Perhaps it's pretentious to call myself an iconoclast. Perhaps it's oxymoronic to call myself a "moderate iconoclast". But perhaps this kind of thinking is exactly what this crazy upside-down world needs.
I have increasingly been calling myself a "moderate" rather than a "liberal" in recent years. Not out of wimpiness, but out of the desire to form my own opinions rather than gravitate to a pole of lazy thinking. Not out of lack of conviction, but with a self-confidence that allows me to delay judgment until I have really listened to the arguments on all sides, secure in the knowledge that I have the experience and intelligence to justify to my own conclusions. Although I am slow to judge, my beliefs are as strong as any other, hardly what a strongly partisan writer like Paul Krugman calls the centrist cop-out. For example, I blame the Republicans utterly for the current manufactured debt crisis; the Tea Party buffoons get no sympathy. Those who would destroy the country just to get Obama out of office are rightly called traitors.
Being a moderate is not the easiest path to follow. It is messy and complicated and provides none of the moral certainty of the radical left or right. It's no accident that young people invariably gravitate towards the extremes, and that self-professed far left communists can so easily flip-flop and become born-again Christians, or vice-versa. The enemy of the left is not the right, and the enemy of the right is not the left; but rather, the center is the true enemy of both.
Although it's a classic blunder to assume that things are somehow "worse" now than they are in the past, it's unquestionable that partisanship has been steadily building in this country in the last 20 or 30 years. One of the starkest illustrations of this is the ranking of Senate members on a conservative-liberal scale. Rankings of this sort have been done for Senate members going back over 100 years, and for most of the last century they show a rough party split, but with sometimes 20% or more of the members falling on the "wrong" side of the dividing line and with almost even mixing of parties near the center. Now, however, there is a perfect split between the parties, with not a single Republican more liberal than a single Democrat or vice-versa. Even near the center there are no surprises: The most conservative Democrat is (or was) Arlen Specter, recently a Republican, and the two most liberal Republicans are the two Maine senators (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins), long known as the last hold-outs of the former liberal wing of the Republican party.
This has been building for a long time, but the immediate trigger has been my desire to understand one of the most complicated and tortuous of political issues: the reality and morality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As my beliefs have been evolving, becoming gradually more nuanced and ramified, I've seen the general viewpoint in the U.S. move in the opposite direction, bifurcating into a depressing left-right divide, with both sides claiming moral certainty. Even more to the point is that my ultimate conclusions have placed me on the "wrong" side of the increasingly vitriolic anti-Israeli opinions coming out of the left, responding to a barely-concealed antisemitism that masquerades as "progressive" politics and is sweeping across Europe. There are many, mostly ignoble reasons for the anti-Israeli fervor in Europe, but to see it get so easily absorbed into the U.S. left even in the face of the generally positive attitude towards Israel in this country has been both depressing and jarring to me. As I look at the shoddy and often duplicitous argumentation used to justify these beliefs, I've more and more come to realize that some of the same machinations may underlie certain other liberal beliefs that I've never before questioned.
This is hardly to say that I have suddenly become a red-blooded conservative. On the whole I am still broadly sympathetic to liberal beliefs, and find many conservatives just as abhorrent as ever. In fact, in one respect, I would happily call myself a radical leftist, and in this respect I have never wavered: Individual liberties of the classical kind should be nearly absolute. This goes especially for speech of any kind, and even more for so-called "vice" crimes: anything related to drugs, sex, or the like. When I took the Political Compass test, my economic beliefs put me only slightly left of center, but my individual-liberty beliefs put me all the way on the left extreme -- and it's clear much of this comes from the "strongly agree" answers (or "strongly disagree", depending on the phrasing) that I give to every one of the sex-related questions.
Yet my foreign policy beliefs have gradually moved to the right, and the gradual resolution of my views on Israel have only strengthened this trend. In the process I've realized more and more the perniciousness even of many of the traditional beliefs/arguments about Israel vs. Palestine that I never questioned before.
For example: One of the classic figures that's always bandied about is the number of Israelis vs. Palestinians killed in the long conflict. Now, never mind the fact that the overall numbers are extremely low compared to nearly every other major conflict, and are in shocking disagreement with both the totally excessive media coverage of the conflict and the extreme hatred often directed at Israel.
A couple of common examples:
1. The bizarre inversion that labels Israelis as "Nazis" or accuses them of Nazi-like behavior: e.g. the Spanish political cartoon (top of p. 6) explicitly comparing the 6,000,000 Jews killed during the Nazi holocaust with the "Palestinian holocaust" of c. 10,000-12,000 Palestinians since 1948. See Wikipedia for the fatality counts.
