Maybe….

On the Left, “On the one hand there is the Left. Yes, there is the one hand, literally on the left, and it is generally a bit more artistic. This can be good and can be bad. Some on the Left go pretty far and are like a bohemian artist who blurs the lines instead of drawing any lines at all. Perhaps they want to see things from both sides or see things from the other sides. They just can’t quite see things from the Right side. So in some artist’s minds there is not much right, only the little of what is Left. In the words, this is the kind of mind that hides between the lines and must be drawn out into the lines. For art, like morality, consists of drawing the line. Slightly more often, their words are literally backwards, dyslexic. The indiscriminate seek to blur discriminations, one will have to draw the lines for them. The link between ethics and aesthetics cannot be overlooked, it must be seen through insight to be seen in sight.” Into Good and Evil…

Right to Leftists…. on Leftists narratives and their focus on the American judiciary.

While there are some overlaps with the American defs of those terms but also some very big divergences… I’d argue that a non-trivial aspect of American conservativism is what’s often been termed “Classical Liberalism” (as opposed to “modern liberalism”) and focuses on a central question about the relationship b/t the individual and society (which, of course, does bleed into questions of tradition… but only as a corollary)

The wikipedia entry on Liberalism captures some of the interesting nuances here.

http://www.techcentralstation.com/032204C.html

Uh, yeah:

After the end of the Second World War, German scientists wanted to separate science from ideology. They hoped for a new beginning without misanthropic political doctrines, but in East Germany [German Democratic Republic (GDR)], this hope was thwarted. There it soon became clear that the communists would decide in which direction scientific research would go, just as the national socialists had done before. This was true especially of biology and philosophy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the attitude of a scientist to the mode of thought encapsulated by the theory of evolution known as Lysenkoism and to the “the socialist achievements of the Soviet Union” was used as a measure of his or her political stance (1). It was within the doctrine of Lysenkoism that the self-styled developmental biologist, Georg Schneider, elaborated his career in the GDR. The Ukrainian agronomist Trofim D. Lysenko (1898-1976) became well known in the 1930s… Lysenko developed his anti-Mendelian theories over the next few decades. His idea–that acquired characters could be inherited–was totally at odds with what was known about genetics at this time. This notion was first known as “Michurin biology” [Ivan D. Michurin (1855-1935) was an early proponent of acquired inheritance, gaining his ideas from fruit-tree selection studies] and later as “creative Darwinism.” By the 1930s, Lysenko had gained Joseph Stalin’s support, which helped him to become president of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) in 1938 and director of the Department of Genetics at the USSR Academy of Science in 1940. Because of Lysenko’s political power, Soviet geneticists abstained from criticizing his theories at their conferences in Moscow in 1936 and 1939. Finally, after the VASKhNIL conference in August 1948 (during times of general repression, denunciation, imprisonment, and murder), the principles of classical genetics were suppressed in the Soviet Union. Soviet genetics, which had until then been of the highest international standards and was led by researchers including S. S. Cetverikov, T. Dobzhansky, G. F. Gauze, N. V. Timoféeff-Ressovsky, and N. I. Vavilov, was given a blow from which it would take a long time to recover. Lysenko’s ideas found their way into textbooks and were taught in schools and universities. There were even attempts to apply his ideas to the evolution of man (e.g., in the ideas of I. I. Prezent).

I seriously doubt the founding fathers were communists. “All men are created equal” meant that they held all men to be spirituallly equal, not that they believed men to be biologically equal. Only a fool would say that Yao Ming and Richard Feynman are “biologically equal”.

the most prominent proponents of genetic politics in the 20th century?

What, you mean Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood?

she agreed with the “progressives” of her day who favored * incentives for the voluntary hospitalization and/or sterilization of people with untreatable, disabling, hereditary conditions * the adoption and enforcement of stringent regulations to prevent the immigration of the diseased and “feebleminded” into the U.S. * placing so-called illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, and dope-fiends on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct

More Sanger:

She focused many of her efforts on gaining support from the medical profession, social workers, and the liberal wing of the eugenics movement. She increasingly rationalized birth control as a means of reducing genetically transmitted mental or physical defects, and at times supported sterilization for the mentally incompetent.

Yes, the “liberal wing of the eugenics movement” – i.e. the progressives?

Much of eugenics belonged to the wave of progressive social reform that swept through western Europe and North America during the early decades of the century. For progressives, eugenics was a branch of the drive for social improvement or perfection that many reformers of the day thought might be achieved through the deployment of science to good social ends.

When you’re ignorant, you’re ignorant…what can I say? Perhaps you didn’t know that eugenics was HUGE on the left, and that the “progressives” were the most prominent American proponents of sterilization, abortion, etcetera.

As for my views – I support voluntary GE. As I said in another thread, the difference between voluntary genetic engineering (i.e. reproductive choice) and coercive eugenics (stopping people from reproducing) should be obvious to anyone who can tell the difference between coercive taxation and voluntary charity…oh, wait…

Go watch “The Corporation” documentary, too. Sickening.

also, i think a crucial problem is that many people, whether left or right, can’t conceive of people disagreeing on ultimate ends, that is, many left or right individuals simply assume they are arguing about means to the same ends when their ends do actually differ (eg; income equality vs. maximum median income).

I made up for it this election, with a bunch of “sore liberal loser” cries for my cartogram posts of the us election results