“Conservatives” welcome self-described liberal to “conservative” fold

Author Keith Thompson, a life-long left-liberal, announced a couple of months ago in the San Francisco Chronicle that his membership in the left had ended. His reasons were the left’s craziness, anti-Americanism, opposition to spreading freedom, hatred of Bush über alles, and so on. It’s a decent article, but I was most struck by the responses of Lucianne.com people to it.

One L-dotter said:

Welcome aboard Keith. There are all kinds of folks here, people bound together by a common belief in personal freedom, personal responsibility, equality of opportunity, democracy (especially as implemented in a representative republic form, but flexible), freedom of religion (not from religion), capitalism (especially as implemented to provide greater rewards to those who choose to work harder, and take risks that can be controlled by working even even harder), with true compassion for the less fortunate combined with a belief that it is our responsibility to personally do things to directly benefit those in need. We used to be called liberals, but we are now all radical conservatives, fighting to hold society together in spite of the exceptional press given to the reactionary liberals. Welcome to a brave new world, and a brave new lexicon.

One L-dotter after another said, “Welcome home, Keith.”

Welcome to what home? Thompson said he had left the left and the left-liberals, and had become a moderate liberal. Good for him, though, by his own account, it had taken him an awful long time to make the move, since his doubts about the left started around 1980. Lucianne.com is supposedly a conservative site. If all these conservatives are welcoming a liberal to their “home,” that means they see no difference between their conservatism and his liberalism. Which, of course, is what I’ve been saying all along. Today’s mainstream conservatism is liberalism.

Another way of looking at it is that the left-liberalism that Thompson has renounced is the true norm for our society, since having a single drop of non-left-liberal blood makes Thompson a conservative. The ruling norm in a society requires purity. The slightest departure from the norm makes a person the opposite of the norm, i.e., a conservative.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 30, 2005 02:00 AM | Send