Don’t want to belong to any movement that would have as a member.

This will be after the fashion of Jay Nordlinger’s Impromptus, with no attempt at transitions and thereby enduring the risk of seeming to be stringing non sequiturs together. So be it.

I really do get some of the lefties’s points. Where to begin?

When the Arab Spring started, I suspected what it would lead to, namely dissolution of whatever stability existed in the Middle East. But given what has eventuated from Obama’s essentially isolationist policy in foreign affairs, I find myself agreeing that putting “American boots on the ground” against ISIS is a waste of time. I’m for defending Israel, with nuclear weapons if necessary, but as to the rest of it, the barbarian regimes of the Middle East have made their own bed and they can lie in it. The American people are tired of war, or more precisely, they are tired of wars their government will not support to any successful conclusion. Too much blood shed for victories that are rendered meaningless by self-serving politicians.

I can understand why black people are mad at the police and the criminal justice system. My quarrel is not as much with their indignation as with their methods. I’m a Jersey motorhead. None of us likes the cops. Some are okay. Many are thugs, not necessarily racist but control freaks who like strutting around with guns and bullying people. I believe the DOJ’s report about the Ferguson police department. The Michael Brown affair was a spark that lit waiting tinder. My biggest problem is with politicians who fanned those first sparks into flaming riots and police murders. That was a cynical and unforgivable tactic by a party that is absolutely in the pocket of attorneys who prosecute selectively, unethically, probably illegally, and for the exclusive purpose of building their own political careers and wallets.

Income inequality has become grotesque. Corporate CEO’s are overpaid by factors of ten or higher. Their pay rises as they collude with lobbyists and politicians to eliminate the risk that is supposed to be the basis for reward in a capitalist system. Wall Street really is the epicenter of this phenomenon. I dropped out of graduate business school because I didn’t want to become an officer in the army of those who make nothing and profit by manipulating those who do make things. I met those guys when they were in training. Cynical, selfish, worthless, despite expensive educations that should have taught them better. I just don’t think the answer to the problem is letting the government that connives with robber barons decide who can make how much or who should make at least this much. That’s just more power to the same crooks.

I understand the frustrations and desire for assistance of our astoundingly high population of single mothers. I think of them, all of them, as lost little girls. They’ve been sold a bill of goods. Keep the iPod earbuds in, ignore your own parents, and do whatever the hell you want. That’s liberation, right? That’s freedom, right. Wrong. But there is no law government can pass that will lay down the necessary rules. No, don’t marry an ex-con who will beat you the day after your wedding. No, don’t be careless or promiscuous about premarital sex; someday the condom will break. No, don’t divorce him the first time you realize that your life is not a Disney movie.

So much is broken in our culture, and has been for such a long time, that I also understand the craving for unfettered abortion rights. I get the resentment of men that hard-core feminists have. But it still does take two to tango, and there’s no government in the history of governments that can repeal the anatomical certainty of woman’s greater stake in pregnancy than man’s. I would love to see a lessening of personal pain, blighted lives of both women and children, but I disagree that abortion is the answer. Better behavior is. That makes me a prig, a chauvinist, and an apologist for the predator sex, I know, but these are issues civilization has been grappling with since before recorded human history.

Yet I also recognize the contradictions in conservative positions that even the left finds hard to surface because of the contradictions in its own positions. We conservatives are choleric about fatherless families among the poor, even as we insist that abortion is never an answer. Well, it is an answer in all too many instances. Only problem being, it begins to look like Sanger-esque eugenics when the overwhelming percentage of abortions occur among the poor. That’s the liberal contradiction. If you want social justice, how is it justice that so many poor babies are killed are on their way out of the womb? Neither side has bellied up to this dilemma.

I even get the Hating America pose of so many leftists. They may not know it it, but their animus is an outgrowth of American exceptionalism. If we’re really the best that ever was, how can there be so much injustice? We have to fix this and this and this. The irony is that the precedent for this kind of constant, grinding self criticism arises from exactly the group that they are presently coalescing to hate as much as they seem to hate America: the Jews. It’s part of the Talmudic tradition to go back and back and back to quibble, quarrel, and otherwise question absolutely everything that’s supposed to be written in stone. Why not even Israel is unanimous about its own right to exist. Problem is, the ancient government which spawned this tradition was led by authoritarian kings. Why the contemporary left is so in love with authoritarian answers to human problems. Again, I understand the impulse and the origins, but I disagree profoundly with the methods and proposed answers.

Immigration. Hospitality to strangers is also a Biblical postulate. I sympathize with the desire. But the notion that you should let strangers despoil your own families is ultimately suicidal.

Gay marriage? Try as I might, I can’t get too worked up about anything but it’s hypocrisies. I have no desire to punish homosexuals. But I despise their insistence on requiring by law that we all have to subjugate our religious and other faiths to their whims. That doesn’t make me a homophobe. If anything, it makes me a vandalphobe. Don’t tell me I have to love a lifestyle I believe is wrong. And don’t force me to imagine or see what you do in bed with each other. But if you want two brides in wedding dresses or two grooms in tuxedos, I really truly don’t care at all as long as there is no legal requirement to attend the ceremony.

Well, I could go on, and maybe I’ll add more later on. But my point is that it’s wrong of leftists to think no conservatives ever understand their penchant and ideals. And it’s wrong of conservatives to think there’s no good that can come out of intensive debate. Who’s more wrong that there’s no debate at all but only opposing armies? As a conservative I admit I blame the left more than the right, but I also admit I blame both sides.