Last week, we found that politics is moving left, a conclusion which should be obvious just from government spending numbers. So why do leftists think that politics is somehow moving rightward? I have a guess.

When we say politics are moving left we look at real, existing political laws, outputs, and outcomes. We see that laws for higher spending have been put in place, that government spending has increased, and that government spending as a percentage of GDP has increased. We see that gay “marriage” has been enforced by courts, that gays are “marrying”, and that Christians are losing their businesses anti-Christian laws.

When the left say politics is moving right, they look at only at actual outcomes as compared to intended outcomes. They look at what they expect should happen if politics moves left, see that that is not occurring and declare politics are moving right, whatever the actual laws and outputs may be.

For example, the leftist believes all men are equal and have equal abilities, if they do show these, then (right-wing) discrimination must be holding people back, so if proper left-wing policies are put in place people would demonstrate equal abilities. So, if education policy were moving left, the achievement gap would be disappearing and all students would be moving towards equally high performance. The achievement gap is not disappearing. Because of this, the leftist thinks education policy is not moving left, so, it must be moving right.

The leftist ignores that he is getting the actual laws and political outputs he wants; public education spending has been ballooning and the the staff:student ratio has been increasing. He ignores the fact that actual public policy is increasingly left because he’s only looking at outcomes and he’s not getting the outcomes he thinks should happen.

The leftist is religiously egalitarian and blank-slatist, so if government programs are not producing the desired outcomes, they must not be the desired programs, hence if the outcomes are not the expected left-wing outcomes, the programs and policies must not be left wing. He can not countenance that the achievement gap is probably genetic in origin, so failures to achieve his expected outcomes must be due to the wrong (ie: right-wing) policies being implemented.

We can see this elsewhere as well. The leftist believes that left-wing policies will reduce poverty and reduce income inequality. He looks at the charts and it’s obvious that for the last half-century poverty rates have stayed level and income inequality has risen. Therefore, policies must not be left-wing, and therefore must be right-wing.

Never mind that most of the federal budget goes to income transfer/poverty alleviation programs, never mind that spending on poverty-alleviation has been increasing at a rapid rate, never mind that we spend enough on poverty alleviation programs to simply pay every person enough to not be poor, never mind graduated tax rates, the spending and laws don’t matter. It can not be that poor people are poor because they are the kind of people whose choices, abilities, and (lack of) virtues lead to being poor, because all people are equal. Therefore, the policies must be right-wing because left-wing policies would result in equality. (In reality though, left-wing schemes usually backfire).

The reason the leftist think politics is moving rightward, is because the leftist is utopian and egalitarian. He believes that left-wing policies will necessarily bring about left-wing utopian goals. When the expected egalitarian utopia does not arrive, the leftist can not believe that this is due to the impossibility of an egalitarian utopia or because left-wing policies don’t work, so he believes the absence of utopia must be because politics is moving right-ward.