Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier
living in the kind of world envisioned by the left.

Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological
preference for a world in which there are many inequalities.

Even fewer would prefer a world in which vast sums of money have to be
devoted to military defense, when so much benefit could be produced if
those resources were directed into medical research instead.

It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left.
The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world
in which we live is very different from the world that the left
perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

Most of us learn that from experience-- but experience is precisely
what the young are lacking.

"Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we
belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the
world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

Those who are insulated from that pain-- whether by being born into
affluence or wealth, or shielded by the welfare state, or insulated by
tenure in academia or in the federal judiciary-- can remain in a state
of perpetual immaturity.

Individuals can refuse to grow up, especially when surrounded in their
work and in their social life by similarly situated and like-minded
people.

Even people born into normal lives, but who have been able through
talent or luck to escape into a world of celebrity and wealth, can
likewise find themselves in the enviable position of being able to
choose whether to grow up or not.

Those of us who can recall what it was like to be an adolescent must
know that growing up can be a painful transition from the sheltered
world of childhood.

No matter how much we may have wanted adult freedom, there was seldom
the same enthusiasm for taking on the burdens of adult
responsibilities and having to weigh painful trade-offs in a world
that hemmed us in on all sides, long after we were liberated from
parental restrictions.

Should we be surprised that the strongest supporters of the political
left are found among the young, academics, limousine liberals with
trust funds, media celebrities and federal judges?

These are hardly Karl Marx's proletarians, who were supposed to bring
on the revolution. The working class are in fact today among those
most skeptical about the visions of the left.

Ordinary working class people did not lead the stampede to Barack
Obama, even before his disdain for them slipped out in unguarded
moments.

The agenda of the left is fine for the world that they envision as
existing today and the world they want to create tomorrow.

That is a world not hemmed in on all sides by inherent constraints and
the painful trade-offs that these constraints imply. Theirs is a world
where there are attractive, win-win "solutions" in place of those ugly
trade-offs in the world that the rest of us live in.

Theirs is a world where we can just talk to opposing nations and work
things out, instead of having to pour tons of money into military
equipment to keep them at bay. The left calls this "change" but in
fact it is a set of notions that were tried out by the Western
democracies in the 1930s-- and which led to the most catastrophic war
in history.

For those who bother to study history, it was precisely the opposite
policies in the 1980s-- pouring tons of money into military
equipment-- which brought the Cold War and its threat of nuclear
annihilation to an end.

The left fought bitterly against that "arms race" which in fact lifted
the burden of the Soviet threat, instead of leading to war as the
elites claimed.

Personally, I wish Ronald Reagan could have talked the Soviets into
being nicer, instead of having to spend all that money. Only
experience makes me skeptical about that "kinder and gentler" approach
and the vision behind it.

http://townhall.com/columnists/Thoma...on_of_the_left