{"id":170,"date":"2004-12-08T13:21:24","date_gmt":"2004-12-08T18:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=170"},"modified":"2005-01-07T16:54:41","modified_gmt":"2005-01-07T21:54:41","slug":"left2right-a-critical-appraisal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=170","title":{"rendered":"Left2Right &#8211; a critical appraisal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading a new blog called<br \/>\n<a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/'>Left2Right<\/a>, founded in<br \/>\nmid-November 2004 as an attempt by a group of left-wing intellectuals to reach<br \/>\nout to intelligent people on the right of the American political spectrum.<br \/>\nIt is indeed a thought-provoking read, but the thoughts they are provoking<br \/>\nare not necessarily of the sort they intend.<\/p>\n<p>This response is intended for the Left2Right authors, so I&#8217;ll<br \/>\nrehearse what will be obvious to regular <cite>Armed and<br \/>\nDangerous<\/cite> readers; I&#8217;m not a conservative or right-winger<br \/>\nmyself, but a radical libertarian who finds both ends of the<br \/>\nconventional spectrum <a href='http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/esrblog\/index.php?m=200409#153'>about<br \/>\nequally repugnant<\/a>. My tradition is the free-market classical liberalism of Locke and<br \/>\nHayek.  I utterly reject both the Marxist program and the reactionary<br \/>\ncultural conservatism of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and (today) the<br \/>\nReligious Right.  Conservatism is defined by a desire to preserve<br \/>\nsociety&#8217;s existing power relationships; given a choice, I prefer<br \/>\nsubverting them to preserving them.<\/p>\n<p>One advantage my libertarianism gives me is that while I disagree<br \/>\nviolently with a lot of right-wing thinking, I understand it much<br \/>\nbetter than most leftists do.  The reverse is not quite as true; while<br \/>\nI do believe I understand left-wing thinking pretty well, most<br \/>\nright-wing intellectuals are not so ignorant of leftism that I have an<br \/>\nunusual advantage there.  They can&#8217;t be, not after having passed<br \/>\nthrough the PC indoctrination camps that most American universities<br \/>\nhave become.<\/p>\n<p>A right-winger, noting the concentration of philosophy and<br \/>\nhumanities professors in the Left2Right bios and the number of them<br \/>\nwho list topics like &#8220;race and gender issues&#8221; as interest areas, would<br \/>\nsay that the contributors are typical members of the elite that runs<br \/>\nthose camps.  But one of the things that Left2Right suggests to this<br \/>\nlibertarian is that even these people are prisoners, locked in by<br \/>\ntheir own group-think.  The toughest challenge they face in reaching<br \/>\nout to right-wingers is not a problem with right-wingers &mdash; it is the<br \/>\nunexamined premises and lacunae in their own reasoning.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/12\/liberators.html'>post<\/a><br \/>\nthat is at the top of the blog as I write is a subtle but perfect<br \/>\nillustration of this point.  J. David Velleman, writing on Bush<br \/>\nadministration strategy about the liberation of Iraq, argues that they<br \/>\nfell victim to a philosophical error, believing that giving the Iraqi<br \/>\npeople freedom would be sufficient to pacify the country.  He writes<br \/>\n&#8220;These decisionmakers seem not to have considered the possibility that<br \/>\nfreedom alone may not induce people to do wonderful things if they<br \/>\nlack a shared sense of confidence in the legitimacy of the social<br \/>\norder&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>This is a refreshing change from the dimmer sort of left-wing<br \/>\nnarrative, in which Bush and Cheney head a sinister cabal who dream<br \/>\nof an American empire that enslaves the Iraqis and steals their oil<br \/>\nfor Halliburton.  It&#8217;s an intelligent criticism; possibly even a<br \/>\ncorrect one.