Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers– that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.

How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to “change the United States of America,” the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

Jeremiah Wright said it with words: “God damn America!” Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted. Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.

Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn’t know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government– people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America’s influence in the world.

Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration’s enemies list.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama’s own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year– each bill more than a thousand pages long– too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question– and the biggest question for this generation.
T SOWELL

The answer is religion.

Given the huge economic failures that the left itself attributes to Medicare and Medicaid and given the economic collapse or near collapse of these systems in other countries, the left’s prescriptions can only be explained in one way: The left has made its views a form of religion.

Most individuals on the left are not religious, but virtually all people, secular and religious, liberal and conservative, yearn to believe in dogma, i.e., absolute beliefs that transcend reason. For people on the left in Europe, the United States and elsewhere, belief in the state — the notion that the state can do a better job at helping people and making a good society — is one such dogma. This applies especially to educating the young and to health care.

Examples of left-wing dogmas that transcend reason are as numerous as any religion’s catechism. One example is the belief that men and women, boys and girls, are basically the same, that the vast majority of characteristics we ascribe to male and female natures are in fact socially induced. This irrational dogma was virtually universally believed and taught by the left-wing faculty when I attended college, and remains so today.

Another is the belief that manmade carbon dioxide emissions are heating the world to the point of imminent worldwide catastrophe, including island nations disappearing underwater, mass starvation, inundation of the world’s major coastal areas and much more. The fact that the world has been getting colder for the last eight years is as irrelevant to most people on the left as the absence of archaeological evidence for the biblical exodus is irrelevant to believing Jews and Christians. That includes me; I do not believe in the Hebrew exodus from Egypt because of scientific evidence, but because of faith. But unlike the left’s belief in manmade carbon emissions leading to unprecedented and calamitous heating of the planet, I admit my belief is a leap of faith. And my belief in the exodus will not ruin Western economies. In other words, my non-scientific belief in the Jews’ exodus is innocuous while the left’s non-scientific beliefs (though shrouded in scientific jargon and promulgated by scientists who put dogma over science) are forced on societies.

One cannot understand the left if one does not appreciate the world of dogmas in which most left-wing thinkers live. What the monastery is to monks, the university and the mainstream media are to the left.

That is the only way to explain the left’s belief that government-run health care, having the government take over so much more of society, raising taxes yet again, expanding government even more and increasing the number of people employed by the government will all be good for America.

Dogma explains why it is useless to point out to the left how the left has economically crippled California, once the most prosperous, most adventurous, most successful “country” in the world (it has an economy that would make it about the seventh largest country in the world). Likewise, it does not matter to blacks what Democrats have done to their cities. As they watch their cities crumble, they will once again vote overwhelmingly for the party that oversaw this destruction.

None of these facts matters because religious-like dogmas are not derived from facts.

In addition to dogma, the left relies for its policies on “hope,” which it often substitutes for analysis. People on the left rarely vote based on reality. They vote based on “hope.” That’s why the word “hope” is so much more significant to the left than to the right. The last two Democratic presidents ran as candidates of “hope.” The right doesn’t have “hope” candidates because conservatives don’t live on hope. They live in reality, meaning that people are not born basically good; that investing men and women with great state power leads inevitably to abuse of that power; that people stop innovating if they are taxed too highly; and that a perfect health care system is understood to be impossible.

And, finally, the left dreams. Robert F. Kennedy often cited the statement first made by George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’ I dream things that never were and say ‘why not?’” The left dreams of an America in which health care will constantly improve, health insurance will be given to every American at the same price irrespective of his or her health, doctors will be fairly reimbursed, there will be no waiting lines, and there will not be a dime’s increase in the national debt for all of this.

Frankly, I don’t yearn for what is unseen. Rather, having a realistic understanding of the limitations of human beings, I am in awe of what I already see — the unique American achievement of affluence, liberty, decency, opportunity and medical innovations.

And I see this all being squandered for the sake of left-wing dogma, left-wing hopes and left-wing dreams

http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.graham.when-morality-opposes-justice.doc

Neo commented on it about a year ago, in the context of a NYTimes liberal reviewing the study.

I have long maintained that liberals do not reject conservative arguments. They completely misunderstand them, and reject that reinterpretation.

Dem dirty tricks in NJ. The third party guy is splitting the anti-Corzine vote.
Our obsolete US Constitution. Am Thinker
Hubris of the incompetent. What’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
The American: I’ve taken a look at the data, and, I’m sad to r…

“There is also the notion of “clever sillies” which goes hand-in-hand with the Dunning-Kruger effect: see”

There was another study along similar lines a year or two ago. Its conclusion was leftists lacked a certain evolved revulsion to things. The thought of eating the family dog after a disaster or walking on flag sets off a response in conservatives that is lacking in lefties. The lefty who did the study concluded lefties were the one missing something vs. the conservatives having a complex. He tried to explain this was what conservatives meant when they said ‘you just don’t get it’ to lefties about such things…

Not my theory, just the one I linked to. Published in a peer-reviewed journal, no less, lots of footnotes and all that.

Liberals believe that they are smarter than everyone else: it’s part of being a liberal nowadays.

Again, not my theory, but that of Bruce G. Charlton, Editor of the journal “Medical Hypotheses”…

Terman did notice some drop off in social adaptation upwards of IQ 140, but we’re up to 99th percentile at that point, so it’s a fairly restricted data set.