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Aside from disagreeing with people who claim the left think they’re fundamentally correct, whilst the right are more open-minded and rational (gimme a break here!) I’d agree with most of the rest of what was said, and I do think there’s more a motivation due to a sense of frustration and alienation with peers than anything else for this phenomenon.

I don’t agree with that. Even if I did, most sources say that the perception by the electorate was that they were indeed different, so more people voted for Bush’s version. (The leftist thought here being defined as what has now devolved into pacificism, anti-US, anti-capitalist.)

But that assumes that only the “Left” voted for Kerry, which I don’t believe. Remember, kerry’s policy wasn’t substantially any different than Bush’s on Iraq. As I recall in polls, those that call themselves “Liberal” are a marked minority in the country (about 27%). And those that we might consider “Leftists” I think are a far smaller part than this.

Something Shrinkwrapped said caused me to think about the role of feelings. My feelings of grief and dread after 9/11 and the following anthrax scare wore me down. I felt the world as I understood it was ending. My eyes were opened, and I heard the neocons who told us why the last 30 years of policy would have to change if we were to survive. They gave us a world view and a philosophy. I still think today they’re right, and the Dems have given us nothing except hysterical cries of Bushitler.

So my feelings led me to where I am now; I feel like the left is stuck.

I think the influence of the left is on the young, who make up a sizeable percentage of voters, enough to sway a close election; and, likewise, on many coastal cities, which are important, likewise, in a close election. If you take away New York City, for example, New York State could easily go Republican. Yes, most in those cities are liberals, but liberals are most definitely influenced by the left, IMHO. The left has the effect of skewing the entire American electorate slightly to the–well, the left!

As for Hersch–he was “right” that My Lai happened (material that was essentially given to him, and he promoted and publicized it), and certainly “right” that Abu Ghraib happened. He was wrong about many other (lesser-known) articles and books he’s written, and wrong about most of his interpretations of even the things he was right about. And he is a good example of how the left (he is on the left) influences liberals.

I’ve done a lot of reading about Hersch–just have to organize it into a post one of these days (and probably a multi-parter, at that!). Tires me out just thinking about it :-).

I definitely make a distinction between the left and liberals, but the distinction is not a sharp one–in my experience, it’s a continuum. I have a bunch of posts that refer to this distinction, but off the top of my head I don’t remember which ones they are.

The difference, to my way of thinking, is that many liberals tend to be less interested in politics and many leftists more; liberals tend to act on feelings and leftists more on theory; liberals have at least the possibility of hearing another POV (at least, some of them), whereas leftists are much much less likely to do so; and liberals are motivated more by idealism and ideas of sympathy/empathy for the downtrodden, whereas leftists have some of that but it’s trumped by their hatred for America and the west.

As for my politics, if you look at this, you’ll see I haven’t given up all my liberal roots. I just don’t see many of the old liberal responses as effective solutions.

As for the influence of the left (and of the segment of liberalism that is not reasonable or open to other points of view), it is alive and well and very, very strong, and not just among elites. I see it everywhere, especially in large coastal cities (which certainly have a significant amount of people in them), not just academia. And most of the people I know ascribe to either leftist or ultra-liberal thought–and they are not freshly out of college, nor are they academics, for the most part. And then there’s the MSM, which I spend a great deal of time talking about on this blog. They have less influence than they used to, but their influence is still huge, and they are strongly motivated by liberal (and, to a lesser extent, leftist) thought and bias.

I actually have a series of posts planned–long ones, so it’ll be a while–on the influence of leftist journalists such as, for example, Seymour Hersch. He is indeed a leftist as far as I can tell, but he writes for a magazine, the New Yorker, that is firmly in what I would consider the liberal camp. Then there’s someone like Michael Moore, a leftist also. His influence is on the downswing right now (thank goodness!), but he certainly influenced a bunch of otherwise-intelligent-seeming people that I know, around the time leading up to the 2004 election.