Left2Right, Schmeft2Right!

Commenter David Velleman kindly pointed us to the Left2Right response to Russ Douthot's Weekly Standard critique mentioned earlier on this site.

Well, it's a good try, anyway, but as more than one respondent to that response on Left2Right noted, the author does not mention the Appiah comment quoted in Douthot's article, which is the statement I found most interesting and which I quoted in my earlier posting here today. To have any credibility, the Left2Right response should have explicitly repudiated Appiah's charming comment. Yet it did not, from which I think we can draw some fairly definite conclusions. Some may see no smugness there, but I do.

Nonetheless, let's get to a more basic objection to Left2Right, which is its mission: to make the present-day Left more politically palatable. That is a fool's errand. The Left cannot become more politically palatable without dropping its basic premises, for those assumptions and attitudes are what make comments such as Appiah's both possible and all too representative of the Left's attitudes toward the vast majority of their neighbors. The only real and viable liberalism to be found at present in the United States (and indeed the West as a whole) is on the Right, not the Left. If the Left2Right philosophes wish to become true liberals by renouncing their prejudices and joining us on the Right, they are certainly welcome to do so.