Tim Blair

Great article, but it's from a year and a half ago. I hope that the author still feels that way.

It’s a cool article, dated 10/14/2002 at its page bottom. The NY Observer Website, like the Aftenposten Website, is quite deceptive in its placement of current date in a place where you expect to see article date.

Whoa! Didn't see that earlier date. Still, it's so good I'll leave it as is.

The Observer had good reason to republish this article. No need to reinvent the wheel. And the author is well respected, not a hack.

Dang....Rosenbaum's first brickbat was so good that I was hoping he had written another.

Leave it up. It deserves to be read again.

Roger Simon just linked to it too, and also missed that it's eighteen months old. Its timeless timeliness is a sad indicator that nothing ever changes for the left.

Rosenbaum makes one mistake out of sheer habit.
He equates the right's failure to come to terms with its negligence on racial matters with the left's failure to come to terms with its support of tyrannies.
Two problems. One is the assertion that the right was any more negligent than the left. A higher proportion of republicans voted for the civil rights bills than did democrats. Dems in Congress didn't want to disturb the dems in the states who were fighting against civil rights.
The other is that it's HISTORY.
The left has the history Rosenbaum mentions, but its support of tyrannies is also current events.
There's a difference.

Apparently Rosenbaum missed the debate between Robert Conquest and Hitchens
(http://www.uncommonknowledge.org/00fall/501.html) from March of 2000 in which Hitchens argued, unpersuasively in my opinion, that the misdeeds committed in the name of communism were less foul than those committed by fascism. The debate is interesting because in it we see Hitchens at a time when he was still clutching to rightness of his trotskyist ideology.

I missed it first time 'round, so thanks.

I'd like to see it printed out on very stiff paper, rolled up and a copy shoved down the throat of every lefty idiot present at the next anti-American protest rally.
That'd buy a few moments of "peace"

There's so many stories out there like this ...

Who was it who first said (words to the effect that) if you are not a socialist when you are young, you have no heart ... but if you don't quickly grow out of it, you have no brain? It's a comforting thought for many ex-lefties who woke up to themselves, like me.

Ron Rosenbaum says: "Before I get into the two idiocies that tipped the scale for me, I want to make clear that saying goodbye to idiocies on the Left doesn’t mean becoming a conservative, neo- or otherwise." Give it time, Ron, give it time! If you have the courage to systematically re-examine all of your dearly-held and cherished beliefs (aka delusions), you never know what you might end up calling yourself. Maybe even not any convenient category at all.

I agree with the theme of the piece, but both Mr. Rosenbaum and Mr. Lang misunderstand Heidegger's position. I comment on that in my blog if you are interested in that aspect of philosophy and the XXth c.

Read Paul McGeogh in the SMH of 30 March 2004, and then reflect on this quote from Rosenbaum:

"Sept. 11 reminds them that Americans are first and foremost murderers, so let’s not spend a moment acknowledging that little matter of Sept. 11 being a day on which 3,000 Americans were murdered by the "pure-hearted killers" of Al Qaeda. Who, when not committing mass murder, stone women as punishment, torture gays, crush free thought by executing dissidents. No, they get a pass (and the 3,000 become non-persons). Because they hate America, they must be for liberation, and so we can’t blame them; we must accuse ourselves of being killers".

Ummm, the KKK was a Democratic organization.

Have all the high-profile "defections" in ideology been away from the Left, or are there examples of Right -> Left, eg in the last decade?
(Local basket-case Robert Manne excepted)

Richard,

I think you're confusing right/left with Republicans/Democrats. George Wallace & Strom Thurmond were Democrats -- but that didn't make them liberals. Both parties were odd hodge-podges back then. (As an aside, Harry Turtledove, in one of his best alternate histories, _How Few Remain_ took Lincoln's own writings and showed how he could have plausibly moved towards Socialism..)

Ted

Barry Goldwater might be described as a guy who moved from the right during his political career to a more liberal position, particularly in terms of social and cultural issues, in his later years.

Goldwater moved from rightwing conservativism on social issues to a more libertarian perspective. That's NOT the same as a leftist perspective. Both leftists and rightists tend to hate libertarians, but for different reasons.

Monsieur Bidet, good point! I have no idea where Goldwater ended up on economic issues.

Typical leftist. Eighty years of communist atrocities didn't bother him, but a movie review and a cocktail party comment really pissed him off.

Flash! Bloghead cuts and pastes article from 18 months ago! Read all about it! Again.

You did.

As an admirer of the Steve McQueen school of acting (i.e. fewer words are better), I am always amazed by anyone whose ideas are so convoluted that they can't be expressed in a few short sentences, but require paragraph after paragraph. Mr. Rosenbaum's piece pretty much has the feel that all those old words take an awful long time to erase.