Why Does the Left Continue to Lie about Its Ideological Agenda?

For the last 20 years, give or take another 50, one of the most cherished baubles of Beltway conventional wisdom has been that the Republican party has moved too far to the right. We’ll come back to that in a moment. Another beloved trinket in the nest of notions that make up elite groupthink is that liberals not only haven’t moved left, but they aren’t even liberals at all. A week doesn’t go by without Barack Obama insisting that he’s merely a pragmatist and problem-solver, with nary an ideological ax to grind. Shortly after he was re-elected, Obama told David Gregory, then the host of Meet the Press, the obvious takeaway of his presidency is that, “I’m not driven by some ideological agenda. I’m a pretty practical guy and I just want to make sure that things work.” A few weeks later, he gave the most ideologically left-wing State of the Union address of any president since FDR.

The War on the Private Mind This is a pattern. For whatever reason, liberals feel compelled — whether out of self-delusion or deliberate deception — to lie about the fact that they are liberals. Consider The New Republic, once the flagship journal of American liberalism. When Facebook multimillionaire Chris Hughes took it over a couple years ago, he had bold plans (which have ended in near-complete failure). For whatever reason, liberals feel compelled — whether out of self-delusion or deliberate deception — to lie about the fact that they are liberals. In his mission statement Hughes proclaimed, “The journalism in these pages will strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias.” Whatever you may think of The New Republic these days, this was a ridiculous thing to say, and it’s proven to be an even more vacuous fog of nonsense words since then. Indeed, in the very same issue, Hughes conducted a fawning and utterly partisan and ideological interview with Obama.

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