The Akron Beacon Journal juxtaposed two editorials today, originally printed in The LA Times, that illustrate as well as anything I have seen the hopeless impasse that exists between the dominant political paradigms in this country. As one who does not fit easily into either camp- for I am prolife, prolabor, antiwar, anticapitalist, and a moral traditionalist ( but without the rancor)- I can only shake my head in despair.
The first of these is by Charlotte Allen, whom I sort of knew in the early 90s, when I lived around Washington. She is a fine writer, one who once wrote for the National Catholic Register, back when that paper was a lively read, before it was bought by the (since disgraced) Legionnaires of Christ. Ms Allen also wrote, incongruously, for DC’s local free paper; you know the kind with the kinky ads in the back.
But like a lot of people I haven’t spoken to in a long time, she seems to have taken leave of her senses.
Ms Allen’s essay is called “You Can’t Talk to a Liberal”, and by the third paragraph she lets loose this zinger: ” The problem is this: We conservatives think liberals are silly; they think we’re evil. “
Huh? What planet does she live on? Does she never listen to talk radio? Does that describe the attitude of Rush Limbaugh? Or Quinn and Rose, who make Limbaugh look reasonable? Or ( God help us) the weasel-voiced Mark Levin? Does she get out much?
The rest of the article follows suit: conservatives are reasonable and never conflate the political with the personal, never introduce divisive political topics in social settings. Liberals, on the other hand, are Manicheans who lack social graces, and every conservative to them is evil, a fascist, racist no goodnik.
This screed, the one that makes broad and nasty characterizations about liberals making broad and nasty characterization about conservatives, is presented without a hint of irony.
You can read the whole sorry mess here: http://www.ohio.com/editorial/charlotte-allen-you-can-t-talk-to-a-liberal-1.266529
Below this, The Beacon ran another editorial, cleverly titled “…or to a conservative”, by one Diana Wagman.
She recounts how a casual social gathering with likeable new neighbors went horribly wrong (after imbibing a good bit of Scotch) when one new friend opened his mouth and said, out of the blue, ”the tea party is not racist.” After realizing that this was not a joke (and the man had an African American wife, so she may be excused for thinking the comment in jest) the evening devolved into a shouting match. Her account of this, and the subsequent morning after apologies that did not dispel the bad feelings, is as self-justifying and unsympathetic and unimaginative as Charlotte Allen’s ode to self deception. Instead of learning a valuable lesson about drinking with people one does not know well, she decides that this experience confirms every stereotype about the right that she ever held. But see for yourself: http://www.ohio.com/editorial/diana-wagman-you-can-t-talk-to-a-conservative-1.266518
Subsequent comments indicate that Ms Wagman is not so young, which is puzzling, unless (as I suspect) she has rarely ever met a conservative. As for me, however prone I may once have been to falling into fruitless political or religious arguments, somewhere along the line I learned to avoid them at nearly every cost. I limit my controversies to the written word.
Ms Wagman does indicate that she had a better example growing up: “My mother had Republican friends. She was a lifelong Democrat, worked with the Adlai Stevenson for president campaign and was a precinct chairman for Hubert Humphrey. She was ashamed of Richard Nixon and thought Ronald Reagan was misguided. Still, she didn’t hate Republicans. She disagreed with their politics and they with hers, but she believed people, no matter how they vote, are basically all the same.I don’t agree. I don’t want to be friends with someone who is a member of the tea party or is a Newt Gingrich Republican. We are not the same. I equate their political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. I think they are not kind or empathetic.”
This is very sad.
At one time in this country people could disagree- and disgree vehemently- without impugning the good will or right intention of their enemies. Those of us who still find truth here and there on both sides of the divide can sometimes still do this, but to a broad spectrum of the public, there is only the tribalism of partisan politics, only us vs them.
God only knows where this will end.
Well put.
I really struggle with this issue because it seems to me your political views say something about the kind of person you are. People of good will can disagree on HOW to help the poor, but when you align yourself with a person or a party that blatantly sneers at the needy, or immigrants, or …fill in the blank, then I have to wonder about you (not you personally, “you” in the abstract). Just as if someone is vehemently pro-abortion, and I’ve met a few, I start wondering about what kind of person can dismiss the lives of humans that easily. Same for the environment. I really have a hard time, because I go to church with people who hold some political views that make me wonder what planet they are from. It’s hard to ascribe good will to them.
I understand, and as you know I can get pretty polemical. But I guess because I know too many people, left and right, that hold pretty awful views on some subjects but are clear on others and are basically pretty good people in most ways, I think it better for my soul to assume they just have big “blind spots” and do not intend evil.
But, say, the folks who cheered Rick Perry’s record on the death penalty, or the guys who shouted “yeah!” when the moderator asked Ron Paul if the uninsured should just die? Yeah, pretty hard to find room for the benefit of the doubt there!
Daniel, if your GOP ‘movement conservative’ Catholic friends are like my GOP ‘movement conservative’ Catholic friends, then I suspect a good number of them were cheering along at those moments while sitting on their couches watching the debates.
Perhaps there is something of a regionalism here. My politically conservative Catholic friends in the North tend to be more restrained on some things than their counterparts here in the South. There are few things that make white movement conservative Southerners happier than the thought of a black man being executed or a poor man (who inevitably deserves his lot in life, of course) withering away from lack of health provision.
