At Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez presents, through narrative, the same question asked by many a self-proclaimed leftist who supports at least in concept the assertive democratization known now as the war on terror.
I have noticed an increasing frequency with which academics puzzle over the diminishing accuracy of traditional epistemology, specifically when applied to the responses of certain groups on the "left" and "right" to the rise and aggrandizement of tyranny.
If I may, an idea: figure ideology as a circle with eight marks, forty-five degrees apart each, beginning at zero degrees so that the circle may be bisected vertically and horizontally. Clockwise from zero, respectively notate pragmatism, objectivism, moralism (ninety), traditionalism, parochialism (one hundred eighty), collectivism, nihilism (two hundred seventy), and solipsism. Notate the left semicircle as relativism, the right semicircle as absolutism; and (optionally) the upper half of the circle as coherentism and the lower half foundationalism. Assign the following people respectively to the foregoing eight ideologies, give or take: Mickey Kaus, Christopher Hitchens, Natan Sharansky, Bill Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Michael Moore, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Woody Allen.
The reason why the "anti-war Socialists" in France in the Belmont Club brief sided with the Nazis is because they were as elementally morally relativistic as the leaders of the Third Reich. Analogously, the reason why a man like Hitchens works for the right is because he is at root a moral absolutist — only he (for better or worse) believes reason, not God, is steward of truth. Like all moral challenges, this war divides men into two broad groups; those who believe in truth, and those who either claim to and don't or those who believe truth is theirs alone to control. That would be the operative "right" and "left."
My formal education in this is nil, and I realize that this may very well be, to paraphrase Bill Buckley, "a kind of epistemology, as written by the sorcerer's apprentice." But to hear and read the confusion among the learned and know that I — if through a glass darkly — understand as consistent what has appeared to others as a tectonic shift, begged this little assertion.