<\/p>\n<p>But&#8230;and this is a large &#8216;but&#8217;&#8230;the when Velleman goes on to<br \/>\nimply that &#8220;shared confidence in the legitimacy of the social order&#8221;<br \/>\nis one of the &#8220;values of the left&#8221; without which the &#8220;values of the<br \/>\nRight are simply not viable&#8221;, he reveals himself to be inhabiting some<br \/>\nsort of ahistorical cloud-Cuckoo land.  He is making an archetypally<br \/>\nright-wing sort of argument here, one which would sound far more<br \/>\nlikely from Russell Kirk or an eighteenth-century clericalist than from<br \/>\nanyone who purports to be part of the tradition of Karl Marx or<br \/>\nMikhael Bakunin or Emma Goldman.<\/p>\n<p>Velleman&#8217;s blythe unawareness of the reactionary tenor of his own<br \/>\nargument suggests more than just a ignorance of right-wing political<br \/>\nthinking that is crippling for anyone engaged in Left2Right&#8217;s project;<br \/>\nit suggests that Left thought has become so empty of any content of<br \/>\nits own, so stuck in reflexive oppositionalism, that all that remains<br \/>\nto it is to grab at any concept that can be used to oppose George W.<br \/>\nBush.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, this model of a Left stuck in reflexive oppositionalism is<br \/>\nexactly what conservative intellectuals believe about it.  Their<br \/>\nnarrative goes like this: once upon a time, Left thought was a genuine<br \/>\nworld-system, a coherent if tragically mistaken competitor to<br \/>\nclassical liberalism and capitalism.  The Soviet Union used this<br \/>\ntheory for evil purposes, to seduce the intelligentsia of the West and<br \/>\nfoment among them anti-American, anti-capitalist hatred.  When the<br \/>\nSoviet Union collapsed, the Left&#8217;s world-system collapsed with it.<br \/>\nAll that remained was a catalogue of resentments clothed in the<br \/>\ntattered remnants of Marxist theory, but the Left intelligentsia never<br \/>\nlet go of this.  As the theory crumbled, the resentments<br \/>\n<em>became<\/em> the theory.  So we are left with a Left that is more<br \/>\nhysterically anti-American than ever, and willing to suck up to<br \/>\nmonstrous dictators like Saddam Hussein, precisely because it no<br \/>\nlonger knows what to be <em>for<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Now: reread the above paragraph, then ask yourself what Velleman&#8217;s<br \/>\nrhetoric will inevitably sound like to a conservative intellectual.  You<br \/>\nwill know you have gotten it when your hair stands on end.<\/p>\n<p>We continue with a <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/12\/supporting_our_.html'>post<\/a><br \/>\nby Jeff McMahan on &#8220;Support our Troops&#8221; bumper stickers.  McMahan<br \/>\nappears to mean well, but when writes as though he thinks that the<br \/>\nowners of SUVs and vans who bear these stickers are performing some<br \/>\nkind of Machiavellian calculation about oil-shock risks he is merely<br \/>\nproving that he is laughably out of touch with the thinking of<br \/>\nordinary Americans.<\/p>\n<p>A gentle hint for Mr. McMahan: People who own vans and SUVs<br \/>\n<em>live in the suburbs<\/em>.  People who live in the suburbs<br \/>\npredominantly <em>vote Republican<\/em>; this is a cold demographic<br \/>\nfact known to almost everybody whose horizons are wider than those of<br \/>\nan average NPR radio-show host. The fact that you don&#8217;t know this, and<br \/>\ninstead chase after paranoid all-about-the-oil theories, makes you the<br \/>\nsort of person conservatives laugh about and and point out as a<br \/>\nparadigmatic example of left-liberal cluelessness.<\/p>\n<p>The ahistorical J. David Velleman speaks some good sense in<br \/>\n<a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/12\/debunking_a_dea.html#more'><br \/>\ndebunking a dead horse<\/a>.  He may be dead-ignorant of right-wing thought<br \/>\nbut he clearly isn&#8217;t stupid.  Like all the contributors he radiates a<br \/>\nsense that he is honestly trying.<\/p>\n<p>David Estlund&#8217;s <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/12\/the_first_data_.html'>The<br \/>\nFirst Data Point on Anti-Terrorism<\/a> starts as fairly standard-issue<br \/>\nBush-bashing; he ignores the fact that, if the Bush administration was<br \/>\nculpable, the Clinton administration was even more culpable on the<br \/>\nsame &#8220;knew or should have known&#8221; sort of argument.  