Why do conservatives and liberals respond so differently to the current war in Georgia?
The answer to that question exposes the great political divide separating left and right, Democrats and Republicans, in today’s America. The stark contrast between Barack Obama and John McCain at this weekend’s televised Civil Forum at California’s Saddleback Church further underlined the vast gulf in worldviews when it comes to injecting moral standards or arguments into politics.
Conservatives approach every challenge with a determination to approach the question (as far as possible)as a choice between right and wrong, good and evil. Liberals, on the other hand, look for nuances, subtleties or extenuating circumstances. They feel reluctant to denounce any action or position as unequivocally wrong, or to endorse any alternative as quintessentially right.
Those who take their inspiration from Ronald Reagan enthusiastically embrace moral absolutes; those who admire Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama feel uncomfortable with terms like good and evil when applied to politics and world affairs. Republicans relish crisp black-and-white when drawing distinctions; “progressives” feel an incurable fondness for shades of gray. On foreign policy, social issues, even the economy, the right wants to take sides and to make sure the good guys win. The left, on the other hand, seeks to split the difference among warring interests in behalf of a “can’t-we-all-get-along” vision of moral equivalency.
When John McCain responded to the invasion of Georgia with a full-throated, unequivocal denunciation of Russian bullying, Barack Obama’s top foreign policy advisor, Susan Rice, condemned the Republican nominee for “shooting from the hip” and “complicating” the situation. Her criticism echoed the sentiments of nervous 1980’s liberals who slammed President Reagan’s “simple-minded” and “destabilizing” characterization of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire.”
In contrast to The Gipper’s famous courage and clarity, Obama offered a mild and even-handed initial response to the attack on Georgia calling on both sides, amazingly, to “show restraint and to avoid an escalation to full-scale war… All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability of Georgia.” To him, in other words, the bloody attack and brutal occupation of a sovereign state represented some sort of misunderstanding, an unfortunate break between rivals of more or less comparable guilt and legitimacy. His feeble response to the most menacing Russian maneuver in a generation recalls the leftist insistence of moral equivalence between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. at the height of the Cold War. Yes, the Soviets might murder millions and oppress hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans, but America had no right to respond because we sanctioned segregation in our own southern states or supported corrupt dictators in Latin America.
When conservatives insisted that the struggle between the superpowers still represented a conflict between good and evil, they never claimed that America counted as flawless and pure, or that the Soviet Union possessed no virtues at all (after all, they sustained a formidable ballet company). The Bible informs core western concepts of right and wrong, but even Holy Scripture features heroes with prominent flaws and shortcomings (like King David, Samson, even Moses and Abraham) who nonetheless champion goodness and righteousness against the vastly more cruel and corrupt forces arrayed against them.
Fortunately, the Good Book reports no liberal interest groups of antiquity who insisted on defending the civil rights of Philistines or Amalekites, or demanded respectful consideration of Pharaoh's heartfelt arguments against freeing his slaves, or championed a compassionate, multicultural outlook that defended the time-honored, distinctive Roman tradition of treating religious dissenters to crucifixion and mutilation.
Liberals have alienated countless ordinary citizens by their promiscuous deployment of sympathy – expressing compassion and understanding for foreign nations and domestic criminals who don’t deserve their concern in any way. The persistent suspicion that leftists count as “soft on crime” comes from their noisily expressed 1960’s solicitude for imprisoned perpetrators above the victims of violence – much as today’s liberals seem vastly more worried over the welfare of the anti-American fanatics in Guantanamo than they are for the heroic counter-terrorism fighters who keep us safe. It’s not entirely fair to say that the ACLU and its acolytes hate America, but it does seem that they feel no more loyalty to their own country than they do to its most implacable enemies.
In any event, the moral obtuseness of the left remains apparently incurable, resulting in the stubborn refusal to draw distinctions between good guys and bad guys at home or abroad, or to acknowledge that the decent or indecent behavior of nations or individuals must dictate the reward and respect they receive.
This same refusal applies to economic policies, where the redistributionist rhetoric of the Obama camp demands financial and standard-of-living guarantees disconnected from an individual’s hard work, productivity or moral worth. Unfortunately, the instinctive liberal reluctance to take sides between the righteous and the rotten doesn’t mean a non-interventionist, hands-off approach to economic policy. On the contrary, the left favors aggressive governmental involvement to punish – or at least question – material success. To progressives, that success counts as an indication of unfair advantage, rather than the result of productivity and job creation. A society becomes rich only if its members create wealth, but the left views such accumulation of resources as suspect and dangerous. Liberals want economic intervention not to protect or reward virtue, but to restrain the natural consequences of virtuous behavior such as disciplined work, patient saving, stable family formation, and entrepreneurial risk-taking.
Continued... |