I found the link to Keith Thompson's 2005 SF Chronicle op-ed piece, titled Leaving the Left: I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled Progressives in a comment somewhere recently. I cannot recall whether I had read it in the past or not, but I post it because it sounds much like what happened to my thinking in my 30s.
Like most well-educated Protestant families in New England at the time (and much less so, today), I was raised in a soft-Left-oriented home. You know: "Joe McCarthy was the devil, but Joe Stalin meant well and besides, the Russians have free medical care." (The only Socialist we were willing to hate was Hitler.) This was combined with a solicitous condescension towards blacks, the "poor" people who worked with their hands, and any other convenient "victim" group. We "cared" about them, or so we convinced ourselves in our self-admiring superiority - but we didn't really know any of them very well, and had no clue about how they ran, or planned, their lives.
What else did we take on faith? That the UN would bring an end to war, that higher taxes (on other people) were a very good idea, that pacifism usually made sense even in the face of an enemy ("Better Red than Dead"), that FDR was a great president, that the world of business - as compared to the "professions" - was tainted with "selfishness" and thus dishonorable, that patriotism was jingoism and nationalism a bad thing, that there was no real "evil" (other than Conservatives), and that DDT was a terrible thing. Socially "nice" stuff like that.
(Of course, we took many good, solid things on faith too, but that's another story and another blog post.)
We all felt smugly virtuous, I think, and quite superior to the ignorant and presumably unwashed masses who cast votes for "idiots" like Nixon and Barry Goldwater instead of for the enlightened ones who only wanted to "help them."
That was before I fully appreciated how much Americans - and I - appreciate our freedom from government power and intrusion. And what a sturdy, thrifty, resourceful, practical, independent, hard-working bunch we Americans really are. I will never forget my first lesson in this on a summer job during high school, but it took years of exposure to real life and to real people to cure me of my malady which was, at the bottom of it, I think, related to pride: the sickest form of pride - the notion that we - the fortunate and privileged "intelligentsia" - the bien-pensants - knew what was best for other folks and for the country. We were educated in everything except humility, common sense, and an adequate appreciation for freedom. Life's wisdom cannot be taught. Only learned.
So, to return to a quote from Thompson's essay, which is similar to, but better than, the one I would have written:
I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").
The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.
If you never read it, please do so.
