Slate has an interesting piece on Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity A Guide for Grown-up Idealists which analyses why Liberals, who in their own mind are the moral superiors to neanderthal conservatives, nevertheless offer thin gruel to the more deeply morally serious:
Liberal intellectuals are embarrassed by talk of good and evil; it's so un-ironic
Why have moral values become the property of the right? Her [Neiman's] diagnosis, in part, is that "Western secular culture has no clear place for moral language, and its use makes many profoundly uncomfortable." She also connects the "rightward turn in American culture" to the reshaping of American conservatism as an intellectual rather than an anti-intellectual movement. As the principle-driven progressive politics of the '60s petered out, the American right discovered the power of ideas.
"Through organizations like the Olin Foundation, Midwestern businessmen who made their fortunes producing chemicals and telephones were sponsoring seminars in the mountains of Hungary on the nature of evil, or flying scholars to Chicago to discuss law and virtue," she writes. "As the right was completing its study of the classics, the left was facing conceptual collapse." The political successes of the right, she argues, were against a left that had abandoned high principle for identity politics—a bad idea in a world in which "everyone, everywhere, was running on moral passion." The Bush era, for her, is the culmination of a trend. In 2004, "whether voters were moved by their views about terrorism, or the war in Iraq, or abortion, what did not decide the most significant election in decades was the bottom line." Accordingly, she urges progressives to reclaim "concepts that have been abandoned to the right: good and evil, hero and dignity and nobility."It's hard to talk about virtue, dignity, and nobility in other than merely aesthetic terms if you think that the human being is nothing more than a talking animal wandering aimlessly in a purposeless universe. People try, of course, but the attempts seem contrived or to have too little weight to counterbalane the profoundly powerful forces that move individuals and societies to embrace horrific evil. Goodness seems so frail, so relatively weak in the face of the enormity of evil.
Liberal intellectuals are embarrassed by talk of good and evil; it's so un-ironic