How do you vote Democratic if you're not a leftist

It is, indeed, all emotional.

We care, we love, we want world peace. We, in contradistinction to Republicans, hate poverty. We want justice, equality, fairness. The Republicans are mean and horrible haters.

As I talked politics with my similar others, the Sixties and Seventies youth--my high school class graduated in 1971, a tad late for the Sixties activism of the hippies, more aligned with the artsy-fartsy, bean sprouts, macrame, and herbal tea crowd--who also were invariably, determinedly liberal, I learned something very important. They knew nothing about our leftism or how to defend challenges to it. They couldn't tell you anything about why they believed in redistribution of the wealth or how they thought that a system that couldn't provide its citizens with toilet paper in Russia was ever going to provide Americans with the refrigerators or light bulbs we expected.

If they ever attempted to answer such questions, they turned to feel-good platitudes. America is too rich, we have too many luxuries, we should live like the barefoot villagers in a sad, brown-skinned country named "Africa" (which they couldn't have found on a map if they had tried, though they had never tried).

We hate poverty, we hate injustice, yadda yadda yadda yadda.