebrate non-Western cultures, regardless of their vices, because Western culture is currently the successful and "dominant" culture. Indeed, under the inverted moral order of leftism, the more backward or even savage a non-Western culture happens to be, the more we must puff it up, cover its sins, and blame its catastrophes on ourselves. Thus the glowing, celebratory documentaries on the history of Islam, such as "Empire of Faith" and "Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet" (described by National Review Online as a "whitewashed commercial for Islam"), that have become a staple on Public Television over the last three years, during the very period when the totalitarian and murderous nature of a significant section of the Islamic community has become horribly apparent. Thus 9/11 Commission vice chairman Lee Hamilton's statement that Moslems blame us (justly, he implies) for their poverty and backwardness, and that to win their trust (!) in the war on terror we must create a giant welfare state for the whole Islamic world—providing new kinds of schools for them, ending their poverty, giving them democracy, and so on. It follows from Hamilton's thoroughly "liberal" premise that if the Moslems continue to distrust and hate us despite our massive assistance, that would only show that we have not yet done "enough" for them and must do more.

The left does not only whitewash Islam, it allies itself with Islam. The following is an excerpt from an Iraq News Network interview with George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament which demonstrates that.

Mohammad Basirul Haq Sinha: "You often call for uniting Muslim and progressive forces globally. How far is it possible under current situation?"

Galloway : "Not only do I think it's possible but I think it is vitally necessary and I think it is happening already. It is possible because the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies. Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British occupation of poor countries mainly Muslim countries. They have the same interest in opposing savage capitalist globalization which is intent upon homogenizing the entire world turning us basically into factory chickens which can be forced fed the American diet of everything from food to Coca-Cola to movies and TV culture. And whose only role in life is to consume the things produced endlessly by the multinational corporations. And the progressive organizations & movements agree on that with the Muslims."

David Horowitz has written a book called Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, and has created a web site www.discoverthenetworks.org demonstrating the links between radical Islam and American progressives.

Daniel Pipes in a debate with Ken Livingstone the mayor of London that took place on 1/20/07 discussed the Islamic leftist alliance: He said:

George Galloway explained in 2005, "the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies," which he then went on to indicate were Israel, the United States, and Great Britain.

And if you listen to the words that are spoken about, say the United States, you can see that this is in fact the case. Howard Pinter has described America as "a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics." [big applause and shouts] And Osama Bin Laden [stops … ] I'll do what I can to get an applause line. [laughter] And, get ready for this one: Osama Bin Laden called the United States, "unjust, criminal, and tyrannical." [applause]

Noam Chomsky termed America "a leading terrorist state". And Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a leading Pakistani political leader, called it the "biggest terrorist state." [scattered applause]

Such common ground makes it tempting for those on the Left to make common cause with Islamists, and the symbol of this would be the [huge, anti-war in Iraq] demonstrations in Hyde Park, on the 16^th of February 2003, called by a coalition of leftist and Islamist organizations.

At other times, the Left feels a kinship with Islamist attacks on the West, forgiving, understanding why these would happen. A couple of notorious quotes make this point. The German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen termed the 9/11 attacks "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos," while American novelist Norman Mailer, commented that "the people who did this were brilliant."

Such attitudes tempt the Left not to take seriously the Islamist threat to the West. With John Kerry, a former aspirant to the [U.S.] presidency, they dismiss terrorism as a mere "nuisance."

Melanie Phillips in an interview with frontpagemag.com (5/12/2006) commented that:

It’s remarkable, to put it mildly, that the left – with its obsessions with issues like gay rights, equality for women and sexual license – should have forged an alliance with radical Islamists who preach death to gays, the subjugation of women and the stoning of adulterers. It is an eye-opener to see, on the streets of London, so-called ‘progressives’ marching shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists under the metaphorical banner of human rights and the literal banners of Hamas. Both the left and the radical Islamists have put aside their differences because they recognize the value of using each other in pursuit of their common objective, the destruction of western society.

