Polemic Of The Day: To The Left, Politics Is Like Religion

06 Oct, 2003 by John Hawkins

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Here’s an exchange from the interview I did with David Limbaugh…

“John Hawkins: Here’s another quote about the left and religion from Ann Coulter. She said,

David Limbaugh: I’ve said that liberals approach their politics almost as a theology too. They adhere to their liberal principles much as religious people adhere to their theology and their religion.”

You want to see a perfect example of what we were talking about? Check out the end of this Johnathan Foreman op/ed about Arnold Schwarzengroper’s happy hands…

Apart from the testimony of the groping victims, both of whom were convincing, the most honest thing I heard came from film producer and Codepink activist Patricia Foulkrod.

“If Arnold was a brilliant pol and had this thing about inappropriate behavior, we’d figure a way of getting around it. I think it’s to our detriment to go on too much about the groping. But it’s our way in. This is really about the GOP trying to take California in 2004 and our trying to stop it.”

A lot of people who aren’t really into politics believe that conservatives and liberals are simply mirror images of each other with different ideologies. In some respects, that’s true. But there are a lot of differences as well. One of them is that many people on the left tend to look at their ideology much like religious doctrine. Now do some people on the right do that too? Yes, but to a much lesser extent.

For example, take Trent Lott. There would have been a barely a whimper about his comments at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party if he had been a Democrat. On the other hand, do you think any Republican would have been treated like anything other than scum of the earth by HIS OWN PARTY if he had gone to Baghdad and tried to help out Saddam Hussein like Bonior & McDermott did? Any member of the GOP who did that, whether a Democrat were President or not, would be a pariah until they were voted out of office at the end of their term.

Then look to Kosovo. Many people in the GOP opposed it because they said it wasn’t in our interests to go. But then President Bush was acting as if he wanted to go to Liberia…and still, most of the Conservative columns I saw were against it.

On the other hand, when Bill Clinton was talking about WMD, terrorists, & invading Iraq, a lot of prominent left-wingers were for it. But when Bush was talking about WMD, terrorists, & invading Iraq, many of those same Democrats opposed doing the exact same thing they supported vociferously when Clinton was in office. I bet you that if Al Gore had been in the White House, 50%+ of the people on the left who were against the war would have flipped sides and supported it while the overwhelming majority of conservatives would have held the same position.

You see to many of the protestors, it wasn’t necessarily about the war itself, it was about who was in charge when we waged it. All those petty little motives they attributed to Bush like a “war for oil,” “revenge for daddy,” “trying to help out business buddies,” etc, wouldn’t have been an issue if a Democrat was in the White House, because he would have been on their side. Whereas Conservatives would have looked at the issue largely in the same way because most of them made their decision based on whether they thought about the issue, not out of blind loyalty to their party.

Like I said, to many people on the left, their positions are more like religious doctrine than positions they’ve come to hold because of any sort of logical thought process. To them it’s “the left is good, the right is bad”, and any scruples or principles they might have get tossed to the side if they get in the way of supporting “their team”. Like religion, it’s not about logic with them, it’s about an unshakable faith that their side is right no matter what evidence can be produced to the contrary. That’s why I’ve always said that you’re not going to convince liberals to change their minds with logic. If they were logical people, they wouldn’t be liberals to begin with.