Leaving the Left: Moments in the News That Made Me Ashamed to Be a Liberal

by Keith Thompson

One man’s personal story of his conversion from lockstep liberal to free-thinking conservative

In May 2005, Keith Thompson published an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle that put him on the map in the conservative world, winning praise from people like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin as well as garnering thousands of supportive messages from across the country.

A distance-running, wilderness-trekking baby boomer living in Northern California, Thompson had been a progressive all his life. But over the years, he became more and more uncomfortable with the excesses of the left, from diversity issues to the taboo on using the word “evil.”

But the tipping point came when the left dismissed President Bush’s liberation of the Iraqi people. As he writes, “Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades yet refused to truly see. Now it’s all too obvious. Leading voices in America’s ‘peace’ movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a longsuffering third world country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.”

In this memoir, Thompson goes beyond his original essay to recall the defining moments in history that led to that tipping point. He describes how episodes such as the left’s mindless embrace of Anita Hill in 1991 and its kneejerk defense of Bill Clinton in 1998 made him wonder what had happened to the progressive movement of his youth.

Leaving the Left will appeal to conservatives who love the books of former liberals like David Horowitz, Zell Miller, and Bernard Goldberg.

Genres: Politics

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 19, 2006

Reviews

[Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thompson's original essay was much better

Published by Sentinel HC in 2006

For those of you who do not know, Keith Thompson's first draft of Leaving the Left was a column in the San Francisco chronicle.

I thoroughly enjoyed the original essay. I printed it out, read it to my wife, forwarded it to friends. A copy of it has set on my desk for the better part of two years - mostly in the way, but also as a reminder of my own personal journey away from the Democrats (my first 4 votes in any sort of Presidential race were proud votes for Jesse Jackson, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas and Bill Clinton). Really, though, it's not so much that I've moved from them as they have moved from some of their core values to new core values.

Political parties, like people, evolve in their thoughts. Keith Thompson, like many others, discovered that the political party of his youth (he was the youngest delegate to a Democratic national convention in American history in 1972) had become something different. (Can you imagine Harry Truman working better with John Kerry or George W. Bush?) Thompson describes the values of his youth, how they matched up with Democratic Party policies and positions and then tells how he believes the Democrats have moved away from those policies. His assertion is that he is still a liberal, but not liberal with a capital "L". Rather, he is a traditional political liberal, the type of liberal that Adams, Jefferson, Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers were. (If you do not know the difference, write your college poli-sci professors a nasty note for neglecting your education - you paid a fortune for it, they should have done a better job! - and then start brushing up on the political philosophies of the Enlightenment.)

Read more (and find a link to the original article) here: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2012/...