Good meaning liberals

In my opinion, there are two types of liberals, naive well intentioned and the rest. There's a saying that if you are young and not liberal, you don't have a heart. If you are old and not Republican, you don't have a brain. I don't know how much truth there is to this adage, but this post goes out to all the well intentioned liberals who either don't know any better or close their eyes to reality. You are the hope for compromise between us and it is to the honesty within you that I appeal. Despite our differences, remember this: our goals are the same. Never forget that.

The world is unfair. That's a reality. Well meaning liberals want to change reality. They see inequality and suffering and demand that it stop. Any world less than ideal is a world for them to improve. And improve they must because reality is not ideal. It is unfair. And that is the essential fallacy of their beliefs, the fallacy of the young, the fallacy of innumerable possibilities not yet tempered by the harshness of life. The heart wants what it wants, but your elderly self reveals an inconvenient truth: You cannot change reality.

Idealism is not evil, in it's way it is noble. My only request to good liberals out there is not to confuse idealism with reality. You believe in noble causes, then believe in them sincerely. And understand that nobility doesn't allow you to ignore hypocrisy nor to ignore evil in the name of the greater good. If you are an honest liberal then call out all evil, even if it lowers the esteem of someone not worthy of your esteem.

In case this is not clear, here is an example of a "bad" liberal. Someone who ignored evil because it fit his paradigm of an idealistic world. The Wall Street Journal shows how John Kenneth Galbraith betrayed progressives by stating:

How the Soviets scrambled to keep up. After one of his chummy sight-seeing tours of Moscow in 1984, the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote an article about his trip for The New Yorker. The Soviet's "great material progress" impressed him, as did the look of "solid well-being of the people on the streets."

He should have known better, he did know better, but he was not honest with himself. He endorsed suffering because he was too weak.

Here are some things I expect good liberals to believe in.

• Be against the Employee Free Choice Act - This takes away the secret ballot for union workers


• Be against giving any subsidies to wealthy Americans - The only moral position for redistribution is for those in need. How can anyone justifying taking from one person and giving it to another for any other reason. This implies means testing for any and all programs that redistribute wealth


• Be for school choice - It is abhorrent to condemn students to decimated schools because this isn't the ideal situation.


• Speak out against blatant hypocrisy in either party. I want to hear you loudly condemn Al Gore's carbon footprint as loudly as you decry George W. Bush.
  

There are many more examples I could cite, but the point is that to be honest with yourself requires that you call out everyone, not just the other side. Are you a liberal I can work with? Are you a good or a bad liberal?