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
Most democratic societies form two major divisions of opinion called the right and left. It's fascinating how attitudes towards seemingly unrelated issues gravitate toward one side or the other. What is the difference between the two?
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 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.
[Karl Note: There is nothing in our Constitution that says it is OK to take from the rich to give to the poor. If that is going to be done, within society, it MUST never be done at the point of a bayonet, but only as an act of volition by an individual.
Certainly those who really need help should get it. The rich who don't really need the money should help those in need.
[Karl: Nuts!
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.
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 some people will fall through the safety net. 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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems to me that usually some balance of the left and right point of views is correct and that balance depends on the particular situation. In some situations one point of view may be entirely correct and in other situations the other point of view may be. I personally will not identify myself as a right winger or a left winger. I try and analyze each situation individually and come up with the right balance between left and right conceptions of the situation.
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:
I remember reading once the statements of a leader of a Neo-Nazi group who said he shared some of the beliefs of Farrakhan the leader of the black anti-white nation of Islam.
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.
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