Here is an interesting article.

The problem with Democrats

Liberals may be well-meaning, but that is about all they are

by PAUL D. MILLER

Opinions Editor

I am rabid environmentalist and care passionately about the poor. Yet
I would sooner pull out a constitutionally protected handgun and
shoot myself while chain smoking, eating red meat, and conducting a
painful experiment on a cute bunny rabbit than become a Democrat.
Here is why I am not a liberal:



Liberalism is simplistic. Whenever there is a problem, liberals
define it as a tragedy of the commons or an example of the private
sector under providing public goods, or make it an issue of rights.
The solution, of course, is to make it government's job to provide
the good or protect the newly minted right.

No doubt a President Gore would soon grace us with a right to the
internet or make self-confidence a public good which needs to be
provided by federal education standards.



The Left is short-sighted. It wants to fund a behemoth welfare state
at home while crusading and gallivanting about the globe in defense
of American ideology abroad. The ever-increasing financial demands of
their utopian vision will suck up all the surplus from our miracle
market, increase the yearly interest payments on the debt, and
necessitate more taxes.

In the long term, the liberal vision is only sustainable if they
succeed in raising the already immorally large tax burden. Yes,
immoral. Coercively appropriating the fruits of up to a third or even
a half of someone's labor is alienating and dehumanizes the process
of work and the worker. Especially when done to fund programs that
deliberately benefit someone else. Especially when justified as our
obligation to helping our community; as if the national, rather than
the local community was the locus of our communal obligation.



Liberal rhetoric is too shrill. If liberalism has an answer to
poverty and you have a different one, you are labeled `anti-poor
people'. If liberalism wants to tax pollution but you think the rate
is too high, you are personally responsible for the deaths of 6,484
small children somehow directly attributable to that specific
pollutant. "It's like you pulled the trigger yourself, man."
Liberalism defines every issue around saving lives and enhancing
liberty: it isn't dramatic or activist enough to say that we are
simply reducing risks and preserving stability.



Liberalism is hypersensitive, waging an unwinnable eternal revolution
against the smallest evil. Liberal causes these days are puny: let us
make sure we use `she' for a hypothetical person instead of always
using `he'; let us narrow the income gap between the richest
country's rich people and the richest country's poor people (the
richest poor in the world); let us give everyone a right not to be
subject to a certain level of pollution (lowering my risk of cancer
from one in a million to one in two million).

Liberals will never believe that America is doing okay; they are the
modern day muckrakers who insist on spoiling the party for everyone
because one person doesn't like the music.



The left is naïve. Liberals act indignantly shocked to find
injustice, poverty, hypocrisy, or oppression. There is really nothing
new about those evils at all. "It is the 20th Century, for crying out
loud!" The most barbaric century yet, they seem to forget. "This
isn't the Middle Ages!" As if that was the only or the worst age of
ignorance, vice, and malice.

Instead of heeding the historical truth that humans and their
institutions in every age will always find ways to perpetuate evil,
liberals blindly listen to the music of political scientists,
economists, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists who lie
and say they have discovered the laws of human behavior, and that
with the right institutional manipulation we can cancel out our vices
and live in harmony forever.



Which brings us to the worst crime of liberal ideology. The left
behaves as if the human spirit did not exist. Liberals and their
social scientists treat humans like object of the scientific method:
predictable, responding to stimuli like animals, obeying laws.
Liberals believe that hard circumstances like poverty,
discrimination, or oppression cause people to believe and behave in
certain ways, with little or no choice of their own. They do not
expect people to rise above their circumstances or live above their
material reality.

The tragic consequence is that liberal programs treat people like
products of their material reality: and when you treat a person a
certain way, over time they begin to believe that is all they are.
Liberals turn a blind eye to the system of power and domination that
their programs often unintentionally create.

The conservative belief that people should participate in helping
themselves is founded on the belief that they can help themselves. If
you treat people like they have the capacity to change, they will
begin to believe they can do so. Conservatism is fundamentally more
respectful of the dignity of human beings. Liberals do not believe
people have the ability to chose their response to their environment.
Conservatism, not liberalism, is the ideology of choice.



I believe liberals are sincere and earnest (which is more than most
conservatives will concede). Indeed, that earnestness is what gives
them their strength over conservatives: they really are more ready
and willing to attack injustice and oppression. Their problem is that
they act so fast that they cause so many unintended consequences
which could bring down the whole social project and which offend most
everyone else in the meantime.

Their victories are pyrrhic and their zeal is fundamentalist, two
very undesirable traits in an ideology