The intelligence<br \/>\nestimates that made al-Qaeda out to be imminently dangerous long<br \/>\npredate the 2000 elections.<\/p>\n<p>The more interesting part of his post is his repetition of the meme<br \/>\nthat Republicans won&#8217;t listen to arguments or evidence from<br \/>\nintellectuals like him.  He is so full of self-congratulation about<br \/>\nthe Bushies&#8217; alleged inability to let the evidence lead them where it<br \/>\nwill (and by implication, his own superior ability to do so) that he<br \/>\ncompletely misses the real reason conservative policy makers tune his<br \/>\nkind out.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Estlund, how can I break this to you gently&#8230;the Bushies ignore<br \/>\nadvice from left-wing academics because they believe the source is poisoned.<br \/>\n<em>They believe you hate America and want to destroy it.<\/em>  Given<br \/>\nthat belief, it would be their duty to listen to your advice only with<br \/>\nthe determination to do the exact opposite of anything you recommend.<\/p>\n<p>Now, mind you, in pointing this out, I am not alleging that you<br \/>\nactually <em>do<\/em> hate America and want to destroy it.  My claim is<br \/>\nthat from the point of view of most conservatives, that is the only<br \/>\nmodel that plausibly explains your speech and behavior.  They do not<br \/>\nmerely pretend to believe your kind is evil as a matter of rhetoric or<br \/>\ntactical positioning, they actually <em>do<\/em> believe it.  With the<br \/>\nbest will in the world to listen to critics and weigh evidence, they<br \/>\nstill wouldn&#8217;t take policy advice from you any more readily than you<br \/>\nwould accept it from a Nazi.<\/p>\n<p>(Allow me to contrast this with the position I think more typical of<br \/>\nlibertarians, which is that left-wing academics are not evil per se<br \/>\nbut have been so canalized by Marxist-derived ideology that on most<br \/>\npolitico-economic issues they should be ignored on grounds of<br \/>\nirremediable incompetence.)<\/p>\n<p>So, if you want to be listened to in Washington, your problem (one<br \/>\nwhich is general to left-wing intellectuals) is how to falsify<br \/>\nconservatives&#8217; belief that you hate America and want to destroy it.<br \/>\nThis is not going to be possible at all as long as you express<br \/>\ncontempt for the values and reasoning ability of the majority of<br \/>\nAmericans that voted for George Bush.<\/p>\n<p>But your problem runs deeper than that.  To be listened to, you<br \/>\nwill need to demonstrate that you share what present-day American<br \/>\nconservatives think of as their core beliefs, including but not limited<br \/>\nto:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The practical <em>and moral<\/em> superiority of free-market capitalism<br \/>\nover socialism and all other competing visions of political economics.<\/li>\n<li>American exceptionalism &mdash; the belief that the U.S. is uniquely<br \/>\nqualified by history and values to bring liberty to the oppressed of<br \/>\nthe world.<\/li>\n<li>Islamic terrorism is an unqualified evil which cannot be explained<br \/>\nor excused either by &#8220;root cause&#8221; analysis; further, that laying it<br \/>\nto past failures in U.S. policy is a form of blaming the victim.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Note that I am not endorsing these beliefs, simply pointing out that<br \/>\n<em>conservatives<\/em> generally hold them.)<\/p>\n<p>As long as conservatives believe that you do not share these core<br \/>\nbeliefs with them, they will conclude that your policy &#8220;help&#8221; on Iraq<br \/>\nor the War on Terror would be an active detriment.  And &mdash; here&#8217;s<br \/>\nthe hard part &mdash; they will be <em>justified<\/em> in that belief<br \/>\n(which, as you doubtless know, is not the same as the assertion that<br \/>\nthe belief is confirmably true).