You're cheating yourself if you don't absorb this post on July 31 from that genius with the word at One Cosmos. Read it all but here are some teasers:

"...What an excellent question asked by James Lewis at American Thinker, Why Isn’t the Whole Left Neoconservative? Leftism is such a discredited ideology, so intrinsically wrong, so at odds with higher human nature, so cruel and unworkable in practice, so retrograde in its results, that one can only wonder at the persistent hold it has on millions of minds around the world.

Some day Leftism will be rejoined with its twin ideology, fascism, which no one takes seriously anymore (consciously, anyway; as Goldberg demonstrates, the program of the left is indistinguishible from fascism). Why is that? In fact, fascism is not a “right wing,” much less “conservative” ideology, but a competing from of socialism. It was the communists who tried to discredit “national socialism” by labeling it “right wing” merely because it wasn’t what they wanted, which was international socialism. . ."

AtOne Cosmos Gagdad Bob goes on to offer a twelve step program:
haps we need a 12 step program for leftists, Apparatchiks Anonymous.

1. We admitted we were powerless over the intoxicating dreams of socialism, and that our lives and governments had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a power far greater than our own omnipotent little egoic fantasies of total control could restore us to true liberalism.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Creator and Guarantor of our Liberty.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of the well-intentioned failures and frank evils of socialism.

5. Admitted to the Creator of our Liberty, to ourselves, and in a live phone call to C-SPAN, the exact nature of socialism’s wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have the Creator of Our Liberty remove all these defects of ideology.

7. Humbly asked Him to cancel our subscription to the Times.

8. Made a list of all races, genders, and classes our government programs had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all by realizing that these constructs of race and gender are irrelevant to begin with.

9. Made direct amends to such people by switching parties.

10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were again tempted to abuse ideology for the purposes of blotting out reality, promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer, meditation, and listening to Rush Limbaugh, to improve our conscious contact with the Source of our Liberty, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other Leftists, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.