What constitutes the indestructible appeal of modern liberalism?

It's a crucial question at a moment when voters seem more inclined to embrace a so-called "progressive" agenda than in any other election in a generation. With his maverick appeal, John McCain may still be able to compete successfully for the White House, but polling on issues and "generic" preferences shows heavy majorities preferring Democrats to Republicans.

Conservatives will return to decisive victories only if we come to terms with liberalism's durable and visceral appeal. The best way to overcome our ideological adversaries is to understand the emotional attraction in their approach to the major challenges of our time.  

While conservatives obsess over distinctions of right and wrong and insist that inevitable consequences must flow from good and bad behavior, liberals focus on differences of another sort entirely.

The rhetoric of today's left shows that they see society divided between the privileged and the powerless, the favored and the unfortunate, victors and victims.

And liberals feel an irresistible instinct to take sides with the less fortunate.

While the right wants to reward beneficial choices and discourage destructive directions, the left seeks to eliminate or reduce the impact of the disadvantages that result from bad decisions. In place of the conservative emphasis on accountability, the left proffers a gospel of indiscriminate compassion.

This leads directly, and inevitably, to the liberal passion to sanctify victimhood.

"Enlightened" lefties long to embrace and exalt all those who claim to have suffered from hard luck or oppression: the homeless, single mothers, "people of color," homosexuals, AIDS patients, feminists, convicted criminals, Native Americans, atheists, immigrants and many more. Recent Democratic Conventions have resembled festivals of fine whines, with countless testimonials from one victim group or another expressing hopelessness and helplessness unless the Donkey Party returns to power.

The leftist impulse to side with the underdog has become so powerful that liberals never bother to inquire whether a given "oppressed" group counts as deserving or not.

For example, the widespread activism on behalf of the fanatical internees at Guantanamo remains one of the most spectacular displays of lefty lunacy in recent years. Aside from a common distaste for free-market economics and the shared desire for a reduced American role in the world, liberal ideologues share with exotic and angry third-worlders a sense of themselves as persecuted victims who blame all their problems on the United States.

The generalized anti-Americanism that afflicts so much of the contemporary left owes everything to this imperative to identify with the downtrodden. The United States is simply too prosperous and too powerful to win liberal sympathy while suffering nations (no matter how dictatorial their governments, or how dysfunctional their cultures) seem far more worthy of support.

Every important element of the liberal program stems from the one central goal of assisting the unfortunate. Pushing for higher taxes, expensive social programs, universal health coverage, lunches and breakfasts in the schools, income redistribution, affirmative action, reparations, a higher minimum wage, more generous foreign aid, multiculturalism, gay marriage, prison rights, generous benefits for illegal immigrants--all these leftist imperatives arise from a common commitment to protect the powerless and uplift the unfortunate.

In fact, recent press focus on psychiatric or economic problems with returning Iraq veterans connects this approach to liberal opposition to the war (where they naturally feel sympathetic to the less powerful or prosperous insurgents). Portraying our military as unfortunates with dim horizons and no viable alternatives to service, showing them as victims of a cruel system and a flawed policy, allows progressives to claim they actually support the troops as oppressed and hapless losers, rather than formidable and willing warriors.

The persistent preference for the purportedly oppressed applies only imperfectly to explaining leftist support for legalized abortion. The unborn, after all, plausibly qualify as the ultimate underdogs: innocent, fragile, utterly helpless. Nevertheless, they've never lived outside the womb and so failed to achieve the status of aggrieved victims suffering from racism, sexism, homophobia, economic oppression.

Moreover, the mother seeking the abortion represents a far more visible victim--which helps explain the desperate determination by pro-abortion forces to stop legislation in requiring abortion providers to offer ultra-sound images of the baby in-utero before the woman makes the final decision to terminate her pregnancy. In other words, they don't want anyone or anything to compete with the stressed, unhappily pregnant mother for pity and sympathy.

The hatred of guns also reflects the progressive preference for the powerless--nothing empowers an ordinary citizen as dramatically and directly as the ownership of a firearm and the knowledge of how to use it. To the liberal mind, Americans with guns look like potential bullies, while the unarmed remain appropriately defenseless. It's utterly predictable which group the left will prefer.

In fact, favored victim groups can lose their sacred claims on the liberal imagination if they become too successful or powerful--as evidenced by shifting perspectives on the State of Israel. In the wake of the devastation of the Holocaust, and with Jews fighting for their lives against massive Arab armies in 1949 and 1967, liberals naturally gave strong, nearly unanimous support to the Israeli underdogs. After the decisive victory in the Six-Day War, however, Israel assumed the role of regional power and began losing leftist support just as more and more conservatives came to appreciate America's reliable ally.

Today, after celebrating sixty years of vibrant independence, the Jewish state counts as far too triumphant, economically productive and militarily formidable to win much liberal sympathy, while the Palestinians remain so pathetically divided, dysfunctional, impoverished and inept that lefties (even Jewish lefties) react to their radical rhetoric with either applause or apologetics.

That's the problem with liberal sympathy for the downtrodden and underprivileged: if you make too much progress, you'll compromise your claims to advocacy and assistance. The best victim groups are those that reliably maintain their victim status. In this sense, the leftist world view effectively discourages empowerment or the pursuit of prosperity and pushes suffering subgroups to more or less permanent self pity.

Moreover, raising taxes on high earners in order to provide more give-aways to the unproductive clearly punishes success while rewarding failure. All but the most willfully blinded liberal activists understand that penalizing success helps to discourage it while giving benefits for failure and dysfunction encourages much more of the same. The massive failures of the US welfare system, and our ill-starred "War on Poverty," indicate that if you give people money in exchange for idleness you'll get more indolence, and if you take away more money from the most industrious you'll get less productive activity.

On occasion, conservatives criticize liberals for a failure to support standards or to make distinctions, but that's not entirely fair, since leftists do love to emphasize the difference between rich and poor, lucky and unlucky, winners and losers.

Conservatives need to affirm the notion that in the United States, such divisions cannot be considered permanent. In a nation of fresh starts and personal choices, misfortune should be viewed as a temporary status, and real compassion honors the determination to move forward, rather than rewarding expressions of self-pity. Leftists may feel virtuous, unselfish and morally superior for invariably embracing losers, but with this persistent (and ultimately punishing) preference; it's society itself that loses most.