<\/p>\n<p>But you have yet another problem, which is not about the beliefs of<br \/>\nconservative intellectuals or policymaking elites.  It is that in<br \/>\nrejecting the core beliefs I have pointed at, you are not merely<br \/>\ndefining yourself out of the policy conversation conservatives are<br \/>\nready to have, you are also out of step with the majority of the<br \/>\nAmerican people.  The voters.  As long as that continues to be the<br \/>\ncase, the Left will continue to lose elections.<\/p>\n<p>Estlund&#8217;s posting responds to the previous one, in which Gerald Dworkin<br \/>\nsays intelligent things about the Bush administration&#8217;s apparent success<br \/>\nat preventing major terrorist acts in the U.S., and the electoral ramifications<br \/>\nthereof.  Excellent; if the Left is prepared to face reality this squarely,<br \/>\nthere is hope for them yet.<\/p>\n<p>J. David Velleman has more sensible things to say about the<br \/>\npolitics of homosexuality.  His distinction between the respect that<br \/>\nwe owe &#8220;gay rights&#8221; and the problematic status of &#8220;gay pride&#8221; is<br \/>\nastute.  I think leftists also need to understand that many<br \/>\nconservatives (and libertarians like myself) feel a deep and<br \/>\nprincipled revulsion not just against &#8220;gay pride&#8221; but against all<br \/>\nforms of manipulative identity politics, and are heartily fed up with<br \/>\nhaving leftists construe that revulsion as bigotry.<\/p>\n<p>Stephen Darwall&#8217;s <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/school_resegreg.html'>School<br \/>\nResegregation and the Exurbs<\/a>, on the other hand, feels like an<br \/>\nattempt to force new wine into old wineskins.  The Left&#8217;s tendency to<br \/>\nturn every policy argument into a diatribe about racism (too often,<br \/>\nracism that existed nowhere but in the Left&#8217;s imagination) was always<br \/>\none of its least attractive traits.  We could do without a<br \/>\nrevival.<\/p>\n<p>Again, I am not just discussing elite opinion here.  If you go to<br \/>\nthe voters with the argument that wanting to live in exurbs is<br \/>\nevidence of racism, they will stiff-arm you.  Actually, I think it is<br \/>\nonly the hothouse atmosphere of the academy that has kept racism alive<br \/>\nas a topic in American thought for the last fifteen years or so.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/being_forthrigh.html'>Being<br \/>\nForthright<\/a>, Seanna Shiffrin says nothing at all that has any<br \/>\nchance of increasing understanding between Left and Right, and does so<br \/>\nat some length.  Her screed reads, to any conservative (and even to a<br \/>\nlibertarian like me) as extended self-congratulation about how Left<br \/>\nconvictions are so obviously correct that if leftists trumpet them<br \/>\nloudly enough the people will come.<\/p>\n<p>This is a perfect example of the wages of groupthink.  In fact, if the<br \/>\nsix election cycles since 1980 demonstrate anything, it is that being<br \/>\nmore &#8220;forthright&#8221; about left-wing positions is a recipe for electoral<br \/>\ndisaster.<\/p>\n<p>Kwame Appiah <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/less_contempt.html'>takes<br \/>\nthe opposite tack<\/a>: &#8220;In these circumstances I think it would be<br \/>\nbetter to show up first with an offer to listen than with an offer to<br \/>\ntalk.&#8221;  A commenter correctly observes that this may be the most<br \/>\nuseful thing we have heard a Democrat say since the elections.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, the rest of the posting is yet another narrative about<br \/>\nleft-wing superiority, though Mr. Appiah gives it the novel twist of<br \/>\nascribing this belief to right-wingers!  For this he is quite properly<br \/>\ntaken to the woodshed buy some conservative commenters.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking as an observer who is (once again) <em>not<\/em> a<br \/>\nconservative, I salute the commenter who said &#8220;I think you go<br \/>\nprofoundly astray in this understanding of why conservatives rail<br \/>\nagainst the liberal media. It isn&#8217;t about being liked. It is about<br \/>\nbelieving that the liberal media distorts the truth and manipulates<br \/>\nbeliefs by using such distortions. They rail against the political and<br \/>\nsocial power which they believe is being corruptly used.