Friday, April 06, 2007

Morality and Politics

Its easy being on the left politically because everything you espouse is automatically considered to be the moral policy option, even when it is not. Its easy because either Marx wrote about it, or meant to write about it or at least would have written about it had it been around when he was writing: the ideology is automatically moral because its founding dogma is infallible. And anyways, who is going to read all of Marx to show otherwise?

It is the pervasiveness of this attitude of moral superiority and entitlement that irritates those of us who do not subscribe to its tenets. Dale Franks has recently tried to explain his objections and the interplay he sees between politics and morality. This is his second post. It follows this original post that stirred up a hornet's nest of reaction. It appears the average leftist commentator can dish the criticism but can not take any when it is levelled at them.

Ironic really: those who speak most often about the rights of the ordinary citizen, are in fact those most at work in curtailing individual freedom.