Guilt and Responsiblity

So, in perusing RealClearPolitics.com today, they directed me to an article on Slate.com called "In Praise of Liberal Guilt" by Ron Rosenbaum. I assumed (incorrectly) that this would be a tongue-in-cheek look at the left's obvious belief that voting for Barack Obama somehow absolves them of the crushing guilt of living in a nation where someone, somewhere, at sometime was a racist.

Mr. Rosenbaum opts not to go with satirizing, but actually PRAISING the concept of White Liberal Guilt. I kid you not. Apparently, our guilt is enough of a reason to vote for Obama. In essence we should vote for a candidate for the color of there skin.

But lets look beyond this simple idiocy. Like most arguments made by the far left, this one can’t help but try and assert there unassailable superiority to the right. Take this quote for example:

“It's especially surprising to hear ‘guilt’ being disparaged by conservatives, since they present themselves as moralists; they are quick to decry liberals for seeking to abolish guilt over various practices conservatives deem immoral. But was slavery not immoral? For those conservatives who make a fetish of "values": Was not the century of institutionalized racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of "flawed values" that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? For those conservatives who are forever speaking of the way they value history and memory more than liberals: Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they're no longer legally institutionalized?”

Unknowingly, Mr. Rosenbaum gives us a perfect example of the differences between Left-Liberal thinking and Right-Conservative thinking, namely where we assign fault.

We Right-of -Center people feel guilty, some of us intensely guilty about things WE DID. If it was US, we'd feel bad about it. We'd make amends. We’d take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for it. We believe that a person is responsible for themselves and no one else. That's where the whole "tough on crime" aspect of conservatism comes in. We could care less about feeling bad for things done hundreds of years ago by people we're not connected to. We study the past not to obsess over what others did wrong and weep about it, but to understand where we came from and how we can avoid mistakes in the future.

Our dear friends on the other side of the ideological isle have a very different approach. They don't tend to feel guilty about there personal choices (it's clearly the system/the nation/society's fault) they care more about things that happened hundreds of years ago to which they also have no connection. Why? Because people who sort of look like them were involved in it. They embrace this guilt not out of actual feelings of guilt but as a way of transferring the actual guilt to others, namely those who are not “enlightened enough” to feel guilty about something they didn’t do and had no part in. In essence, it’s a way of transferring there guilt to others.

Or to reduce it to it’s basic level, Conservitives take personal responsibility, rather then “societal responsibility” and Liberals take “societal responsibility” rather then personal responsibility.

Or as Shelby Steel once put it, liberals engage in "a form of self-congradulation, where whites initiate 'compassionate policies' towards people of color, to showcase their innocence to racism."