Once more with feeling

In a piece republished from the New York Times today, I see an echo of the defeat of the press. The piece (here) says:

However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.

Help me here, please. How is it that the left and right don't actually compete to provide the best answers for abortion and same-sex marriage? Is it because, like on issues of race and gender equality, the left was right all along, and it took a long time for the right to divest itself of the bigots that "led" on those issues? Or is it, because his editor's ears had gone deaf, the reporter got to slide the newest lie about the left into the text? I suspect the latter, if only because the reporter is so utterly stunned that the Democratic front runners are more moral in person than the Republicans are this year.

It's no accident that the Democratic front runners lead more moral lives than their right wing rivals. The Democrats, liberals all, are comfortable with the core doctrine of liberalism, that people really are qualified to make their own decisions, whether individually or collectively. That doesn't mean that government has no role to play outside a very narrow (and objectively anti-poor, anti-middle class) set of issues, but rather that people are qualified to make decisions about their own lives, and that the power of enforcement should be used as little as possible. True liberals trust other people to make reasonable decisions about their own lives, although they understand that people may fail to make such decisions.

Beliefs have consequences, though. If I repeatedly say to you "I trust you to make this decision or that decision", then I must be willing to believe that people typically make good decisions, and, at the end of the day, that depends on me, myself, having the experience of making difficult rational decisions. As a result, someone who's willing to extend freedom to others over a long period of time will usually be doing so based on having made good decisions themselves, despite temptation or abuse. That is, liberalism and libertarianism are political philosophies which select for self-controlled people who can be trusted with power over themselves.

By corollary, authoritarianism and radicalism would tend to be most attractive to those who have "uncontrollable urges" -- a pattern we've seen a lot of in recent years in the leaders of the "religious right". Tom Delay, Grover Norquist, and Jack Abramoff were all terribly susceptible to sin of greed, and were unable to restrain themselves from taking everything they could. Ted Haggard, Larry Craig and Mark Foley were all horrified by their homoerotic impulses, and by their inability to channel them into normal behavior, and so they were and are unable to imagine that normal people feel sexual urges all the time, while still managing to keep from tearing each other's clothes off in the office. Rudy Giuliani is a serial betrayer of wife and family, and so believes that nobody is trustworthy. Mitt Romney will do anything for power, and so imagines that all others are corrupted by the same vice.

There's nothing special about conservativism itself here, by the way. Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, Kim Il Sun and Kim Jung Il in North Korea, Hussein in Iraq, Assad in Syria...there are plenty of left wing authoritarians with similar patterns of deceptive left-wing thugs. Closer to home, one can raise the examples of the Black Panthers, Elijah Mohammed and the Weathermen as well. It's only that the right in America right now is the home of our home-grown authoritarian movement.

Maybe the author of the New York Times piece was saying that the left was unquestionably correct about about gay rights -- which include, but are certainly not limited to the right marry -- and reproductive rights -- which include, but are certainly not limited to the right to a therapeutic abortion. I kind of doubt it, though.