Professor Paul Eidelberg, in an article titled: The Cultural Left: Islam’s Ally (Freeman Center Email Broadcast 2/19/2007) wrote that:

In 2004, a leading critic of the Bush administration, published a stinging criticism of the U . S . government’s war on terrorism . He found Bush’s conduct abhorrent from the time the president was informed about the 9/11 attacks . He impugned Bush’s motives for the war on terror and for the invasion of Iraq . He said Bush knew Iraq posed no security threat, so that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was made because of “oil and more business for his private companies . ” “Black gold blinded him and he put his own private interests ahead of the American public interest . ” “Bush’s hands,” said his critic, “are covered with blood, and Iraq has become a quagmire . ” Moreover, while Bush pretends to promote liberty abroad, “he has brought tyranny and the suppression of liberties to his own country” through “the Patriot Act, implemented under the pretext of fighting terrorism . ”

The name of the critic is not Michael Moore or Nancy Pelosi . He is none other than Osama bin Laden! Bin Laden simply cited and even commended the writings of the American Left . In his 2004 missive to America, bin Laden said his message would be better understood if Americans read westerners like author William Blum, a former State Department employee, who calls on America to withdraw from the Middle East and “give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those that were tortured” by American troops.

The left in the United States tends to share communist ideals more than the right and so tend to be more sympathetic to communist regimes.

The American left tends to oppose military spending more than the right. One reason is the greater sympathy of the left for the Communist regimes which the military spending is designed to defeat. Another reason is that military spending reduces the money available for beloved left wing social programs. Yet another reason is the liberal belief that the way to deal with hostile countries is to give them money.

Al Gore,the democratic candidate for president, gave a speech in Aug 2000 at the Democratic National Convention in which he said the Republicans were the party for the powerful implying that he was for the weak. An interesting exception to that is Gore's and the Democrats stand on abortion. When Gore announced his support of abortion a loud cheer went up from the floor of the convention. Yet abortion is the destruction of the weak and helpless. One would expect that the Liberal ideal of helping the weak and helpless would be extended to unborn babies. The liberal explanation for this is that it can be more compassionate to the unborn to kill them than to allow them to live a miserable life. The truth is though that there are many people who want to adopt children and who would give these children a good life. Another liberal argument is that they are supporting the right of women to choose. The feminist ideals of the liberals in conflict with the compassionate ideals toward the unborn and those ideals are stronger. Why are they not more concerned about the rights of unborn women? I don't have the answers to these questions.

Several letters were sent to the New York Post on August 31, 2000 in response to Gore's promises which are instructive about the pitfalls of liberalism. I paraphrase them below

Al Gore promises cheap or free prescription drugs for everybody ("Steal Al's Issues! - It's Bush's Best Bet to Win," Dick Morris, Opinion, Aug. 24).

Wow, what a deal! I'm going to vote for Gore. How nice of him. Where has he been all these years?

Wait a minute. There must be a reason why some drugs are so expensive. Could it be that drug companies spend a fortune on research and are seeking to recover their costs? ...

If Gore's idea wins out, then we might have lower drug costs. But we might also find ourselves having to accept lower quality drugs.

Another reader wrote

Al Gore repeatedly preaches that he will fight "Big Oil," HMOs, and greedy pharmaceutical companies on behalf of "working families."

What about those "working families" now employed in these very industries?

Another reader pointed out that higher taxes hurt working families.

The left favors affirmative actions policies to force schools to lower their standards to help blacks graduate. Thomas Sowell, a brilliant black professor from Stanford University, in an article titled Left Wing Friends Hurt Blacks (Townhall.com 4/28/04) revealed the problem with this approach when he wrote that:

My own experience as a teacher was that black students would meet higher standards if you refused to lower the standards for them.

An interesting distinction between the right and left was made by Professor Stanley Rothman in an interview with frontpage magazine 5/23/05)

FP: Why do you think the Left thrives on conflict and why are conservatives such a failure in fighting political war? Why don't they know how to stand up for themselves? It took David Horowitz, a former leftist, to do what conservatives should have been doing years ago.

Rothman: Part of the answer to that, it seems to me, lies in the nature of radicalism The left is persuaded that collective political action can remake the world, and political action gives meaning to their lives. To many of them, human beings will be perfectible once the reactionary forces of evil are destroyed. Theirs is a Manichean view.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to believe that love, work, family and culture are the stuff of which life is made. They turn to politics reluctantly and, only as a last resort, to defend themselves. They are also persuaded that civility plays an important role in the preservation of a decent community, and are reluctant to violate the rules of civility. While radicals also believe that they can achieve immortality by remaking the world, conservatives do not believe that immortality is possible except through religion and/or their children.

