I've had a laugh or two from the over-the-top parodies (and impressive graphics) over at The People's Cube. So I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised to learn that the man behind the Cube, Oleg Atbashian, was actually born in the Soviet Union.

He offers a theory about the underpinnings of leftism and makes an observation:

Attempts to confront the lure of “progressive” ideology with facts and logic have failed and will continue to fail because the “progressive” faith is not based on facts and logic. It is based on morality and this is the ground on which it must be fought.

Conservatives who support their positions with economic and political data but give away high moral ground to the “progressives” are thereby admitting that their economic and political achievements are immoral - and thus have no right to exist.

Frankly, he's right and this drives me up the wall. Conservatives are generally ineffective (too polite, too vague, or not-polite but also off-the-mark) in responding to the left. And I don't mean the left should be demonized personally -- but I do mean that their policies need to be called into account on the same terms they are offered.

Leftism is, for many, a highly moralistic religion, and needs to be confronted as such.

For example, when someone says they support a "living wage", I am amazed, and ask (with varying degrees of tact, depending on situation) how they can care so little about the poor. And I mean it sincerely: I don't understand how they could actively support a policy which so harms the poor, and put so much emotion into it, without ever, in their many decades of life (and active political involvement), taking even a few hours to consider counter-evidence.

(I did, and it didn't kill me to change my mind.)

Typically, they are shocked at the implication that they aren't supporting something which helps the poor. Most will ask for more evidence. A few might say "Oh, I'd never thought of that" and go often to ponder it more. Others just reveal that really drives them -- in particular one lifelong Democrat told me, point-blank, that no evidence I could ever show her would ever change her mind. (So much for doing whatever helps the poor, eh?)

This is sad, instructive, and amusing (all at once) on a one-to-one level, but it frustrates me that I never see such challenges offered in the public square. Why don't Republican politicians ever strike back with these kinds of responses?

I have a theory.

It was actually concern for the poor which caused me to support tax cuts for the wealthy and oppose minimum wage laws. It is my desire to see more healthy people which leads me to oppose socialized medicine. I oppose "affirmative action" because it harms the very minorities it's supposed to help. And it was my desire to prevent crime which caused me to support society having more hidden firearms.

Although some may just be poor communicators, Republicans who don't clearly make on these points may simply lack these convictions, I suspect.

Say Ted Kennedy runs against some challenger. Ted Kennedy bloviates about caring about the poor, being appalled about "inequality", and demanding higher taxes. His Republican opponent says tax hikes will hurt the economy.

While his opponent is arguably right, perhaps neither cares about the poor. Ted Kennedy, for all his protests about "inequality" certainly lives as one of the economic elite, in his exclusive corner of Martha's Vineyard. (If "inequality" needed a poster child, you couldn't do better than him or John Edwards.) But his opponent either doesn't understand that tax cuts actually help the poor, or perhaps that isn't uppermost in his mind. He just doesn't bother to pretend otherwise.

So here Republicans are, with the right answers to the challenges from the left. But they're either too polite, too uninformed, or too apathetic to make them. You can't simply present counter-evidence. And you can't even, as Oleg suggests, expose hypocrisy: the media won't cover it, and the argument is always diffused by a different kind of hypocrisy present on one's own side.

Instead, the left needs to be confronted directly on their own terms, with direct questions or even accusations about concern for various issues. But in order to stop ceding the moral high ground, you must occupy it, which means you must actually give a thought about the poor, care whether affirmative action hurts or helps minorities, care whether welfare hurt or helped women and children, etc, etc, etc.

And you must fortify yourself with evidence to back up your claims.

Two flavors of apathy -- one based in feigned concern, the other based in correct-but-souless blather about economics -- simply won't do.