Why leftists think the way they do?

It has been only a year since my conversion to enlightenment. During my college days I thought socialism was good and America was bad. But why did I feel this way. I always said that the only reason I have the stuff I did was due to the fact that I was LUCKY to be born in America. I felt bad that not everybody could be so lucky. However, you could be born anywhere and succeed as long as you are given the freedoms that we enjoy in America. I also felt bad for the sins of the Western World's past. I felt the only way to rid myself of this guilt and to be righteous was to be Anti-American. Shelby Steele recently wrote in the Journal about this white guilt.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort -- only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.