Peter Schweizer has written a new book, Do As I Say (Not As I Do: Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy. He says he wrote the book because
I've experienced what so many others have with family and friends: the left's sense that they are our moral superiors. They care more, are less selfless, more civic minded, etc. My personal experience was that this simply wasn't the case. So I decided to pick the leading lights of the movement, those who come from politics, academe, and activism, and that are particularly aggressive in spouting their moral superiority, and do some digging.
In this interview Schweizer says that the actions and personal behavior of such liberals as Michael Moore, Barbara Streisand, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Noam Chomsky, and Cornel West do not match their ideological rhetoric. Embedded in the interview is the following interpretation of the liberal mind. Does Schweizer have a point?
FP: Why do you think people are drawn to leftist ideals and what kind of people are they? Self-contempt appears to be a common ingredient, no?
Schweizer: Yes, self-contempt is a big part of it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German pastor who stood up to Hitler, wrote a book about "cheap grace." Liberals are guilty of cheap grace in the political sense. They feel guilty and their form of penance is embracing the destructive ideas of the progressive faith. But it's cheap grace because as I show it the book, they don't actually change the way they live. I think that the religious comparison makes sense because in many respects the modern day left represents a religious movement. They are motivated by a sense of sin, guilt, and the need for salvation and absolution in the political sense. Socialism offers salvation to them. Of course, they don't actually plan to live like socialists.