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll go further than that.  I resent the way that the Left uses its<br \/>\neffective control of the mainstream media to manipulate belief even<br \/>\nwhen the manipulation advances causes I <em>agree<\/em> with &mdash;<br \/>\nfor example, abortion rights.  I don&#8217;t like &#8220;pro-lifers&#8221; and I don&#8217;t<br \/>\nagree with them &mdash; but that doesn&#8217;t stop me from noticing that<br \/>\nthey get stigmatized as all being yahoos and routinely associated with<br \/>\nclinic-bombers by the same media that is very painstaking in<br \/>\nseparating the Left&#8217;s violent crazies from allegedly more<br \/>\n&#8220;respectable&#8221; organizations like Greenpeace or PETA.<\/p>\n<p>It is wise of Joshua Cohen to have <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/the_moral_value.html'>noticed<\/a><br \/>\nthat gay-marriage initiatives probably actually hurt Bush rather than<br \/>\nwinning him the election. If the Left continues to comfort itself by<br \/>\nbelieving its only real problem is with Christian evangelicals, it will<br \/>\nslide further into denial and irrelevancy.<\/p>\n<p>The American rejection of what Cohen calls &#8220;progressive values&#8221; is<br \/>\nmuch, much broader based than that.  As an agnostic Wiccan who thinks<br \/>\nthe War on Drugs was a huge toxic blunder, I am not personally<br \/>\nthrilled about this development, but I recognize it as fact<br \/>\nnevertheless.  Mr. Cohen is to be commended for urging this unwelcome<br \/>\nnews on the Left.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, J. David Velleman&#8217;s <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/the_academic_re.html'>post<\/a><br \/>\non the Academic Bill of Rights does not go nearly far enough.  His is<br \/>\na more sophisticated form of defensive crouch than the outright denial<br \/>\nwe usually see, but merely admitting that &#8220;large regions of the<br \/>\nhumanities and social sciences have become increasingly ideological,&#8221; doesn&#8217;t<br \/>\neven come close to addressing the actual magnitude of the problem.<\/p>\n<p>I am, in an important sense, an applied humanist\/sociologist.  My<br \/>\n<a href='http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/writings\/cathedral-bazaar\/'>analysis<\/a><br \/>\nof the anthropology and sociology of open-source software development<br \/>\nhas a significant reputation in academia; it has been cited with the<br \/>\ncoveted adjective &#8220;seminal&#8221; and spawned quite a number of master&#8217;s and<br \/>\ndoctoral theses.  My work has required that I enter the conceptual<br \/>\nworld of modern &#8220;humanities and social sciences&#8221; &mdash; not merely to<br \/>\ntheorize about these disciplines, but to <em>use<\/em> them in ways<br \/>\nthat have helped trigger transformative changes in the software<br \/>\nindustry.<\/p>\n<p>I have immodestly set forth these qualifications here because my<br \/>\nexperience requires an even stronger indictment than David Horowitz&#8217;s,<br \/>\nlet alone the mild one that Mr. Velleman will admit.  I have<br \/>\nencountered entire academic fields that have been effectively<br \/>\n<em>destroyed<\/em> by Left politics, in the sense that they can no<br \/>\nlonger talk about anything other than power relations.  Postmodern<br \/>\nliterary criticism is only the most obvious example; for that matter,<br \/>\npostmodernist <em>anything<\/em> is reliably a nihilist swamp obsessed<br \/>\nwith &#8216;agendas&#8217; and &#8216;power relations&#8217; to the exclusion of its<br \/>\nostensible subject matter.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s one that affects me particularly: the damage done to<br \/>\ncultural anthropology has been horrific, with the perverse effect of<br \/>\nmaking my amateur and tentative essays in it look far stronger than<br \/>\nthey would have if the field were actually healthy.