Keith Thompson wrote an article Leaving the Left 5/23/05 in which he explained a key difference between the left and right.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

Eric Alan Beltt wrote an article titled Liberalism is a Psychology, in which he argued that Liberal beliefs stem from what makes the liberal feel good and avoid feeling bad. It stems from wanting to feel moral noble unique and to avoid being ostracized. Certainly it feels better to believe that we don’t have to arm and fight an enemy, just give them money. It feels much better to talk about peace. Certainly we feel better and noble when we insist on money for the poor. Eric Beltt’s theories are consistent with Liberal thinking. Dennis Prager wrote an article in frontpage magazine 8/28/07 that argued that the desire to be loved drives liberal thinking and gave examples of how doing the moral thing and doing the popular thing are not always the same thing.

When either the left or the right become extreme they are usually wrong though not always. There are situations when the centrist point of view is wrong. When the left and the right take on extreme point of views they are usually distorting reality. The left wing way of distorting reality is usually to make those who have the villains and those who have less the good guys. The right wing way of distorting reality is to view all those who belong to a group as being the evil enemy if the group is different in some way. The extreme left and extreme right often view each other as evil and as "the enemy".

The extreme left is unlikely to view the right in terms of moral relativism though, the extreme left is likely to view the right as the bad guys. Extreme left and right are both likely to believe in taking the law in their own hands and in forcing their utopia on everyone else. There is thus convergence of ideas between left and right extremists. This concept is illustrated in the diagram below:

The far left and right both believe in conspiracy theories. “If I told you I thought the world was controlled by a handful of capitalists and corporate bosses, you would say I was a left-winger,” an anarchist demonstrator told the online Russian publication Pravda. “But if I told you who I thought the capitalists and corporate bosses were (the Jews), you’d say I was far right.” (Anti-Capitalist Anti-Semites, Mark, Strauss, Frontpagemag.com 10/29/03)

The left wing is more likely to be pacifist than the right although there are segments of the right that are likely to be isolationist which can translate into avoiding military intervention. Extreme left wing pacifists ironically often show support for terrorist groups, The Quakers for example are sympathetic to the PLO. Dr. Paul Eidelberg in an article titled The Cultural Left: Islam’s Ally (Freeman Center Email Broadcast 2/19/07) wrote:

Orwell saw that pacifism and defeatism were rampant among the English intelligentsia, especially the very young intelligentsia . He notes that people who started by renouncing violence often ended up supporting Hitler . The opponents of war simply lacked the intellectual courage to think through the practical consequences of their anti-war position: their opposition to the war made them objectively pro-Fascist . (One may say the same of today’s Cultural Left in America , whose opposition to the presence of U . S . troops in Iraq is objectively pro-terrorist, despite any antipathy they may feel toward terrorism . )

There is an alliance between neo-Nazis and Muslim extremists. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross wrote in the Weekly Standard that (The Peculiar Alliance, Weekly Standard, 9/6/05):

Such an alliance seems unlikely on its face; after all, neo-Nazis view most Muslims as racially inferior, while Islamic extremists believe that neo-Nazis are just another flavor of infidel. However, a closer examination reveals that many white-supremacist groups have expressed solidarity with Islamic terrorists recently, and in turn some white supremacists and far-right Holocaust deniers have found newfound supporters among the Islamists.

Mr. Gartenstein Ross writes that in 2005 August Kreis, the head of the Aryan Nations, told a CNN interviewer regarding al Qaeda:

"You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters."

I remember reading once the statements of a leader of a right wing anti black, Neo-Nazi group who said he shared some of the beliefs of Farrakhan the leader of the black anti-white nation of Islam. Osama bin Ladin said on 2/14/03 that:

"The interests of Muslims and the interests of the Socialists coincide in the war against the Crusaders."

Respect, a left-wing party founded by former Labour MP George Galloway, aims to unite Muslims and socialists around opposition to American foreign policy and globalization. (Britain's Defiant Islam, Christian Science Monitor 7/14/05)

David Stolinky wrote an article for frontpagemag.com (Bin Laden and Marx, Strange Bedfellows, 9/29/04) in which he listed similarities between radical Islam and communism. Here is an excerpt of what he wrote:

How can I compare communists, who are militant atheists, with Islamic extremists, who are fanatically religious? True, they disagree on theology, but they agree on many other things:

They both believe that people’s behavior is governed by their environment, which therefore must be rigidly controlled.

