FACING UP TO THE REAL NATURE OF THE HARD LEFT

I usually steer clear of writing on purely domestic politics because the issues are always more complex in reality than committed partisans are willing to admit and because the difficulty of having having an intelligent dialogue about hot-button issues. Granted, it is the hyperpolitical blogs that have the big audiences but if I wanted to preach to the choir, I’d get myself a church.

Nevertheless, in the last few days a couple of figures with impeccable credentials as men of the Left awoke to the realization that the broad American Left tolerates and includes people with a very dangerous mindset. Not that this is a revelation to those of us on the Right or the Middle ( or who have been following the history of the past century) but it is a fact about which many liberals, some of whom are intelligent people for whom I have much respect, are in deep denial. To admit that their side openly welcomes -and regularly defends- the sort of unsavory hater or dedicated authoritarian that they regularly condemn on the Religious Right is viewed as an unacceptable concession to conservatives -instead of being a simple concession to the reality of human nature. I guess nobody reads Eric Hoffer these days.

Here are the pieces in question:

“Liberal McCarthyism Bigotry and hate aren’t just for right-wingers anymore.” by Lanny Davis in the Wall Street Journal.

“Has the Left Gone Mad?” by Dr. Mark A. LeVine at HNN.

Lanny Davis is a well known public figure, attorney, Democratic activist and former official in the Clinton administration who was, for a time, the chief attack dog against the ” Vast Right-wing conspiracy”. Dr. LeVine is less well-known, being a MENA scholar of the kind of far Left, anti-Israeli, academic politics that, say, David Horowitz, loves to attack. These are not moderate Democrats or centrists, Davis and LeVine are both anti-war progressives.

Yet they have, for various reasons, decided to break the unspoken rule against calling attention to the existence of the Marxoid hardliners, the wingnuts and the radical haters who pollute the otherwise liberal and democratic politics of their Party. Here are snippets of what they had to say:

First, Lanny Davis:

“I came to believe that we liberals couldn’t possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years–with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage–I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman:

• “Ned Lamont and his supporters need to [g]et real busy. Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an AMerican who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby” (by “rim,” posted on Huffington Post, July 6, 2006).

• “Joe’s on the Senate floor now and he’s growing a beard. He has about a weeks growth on his face. . . . I hope he dyes his beard Blood red. It would be so appropriate” (by “ctkeith,” posted on Daily Kos, July 11 and 12, 2005).

• On “Lieberman vs. Murtha”: “as everybody knows, jews ONLY care about the welfare of other jews; thanks ever so much for reminding everyone of this most salient fact, so that we might better ignore all that jewish propaganda [by Lieberman] about participating in the civil rights movement of the 60s and so on” (by “tomjones,” posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).”

Unsurprisingly, DailyKos was at hand to provide examples of rancid anti-semitism for the Davis op-ed.

Now for Mark LeVine:

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