Today's "liberals" are really leftists who have rejected the older liberal belief in a shared equality of citizens before the law and have embraced the socialist vision of "equality as a fact and equality as a result," as Lyndon Johnson famously put it.

..the left has for tactical reasons largely shifted its demand for equality of results away from the economic sphere to the cultural/moral sphere and the advancement of "oppressed" cultural and ethnic groups. The result is cultural socialism, which entails the same kind of bureaucratically imposed egalitarian “solution” as existed under the older socialism, and thus leads to a cultural double standard.

... the belief in equality requires leftists to delegitimize
anyone who upholds the traditional moral code, and to excuse anyone who violates it, because traditional morality says that some behaviors are objectively better than others, which is (to leftists) discriminatory. The belief in equality requires leftists to demand the virtual dismantling of Christianity, because, as James Carroll claims in his anti-Christian opus, Constantine's Sword, Christianity, by its very existence and its claim to being the true religion, denigrates Judaism and the Jews; Carroll isn't bothered that every sentence of his book denigrates Christianity and Christians.

The above link is to an article that is a few years old, but still poignant. I've struggled with political labels myself and am still finding where I fit politically in a lot of things. Because of my background I've always had very bad gut reactions to the term "conservative" and to this day continued to call myself "liberal" or "left." More and more though I can't identify with that camp, at least as the mainstream understands it, and have to confess I'm falling in more with the conservative understanding. At the same time I certainly don't agree with everything traditional conservatives support, and find many beliefs alluded to in this article problematic. I guess I'm truly non-partisan and can't fit in with any one group's agenda. Unfortunately for me, this makes me feel totally impotent and voiceless in our two-party system.

Labels: politics