They both believe that people have no inalienable rights, and must be regimented by harsh rules that govern all aspects of human activity.

They both think people can’t be trusted, and must be watched by a vast police apparatus.

They both attract unhappy, angry, alienated people. Remember John Walker Lindh and the Beltway snipers?

They both use schools to brainwash young people – Muslim schools in the case of radical Islam, universities in the case of Marxism.

They both dehumanize nonbelievers. Marxists call their opponents "capitalist pigs," "racists," "oppressors" and "Nazis." Islamic extremists call their opponents "infidels," "sons of pigs and monkeys" and "followers of Satan."

They both claim that nonbelievers should be converted by force, and those who resist should be persecuted without mercy – or brutally murdered.

They both believe their role is to create a perfect society, so they are justified in using any means, including mass murder.

They both hate Judeo-Christian civilization in general and capitalism in particular. The 9/11 terrorists could have destroyed a cathedral or a synagogue. Instead, they destroyed the World Trade Center. That tells a lot about their priorities.

They both refuse to take responsibility for their backward, poverty-stricken societies. Instead, they blame others for their own failures.

They both take the anger that should be aimed at their corrupt, incompetent rulers, and misdirect it at the West, and America in particular.

They both believe they are entitled to control the world, and they hate America for standing in their way.

Evidence of the extreme left/Islamist alliance surfaced when the Freedom Center which David Horowitz founded organized Islamo-Fascism awareness week for Oct 22-22 07. In a fundraising letter Mr. Horowitz wrote:

the left is also organizing - to kill Islamo Fascism Awareness Week and silence the vital truths it will tell. The powerful American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is intimidating university administrations all over the country into canceling the events our campus coordinators have set up. The Muslim Students Association, campus arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, is planning disruptive actions to drown out our message. And most alarming of all, the Revolutionary Communist Party and other radical groups have promised violent confrontations that put our speakers in physical danger.

Interestingly enough there is an alliance between the left and radical Islam. The Soviets have been supporting Iran's nuclear program inspite of the threat of Chechen terrorists someday igniting an Islamic nuclear weapon in Moscow. Phyllis Chesler in her book, The New Antisemitism wrote the following about the similarities between left wing and right wing radicalism:

Today we are dealing with at least two kinds of racism. One is right-wing, neo-Nazi, and traditional; the other (and here's where it gets complicated) is left-wing, anticolonialist, anti-imperialist, and ostensibly antiracist, but also pro-Islamofascist...

What's new about the new anti-Semitism is that acts of violence against Jews and anti-Semitic words and deeds are being uttered and performed by politically correct people in the name of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, antiracism, and pacifism. Old fashioned anti-Semitism was justified in the name of ethnic, Aryan, white purity, superiority, and nationalism. Many Nazi-era Germans and Americans viewed Jews as inferior racially and biologically. The new anti-Semite cannot, by definition, be an anti-Semitic racist because she speaks out on behalf of oppressed people.

Phyllis quotes Jochnowitz about the mystery of the left wing Islamic alliance:

This is the great mystery of the left. Leftists are totally silent about the excesses of radical Islam. They are equally silent about the fact that Israel allows dissent... the most fundamentalist of Americans does not believe in executing women who have been raped although such things happen in Islamic states.

Phyllis writes:

The American and European Left have made a marriage in hell with their Islamic terrorist counterparts. The same Left that has still never expressed any guilt over its devotion to communist dictators who murdered millions of their own people in the service of a Great Idea has now finally, fatefully joined the world jihadic chorus in the call for the end to racist Zionism and to the Jewish Apartheid state.

Melanie Philips in an article titled Return of the Old Hatred (frontpagemag.com 3/1/04) wrote about the left wing, Islamic alliance as follows:

The outcome is that an astonishing axis has developed between Islamic Jew-haters and the Left, marching behind the banners of 'human rights' on demonstrations in Europe producing chants of 'Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas'.

