Why Leftists Don't Know Conservative Positions

The Washington Times editorial staff complain via this title, "Why don't liberals [sic] know what conservatives believe?"

That's a fair question, but I think they need some help with understanding the confusion -- especially after making themselves sound so like leftists (or worse) in the process.

Let's look at their two examples, but in reverse order.

Take the issue of school choice. The piece correctly complains that opponents of school choice see the whole idea as a racist plot to deny decent educations to poor, black, inner-city children:

Scylla and Charybdis, aka The Left and the Right in Modern America. (Image by A. H. Payne, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

Moving to the second tweet, University of North Carolina-educated Nikole Hannah-Jones of 1619 Project fame wrote last week, "Why do 'school choice' advocates never advocate eliminating school district boundaries/funding schools by local property tax and allowing poor, Black students to attend white, wealthy schools in neighboring municipalities? They don't really want choice, just privatization."

As Hannah-Jones would have quickly discovered if she bothered to read the replies to her tweet, many conservatives have advocated for this policy for years... [bold added]

Such a step might be good, as a step towards making parents best able to choose schools for their own children -- but that's only because privatization is the way to achieve meaningful choice, via competition.

But the Times leaves off that meaningful qualification. (Chance to engage minds? Lost.)

I haven't heard a conservative make a point like that in a long time. In fact, now that I consider this reply, it reminds me of so many times in the past when some craven conservative -- faced with some false widows and orphans will be thrown to the streets-type accusation -- quickly backed off with the equivalent of, Oh, no! I'm not a capitalist at all!

But at least on that issue, one can imagine that some conservatives are at least trying to smuggle a modicum of freedom into a horrible system that we're stuck with for the foreseeable future...

On abortion, there is no room for such hope, which is a shame because that's an issue the left is actually correct about, except for its statist method of funding it. Take a gander at what the Times has to say about the oblivious leftists wondering why anti-abortion states don't force men to pay child support (including pre-natal medical bills) to the mothers of their unwanted children:

[A]nyone with even a passing familiarity with the pro-life [sic] movement would know that conservatives are perfectly fine with forcing men to pay for the pregnancies of women they impregnate. In fact, the state of Utah, a deep-red state with a Republican Legislature and Republican governor, passed a law doing exactly that earlier this year! Yet Ioffe is completely clueless about this conservative viewpoint. [bold added]

Wow. This makes the government forcing me to pay for someone else's abortion look positively humane and borderline capitalist compared to the enslavement of a woman and a man to the not-yet-living that the Times here is asserting as a conservative position.

This radical capitalist/classical liberal will offer his two-part answer to the question above.

First, one can forgive the left for part of the confusion -- which is still shared even by many who think of themselves as conservatives: Conservatives themselves used to at least pretend to be pro-freedom and pro-capitalist. Hell, some of them actually were, to an extent.

Second, the left is so rabidly anti-capitalist they can't even think straight when the idea of ideological opposition rears its head: Voice a desire for school choice or anything that sounds vaguely free-market and you'll probably be called or thought of as racist, as wrong as that is.

The left routinely smears all its opponents, and many of those doing the name-calling -- thoroughly indoctrinated by a school system conservatives won't even discuss abolishing -- believe their own propaganda. What a surprise!

I was merely disappointed by the school choice concession, but I am appalled by that We're way ahead of you on your child support idea! That one reminds me of when conservatives claimed to support both economic freedom and the draft, as if they thought you could own your wallet, but not your own life.

Thanks, Washington Times, for clearing the air, I guess. At least, this time, you're being honest.

-- CAV