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have a fix for this problem.  But I do know that more than any<br \/>\nmere housecleaning is needed.  Some of these dwellings are so rotted out<br \/>\nthat they will have to be razed and rebuilt before they are habitable<br \/>\nby anything but political animals.<\/p>\n<p>Don Herzog is right to ask, in <a hreg='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/religion_and_po.html'><br \/>\nReligion and politics<\/a>, exactly what conservatives want when they say<br \/>\nAmericans should agree that we a &#8220;Christian nation&#8221;.  This is exactly the<br \/>\nsort of question that the Left, if its continued existence is to mean<br \/>\nanything useful, <em>should<\/em> be pushing.<\/p>\n<p>J. David Velleman makes the surprising <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/let_roe_go.html'>concession<\/a><br \/>\nthat Roe V. Wade was bad politics and bad law.  As a pro-choicer who<br \/>\nnevertheless agrees with conservatives on this point (and largely for<br \/>\nthe reasons Velleman states), I have been wondering when the Left<br \/>\nwould begin to wake up on this point.<\/p>\n<p>Groupthink shows up again in Gerald Dworkin&#8217;s <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/less_contempt_m.html'>Less<br \/>\ncontempt; more mutual ground<\/a>.  I&#8217;m thinking in particular of his claim<br \/>\nthat &#8220;Both those who advocate gun-control and those who oppose it can<br \/>\nagree that trigger-locks and other safety devices are desirable.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It is evident here that Mr. Dworkin has no idea what pro-firearms<br \/>\nactivists like myself actually believe.  It seems likely he has never<br \/>\nactually spoken with one; otherwise he would know that we regard<br \/>\ntrigger locks as bad things, because they reduce the utility of<br \/>\nfirearms for one of their principal purposes &mdash; self-defense.  If<br \/>\nyour friendly neighborhood junkie breaks into your home and menaces<br \/>\nyour family with a knife (or, as in one recent case, a branding iron)<br \/>\nyou need to be able to get the weapon into play <em>fast<\/em>.<br \/>\nTrigger locks and soi-disant &#8220;safety devices&#8221; primarily benefit<br \/>\ncriminals by reducing their risks.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, we regard the push for trigger locks as an underhanded<br \/>\nattempt to make self-defense impractical so that popular support for<br \/>\nfirearms rights will lose a major prop.  If Mr. Dworkin had ever discussed<br \/>\nthis issue outside a UC Davis faculty meeting, he would probably know<br \/>\nthis.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/not_too_bright.html'>Not<br \/>\nToo Bright<\/a>, J. David Velleman misses a central point about<br \/>\nAmerican hostility to the &#8220;intelligentsia&#8221; because he falls back into<br \/>\nthe comforting Left groupthink about the Christian evangelicals and<br \/>\n&#8220;moral values&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m an intellectual myself, not a Christian, not a conservative.<br \/>\nYet I understand the emotion Mr. Dworkin reads as<br \/>\n&#8220;anti-intellectualism&#8221;; I even sympathize with it to some extent.  It<br \/>\nis a folk reaction to what Julian Benda called <a href='http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/esrblog\/index.php?m=200211'>le trahison<br \/>\ndes clercs<\/a>.  The West&#8217;s intelligentsia &mdash; not all of it, but<br \/>\nenough of it to tar all of us &mdash; was a willing accomplice in the<br \/>\nterrible totalitarian crimes of the 20th century.  Today, the same<br \/>\nsegments of the intelligentsia that cooperated with Stalinism are<br \/>\nissuing apologetics for al-Qaeda. (This is not just metaphorically but<br \/>\n<em>literally<\/em> the case, as the pedigree of A.N.S.W.E.R. and the<br \/>\n&#8220;Not In Our Name&#8221; organizers shows.)<\/p>\n<p>Until the academic Left faces up to the evil at the center of its<br \/>\nown history, it will completely fail to understand why<br \/>\n&#8220;anti-intellectualism&#8221; is common even anong people who find Christian<br \/>\n&#8220;moral values&#8221; argument as off-putting as I do.