Noam Chomsky after meeting with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s “secretary general,” announced his support for Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm. Then, in an echo of Nasrallah’s recent declaration that President Bush is the world’s top “terrorist,” Chomsky pronounced his own fatwa on the United States calling it one of the “leading terrorist states.” (frontpagemag.com 5/15/2006)

The left in Sweden is aligning itself with Islamic radicals. In an article titled Sweden’s Unholy Alliance, Nima Sanandaji wrote: (frontpagemag.com 5/19/06)

Indeed, as the September elections draw closer, it seems as if the Swedish left are openly embracing radical Islamic groups. Recently, Swedish public television revealed that the leading Social Democratic party has started fishing for votes with the help of radical Muslims clergies. For several years the Christian wing of the Social Democratic party, called The Brotherhood, has been working with the influential Muslim leader Mahmoud Aldebe, president of Sweden’s Muslim Association.

But the new ally of the Social Democrats is anything but democratic. Already in 1999, Aldebe went on radio proposing that Sharia – the Islamic law – be introduced in Sweden. In addition, Aldebe has in a letter to the Swedish minister of Justice in 2003 involved himself in a heated debate regarding an incident of honor-related murder where a Kurdish girl was murdered by her two uncles, shot several times in the head. Aldebe did not condemn the murderers – rather he forcefully defended the perpetrators. Aldebe sees the entire debate regarding honor-related murders as an attack against the Islamic religion and claims in his letter that a public debate regarding these acts of murder risk to “encourage immigrant girls to revolt against the tradition of the families and their religious values.”

One might ask how a democratic party can justify co-operating with Sweden’s Muslim Association. During the above mentioned documentary the Social Democrat Ola Johansson referred to the book Social Justice in Islam by the Islamic ideologue Sayyid Qutb as proof that the social democratic ideology could find common ground with Islamic ideas. As the Swedish paper Expressen has exposed, Sayyid Qutb was not only a social thinker; he was also inspired by the German Nazi movement. He was an important figure in the Egyptian Islamic movement in the 50's and remains an inspiration for Muslim Extremists.

It is interesting that according to British government reports (Middle-Class Muslims Joining Ranks of Killers, New York Post 7/10/05)

Most al Qaeda recruits tend to be loners who come from liberal, nonreligious Muslim backgrounds and convert to Islam as adults

One would expect that people with liberal ideals would be the last to join Al Qaeda but on the contrary most Al Qaeda recruits come from liberal non-religious Muslim backgrounds.

Perhaps the greatest mystery is the identification of feminists with Moslems. Phyllis writes:

For some time some feminist marchers have waved the Palestinian flag and worn Arab headdresses in various demonstrations. (They don't have it right, though, because they wear Arab male keffiyahs. Were they marching anywhere between Cairo and Kabul, they'd be wearing burqas, headscarves, veils.)

Robert Spencer in an article in frontpagemag.com (Consummated in Cairo 1/16/2004) wrote that at the 2003 Cairo Conference held in mid-December by

The International Campaign Against U.S. & Zionist Occupations, high-profile anti-war left wing activists got together with radical Muslims in a quest to join forces to gain their respective objectives. Robert Spencer wrote:

The Cairo Conference demonstrated that Socialist anti-war activists don’t mind sharing a podium with radical Muslims who want to establish Sharia states in Iraq and elsewhere. Of course, the peace movement has betrayed a taste for totalitarianism and brutality before. Today’s radical Muslim terrorists are worthy heirs of Lenin, Stalin, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and all the rest who filled the Gulag for the sake of peace. Evidently nowadays as long as the struggle against “imperialist aggression” is won, a few amputations and stonings along the way will be just fine.

Evan Coyne Maloney when asked why the left sides with totalitarian ideologies by Jamie Glazov replied:

That's what boggles my mind. Women are second-class citizens in a large part of the world, treated as property, and it is not only acceptable for their husbands to beat them, but it is expected. Rape victims are stoned to death in "honor" killings while gang-rapists face no punishment. And yet the West’s feminists are silent. In a large part of the world, gays can be jailed and subject to chemical treatments in an attempt to change their gender preference. They are hanged and beheaded simply for being gay. And yet the gay rights activists in the West are silent.

I really don't get it. There are very severe offenses against humanity occurring all over the world, and yet the left ignores them. It seems they are constitutionally incapable of recognizing any injustice unless they can somehow blame it on the West, on white males, on Christians or Jews, or on the United States.

An excellent article about the problems of liberalism is called PC and the Crisis of Liberalism. George Will has an interesting article about the attitudes of the left.