Every so often, a public figure will speak a sentence that succinctly sums up his or her entire worldview in just a few words, exposing the core belief that is the wellspring of his or her every position on matters of consequence. Consider, for instance, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s recent assertion: "If we [the U.S. military] leave Iraq, then the insurgents will leave Iraq, the terrorists will leave Iraq."

That sentence tells us virtually everything we really need to know about the workings of Nancy Pelosi’s mind. Though some may sneer at what they perceive to be an example of politically motivated hyperbole calculated to further discredit President Bush’s Iraq policy, Pelosi, indisputably an intelligent woman, was being quite serious; she believed and meant every word she said.

Pelosi’s perspective – and that of her ideological kin – did not develop without historical and intellectual context. It is partially rooted in a branch of liberalism that sprouted in the 18th century with the philosopher Rousseau, whose view of human nature held that “man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad.” Rousseau taught that the “noble savage,” whose beliefs and behaviors were unpolluted by social customs, represented the ideal man; that the more an individual or a culture was untouched by the corrupting influences of commerce and custom, the more virtuous and innocent he was – on the theory that he was closer to “nature” and all its inherent goodness. As Will Durant once paraphrased this view, “Everything that distinguishes civilized man from the untutored barbarian is evil.” In recent decades, the political Left has concocted a variant brew of Rousseau’s original contention, equating the “noble savage” with any non-Western person or culture, and identifying Western civilization – particularly America – as the quintessentially corrosive “institution” invented by Rousseau.

Pelosi’s view is further influenced by a noteworthy perversion of the wholly laudable intellectual traits of introspection and self-examination that are the hallmarks of classical liberalism. Rooted in great movements like the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Age of Science, the Reformation, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment, the impulse to question conventional “wisdom,” and to pursue new ways of thinking and behaving, enabled the Western world to make social, economic, scientific, and political strides unimaginable elsewhere. But in recent decades this noble impulse has been seized by the Left and, under the banner of “liberalism,” has been twisted into something bearing utterly no resemblance to classical liberalism. Rather, self-examination has given way to a guilt-ridden self-flagellation that confronts every instance of international discord by asking the same question: “What wrong have we done to so anger our enemies, who undoubtedly would like to live in peace but are prevented from doing so only by our unwarranted provocations?” The premise underlying that question also underlies Pelosi’s prediction that the terrorists will happily leave Iraq once the Americans have abandoned their allegedly insane mission and departed.

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FrontPage magazine.com :: Why Nancy Pelosi Thinks As She Does by John Perazzo