What do The Dave Matthews Band and Coldplay have in common with the likes of Al Gore and John Edwards? They all suffer from liberal guilt. Coldplay, for example, funded 10,000 mango trees in India to make amends for their emissions in the production of their CD. The Dave Matthews Band has said it will offset 100% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from all of its touring activities since 1991. It is comparable to the medieval practice of buying indulgences to eliminate guilt. Al Gore and John Edwards are not only buying offsets but espousing guilt-based policies.

Shelby Steele describes this liberal guilt well in his piece “White Guilt”:

They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group’s former sinfulness.

Here lies the root issue of liberal policies and actions. In other words, we have program after program of government funded “guilt offsets” to help relieve liberals of their shame-ridden past. Consider the war on poverty, social security, affirmative action, global warming, universal health care, and the countless other guilt-based agendas.

Guilt leads to blame. Their need to correct some perceived injustice means they must amend others actions as well—the louder the better so the world will know they are doing something about their supposed disgrace. Consider protests of the following: the Iraq war, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, Kyoto, “undocumented workers,” Bush policies, and so many more. Guilt, blame, guilt, blame—the same pattern over and over.

It is cognitive dissonance. Liberals assign guilt to oneself or, worse yet, to others who disagree with them. This allows them to circumvent feeling bad about themselves, or in terms they recognize—having a negative self-image. This, unfortunately, manifests itself into the myriad of government programs costing taxpayers trillions of dollars.

Because liberals are repeatedly offsetting their guilt, this leads them to be sanctimonious. P.J. O’Rourke puts it best:

The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things. It’s a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don’t have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.

So, the next time you hear liberals espousing the “need” for a policy or program to “help the poor,” “save the environment,” or “help the children,” understand its root cause. It is their own inability to move beyond their own guilt-ridden self image.