2. The constant lambasting of the Israelis for having "ethnically cleansed" their country of c. 700,000 Palestinians in 1948, while conveniently "forgetting" the c. 800,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab lands (plus another 200,000 or so total from Iran and Turkey) in the same time period. It is often the case that the loudest, harshest accusations of wrongdoing come from those who themselves are most guilty, and it is hardly surprising to find that the Europeans -- who always scream the loudest about Jewish malfeasance -- have been complicit in some of the most shameful ethnic cleansing in exactly the same period. Over 12,000,000 Germans and 1,000,000+ Poles were deported from their ancestral lands after World War II (in the process of which at least 500,000 Germans died), and 1,000,000 Greeks were expelled in 1923 from lands they had lived in for over 2,000 years -- all with the explicit agreement of the major European powers.
Also compare the total 15,000 deaths on both sides with the 350,000 or so deaths in Darfur, and the 2,000,000+ dead in the Congo wars -- or even the c. 100,000 violence-related civilian deaths in the ongoing Iraq War, as cited by the Iraq Body Count (a conservative count, as they only count deaths explicitly reported in reliable media sources). Logically we should see media coverage of the Congo conflict vs. the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at 100-to-1, given the differing levels of ferocity; surely, we should at least see similar coverage of the two conflicts, no? But in fact, there's little doubt that the ratio is at least 100-to-1 in the other direction, and similarly lopsided counts apply to every one of the other conflicts just mentioned.
Also never mind the fact that these Palestinian figures invariably lump civilians, militants of various sorts, and suicide bombers together. (In addition, analyses by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), i.e. the Israeli military, of the "non-combatant" figures cited by pro-Palestinian organizations such as B'Tselem show that the large majority of these Palestinian deaths are men of fighting age -- suggesting that many or most are in fact combatants, not civilians -- while the comparable spread of Israelis killed closely mirrors the civilian population as a whole. I do not take issue with someone who is skeptical of the objectivity of the IDF in this matter, but I have no respect for anyone who shows such skepticism towards pro-Israeli sources but no skepticism at all towards pro-Palestinian sources, as is so commonly seen in the European media and in "progressive" American commentary.)
Perhaps the most fundamental issue is simply to look at what happens in general in military conflicts where the two sides have differing technological capabilities and/or views on the relative importance of human life. In the war between the U.S. and Japan, Japan suffered deaths at something like a 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 rate vs. the U.S. In most other recent conflicts involving the U.S., the disparity is far more extreme. Yet do we automatically condemn the U.S. as the evil aggressor because of this? Hardly, as we recognize the differing attitudes on the two sides towards the life of human soldiers: Japan regularly used suicide bombers (kamikazes); told wildly exaggerated stories of U.S. brutality in a mostly successful attempt to convince Japanese soldiers to never surrender to Americans; and would willingly sacrifice thousands of soldiers for a small tactical gain. Russia did the same thing when fighting the Germans, ordering massive suicidal attacks by whole brigades worth of soldiers (c. 5000 each) in order to temporarily delay the Germans in their eastward march.
There are many parallels with the Palestinians. Palestinian militants are, of course, infamous for using suicide bombers, and regularly fight in the very midst of dense urban areas (i.e. they use human shields) with the full knowledge that this behavior will inevitably result in many more civilian casualties. Israel, on the other hand, like the U.S., is willing to spend enormous amounts of money to avoid deaths of their own soldiers and civilians -- and in fact, despite regular allegations to the contrary, takes far more care than any other army to avoid civilian casualties on the other side. It is said that U.S. bombs in Afghanistan kill 5-10 civilians for every militant killed, while in Israel the ratio is less than 1 to 1. (Yet who gets more negative publicity for this? A mistaken report of an errant bomb that allegedly killed 29 civilians was enough for Israel to get branded a perpetrator of "war crimes" by the now-retracted Goldstone report; yet there have been thousands and thousands of civilian deaths in the Afghanistan war directly caused by aerial bombs, including plenty of reports of errant bombs killing 80+ civilians in a single strike -- and no similar "Goldstone report" branding the U.S. a war criminal.
In short, Palestinian militants deliberately accept more deaths on their own side -- including civilians -- than Israel does. Hence it's no surprise that there are more Palestinian deaths. In fact, the argumentation is totally perverse: If Israel had a similarly callous attitude towards death, there would be far more Israeli deaths, yet somehow this would "exonerate" the Israelis?!
I see no conflict in holding "far left" views on individual liberty, "centrist" views on economics, and "center-right" views on foreign policy. In fact, the very definition of "left" vs. "right" in these areas has shifted in a way that often has little to do with anything other than where certain political groups have happened to align themselves at certain times. Before World War II, an aggressive foreign policy of the sort now described as "right-wing" was considered unambiguously liberal, and majority of conservatives were isolationist. There are still echoes of this in the occasional slur (now mostly from paleoconservative dinosaurs) about "Democrat wars". And at one point, the strong defense of individual liberty was also associated with conservatives and/or right-wingers: Self-described "far left" communists tend to have a strongly collectivist attitude that is quite willing to sacrifice individual liberty in the name of the greater good, while many older right-wing political parties held strongly libertarian, pro-liberty views (which, ironically, were once called "liberal", a term often still used outside of this country).
