Every important element of the liberal program stems from the one central goal of assisting the unfortunate. Pushing for high taxes, expensive social programs, universal health coverage, lunches and breakfasts in the schools, income redistribution, affirmative action, reparations, a higher minimum wage, more generous foreign aid, multiculturalism, gay marriage, protecting endangered species, animal rights, enhancing entitlements, affirming prison rights, providing generous benefits for illegal immigrants – all these leftist imperatives arise from a common commitment to protect the powerless and uplift the unfortunate.

In fact, the recent hearings about the shabby treatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reade Medical Center represented a concerted effort to transform America’s military into a victims group worthy of liberal sympathy. John Kerry's notorious and derisive comments about kids who do poorly in school getting "stuck in Iraq" complemented this ongoing effort to portray active duty personnel as oppressed and hapless losers, rather than formidable and willing warriors.

The persistent preference for the powerless and purportedly oppressed applies only imperfectly to explaining leftist support for legalized abortion. The unborn, after all, plausibly qualify as the ultimate underdogs: innocent, fragile, utterly helpless. Nevertheless, they’ve never lived outside the womb and so failed to achieve the status of aggrieved victims – suffering from racism, sexism, homophobia, economic oppression. Moreover, the mother seeking the abortion represents a far more visible victim—which helps explain the desperate determination by pro-abortion forces to stop legislation in Georgia and elsewhere that would require abortion providers to offer ultra-sound images of the baby in utero before the woman makes the final decision to terminate her pregnancy. In other words, they don’t want anyone or anything to compete with the stressed, unhappily pregnant mother for pity and sympathy.

In fact, favored victim groups can lose their sacred claims on the liberal imagination as evidenced by shifting perspectives on the left concerning the State of Israel. In the wake of the devastation of the Holocaust, and with the Jews fighting for their lives against massive Arab armies in 1949 and '67, liberals naturally gave strong, nearly unanimous support to the Israeli underdogs. After the decisive victory in 1967, however, Israel assumed the role of regional power and began losing leftist support just as more and more conservatives came to appreciate America's redoubtable and reliable ally. Today, the Jewish state counts as far too successful, economically productive and militarily formidable to win much liberal sympathy, while the Palestinians remain so pathetically divided, dysfunctional, impoverished and inept that lefties (even Jewish lefties) react to their radical rhetoric with either applause or apologetics.

That's the problem with liberal sympathy for the downtrodden and underprivileged: if you make too much progress, you’ll compromise your claims to advocacy and assistance. The best victim groups are those that reliably maintain their victim status. In this sense, the leftist world view effectively discourages empowerment or the pursuit of prosperity and pushes suffering subgroups to more or less permanent self pity.

Moreover, raising taxes on high earners in order to provide more give-aways to the unproductive clearly punishes success while rewarding failure. All but the most willfully blinded liberal activists understand that punishing success helps to discourage it while rewarding failure and dysfunction encourages much more of the same. The massive failures of the US welfare system, and our ill-starred "War on Poverty," indicate that if you give people money in exchange for idleness you’ll get more indolence, and if you take away more money from the most industrious you’ll get less productive activity.

On occasion, conservatives criticize liberals for a failure to support standards or to make distinctions, but that’s not entirely fair, since leftists do love to emphasize the difference between rich and poor, lucky and unlucky, winners and losers.

Leftists feel virtuous and unselfish for invariably embracing the losers, but with this persistent preference it’s society itself that loses most.