<\/p>\n<p>We could ask for no better illustration of the blindness induced by<br \/>\ncomforting groupthink than Elizabeth Anderson&#8217;s <a href='http:\/\/left2right.typepad.com\/main\/2004\/11\/what_hume_can_t.html'><br \/>\nWhat Hume can teach us about our partisan divisions<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>She writes &#8220;If interests were all that divided us, the Democratic<br \/>\nParty (what there is of the Left that has institutional power) would<br \/>\nenjoy an overwhelming majority, since it represents the interests of<br \/>\nthe bulk of the population, while Republican policies favor mainly the<br \/>\nrich.  Most people understand this, and the Left can offer sound<br \/>\narguments and evidence to persuade those who disagree.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I am not a Republican.  I have never been a Republican.  But claims<br \/>\nlike this, presented as though they are unassailable fact, utterly<br \/>\ninfuriate me.  And if they infuriate <em>me<\/em>, imagine how they<br \/>\nwould affect an actual conservative!<\/p>\n<p>As a matter of political economics, I believe that the high-tax,<br \/>\nhigh-spending policies of the Democrats benefit <em>nobody<\/em> except<br \/>\na small class of elite parasites and a slightly larger one of welfare<br \/>\nclients; the &#8220;bulk of the population&#8221; gets shafted, forced to pay the<br \/>\nbill for redistributive programs that wind up doing net damage to<br \/>\nsociety.  Nor is there any reason, given that the Democrats now rely<br \/>\nmore on wealthy contributors than the Republicans, to credit the<br \/>\nworn-out canard that Republicans are tools of the rich.<\/p>\n<p>It is not, however, the factual falsity of Ms. Anderson&#8217;s claim<br \/>\nthat is most infuriating, but its smugness, its blind arrogance,<br \/>\nits casual assumption that no reasonable person could possibly<br \/>\ndisagree with the premises.  Anyone who decides to reject Julian<br \/>\nBenda&#8217;s analysis need look no further for an explanation of<br \/>\nAmerican anti-intellectualism than this. After reading it, I&#8217;m<br \/>\nalmost ready to torch the nearest ivory tower myself.<\/p>\n<p>It is a good thing that the skein finishes (actually, begins) with<br \/>\nDavid J. Velleman&#8217;s honest puzzlement about conservative notions of &#8220;absolute<br \/>\nevil&#8221;; otherwise, with the taste of Ms, Anderson&#8217;s purblind parochialism<br \/>\nin my mouth, I might have to conclude that Left2Right&#8217;s project is<br \/>\nunsalvageable.<\/p>\n<p>What can we conclude from Left2Right&#8217;s first three weeks of<br \/>\npostings?  My own evaluation begins with praise: comparing with what I<br \/>\nread elsewhere, I think these writers truly do represent the best of<br \/>\nthe modern Left.  I see more willingness than I might have expected<br \/>\nto honestly question some of the Left&#8217;s sacred cows.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, the news is far from all good.  Too many smug<br \/>\nshibboleths are also being repeated here.  There is too much talk and<br \/>\nnot enough listening &ndash; not enough attempt to engage the Right&#8217;s<br \/>\nbeliefs (as opposed to a comforting left-wing parody of those beliefs).<\/p>\n<p>Kwame Appiah is right.  If you really want to build a healthy<br \/>\ndialogue with the right-wing majority in America, you need to approach<br \/>\nthem not to teach but to <em>learn<\/em>.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading a new blog called Left2Right, founded in mid-November 2004 as an attempt by a group of left-wing intellectuals to reach out to intelligent people on the right of the American political spectrum. It is indeed a thought-provoking read, but the thoughts they are provoking are not necessarily of the sort they intend.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=170\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Left2Right &#8211; a critical appraisal<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}