This is suggestive of the fact that today’s GOP and movement conservatism is largely fueled by the South. When you look at the major donors to Gingrich’s, Paul’s, Santorum’s and even Romney’s SuperPacs the majority of those donors are based in the South (or states like OK, which is effectively in the South today), and when you look at rank and file political donations, the South also disproportionately provides the GOP with funding. The tone and ethos of the GOP is also largely framed by Southerners and Southern ‘values’ and ideological cues. It has always astounded me that Northerners who were otherwise intelligent and reasonable would join in a political alliance dominated by such backwards, cringe-worthy, and ignorant persons such as one finds as the norm among political conservatives here in the South. It used to be that there were essentially two Democratic Parties – the northern Democrats and the Southern democrats. The GOP has always been far more homogeneous in ideological orientation and milieu. The irony then is that the ‘Southern Strategy’ has left us with a GOP in which the worst of Southern political values have come to dominate the political cultus of the GOP. It just keeps getting stupider and stupider.
This leaves me anachronistically wishing that Sherman had wiped more of them off the face of the earth when he had the chance.
Spoken as a true Marxist: what’s a little genocide when there is a new world waiting to be born?
And I don’t know if I have any “movement conservative” friends; most of my conservative friends are more Paul libertarians, and in Dreher’s unfortunate lingo, “crunchy”. I can’t see any of those folks cheering death like those morons in the debates…
Daniel,
I was being facetious about Sherman. And as debated as the definition of genocide may be, he never committed genocide, at least not during the Civil War.
The various Marxist theses regarding what post-Capitalist societies might look like involve no greater an advocacy of a birth of a new world than what would result should any of the various Distributist schemas come into play. You can’t have anything more than quite partial Distributist ordos unless there is a more or less complete dismantling of late capitalist finance structures and wealth distribution norms. Look at the Amish now. They may have a model of life that is aesthetically and morally pleasing to some, but they participate within capitalist structures, and actually take part in even the nefarious side of capitalism. For instance, in the Amish area of WI where my mother-in-law lives ones sees scores of gas guzzling tourist buses and hundreds of SUVs every weekend full of people coming in from cities to buy Amish goods, services, and food. The money they use to pay for those things is made or maintained via usurious methods, as often as not. Those vehicles they use to get to the Amish pollute and were built and bought vie big finance. The Amish there use electricity in their dairies and sawmills to keep up with demand. More than a few Amish places now take credit cards, etc., etc. The Amish use modern hospitals and when they (frequently) don’t pay all of their bills the locals see their taxes go up to keep the local rural hospital afloat. The Amish shop at Walmart and there is even a place there for their buggies. One thing I’ve always found interesting about the Amish groceries in the area is how much their various mixes and foods contain artificial sweeteners and were mass produced. There are Amish factories in WI and IL that make some of the snack foods sold in those clear bulk looking bags you see stuff in at Amish groceries — it all has a down homey feel but it is raw, bank financed, capitalism with owners getting rich and workers getting exploited just like everywhere else, even if the owners in this instance drive buggies. My point here is that until you get rid of late capitalist superstructures, niche attempts at forging alternatives will continue to be sucked into the normative capitalist apparatus. Thus there is no real “partial” distributism. Capitalism must be brought down for distributism (or communism) to work on any scale.
Thus, to postulate getting rid of the current economic ordo and transitioning to one of the various distributist models is to advocate no less alien a new world than the new worlds that various Marxists advocate. And whilst orthodox Marxism might be more pronounced in its determination that such a new world is inevitable most Marxists agree with most distributists today that if there is not significant change in worldwide economic structures mankind will at some point make this planet inhospitable to human life. So in that sense, most Marxists and most distributists believe a new world is coming whether it’s the one we want or not.
I realize that the old ChesterBelloc canard is to pull out old tropes and cliches regarding both capitalism and communism, and this is part of the act of presenting something that is supposed to be taken as an actual third way or alternative from the supposed normative dialectic. I’ve yet to encounter any distributist who gives me reason to believe that he or she is well versed in either capitalism or communism, but that is to be expected, considering that the social theory was born from men who had little background in economics or in the making of things or the provision of services. Marxist thought is sometimes parochial and banal, sometimes complex and rich, and what falls under the Marxist umbrella is hugely varied, taking many divergent paths. To make blanket pronouncements about Marxism is about as silly as to make blanket pronouncements regarding evolutionary theory(-ies).
Society is becoming more and more openly hostile to one another.I am always amazed at how willing people are to make a comment like the “Yeah!” guy at the Ron Paul debate.Except I was at a PTO meeting.(Did I say that?) Until Christ comes again the world will cycle back and forth between its senses: it will be barbarism and then people will get sick of that,then “values” will reincarnate in some fashion and then when people get sick of that, the cycle will continue.But I know the fight must be fought, it is a grassroots campaign to win hearts to the good.
Similar experiences with the Great Divide:
One that taught me to shut my mouth was when a couple we know (evangelical Christian) came to visit. When I expressed my horror of the Iraq war, the wife, who is a very gentle woman, said,”Well, they asked for it.” I couldn’t believe my ears, and before I could rein in the words I blurted out “They DID NOT ask for it.” I didn’t say more than that, because I suddenly realized that our relationship for the rest of their week-long visit would be very strained if I did.
For a Women’s Day celebration among my more liberal acquaintances, who know my thoughts on abortion, I attended with my “Peace in the womb, too” sign. One of my friends made a little speech about keeping abortion legal, and there I was, the “sore thumb” on the sidelines, thinking , “Oh no, this is going to make things very awkward between us.” But, she took the initiative, and very kindly approached me to talk about other things… to demonstrate indirectly that, no matter how we disagreed on this subject, we were still friends.
So I’ve been surprised by conservative Christians supporting an illegal pre-emptive war, and I’ve been shamed by liberal pro-choicers demonstrating a sort of unconditional love.
Well, posts like this are good. Thank you for discussing this. We need to bring back civility into the discussion. Sometimes even if you do think the other side embraces evil, by getting nasty you cut off any chance of an open debate. We all need to exercise self-control. And we have to remember to love our enemies. If we remain level headed and don’t call names, we give them a reason to respect us and that might lead to an actual conversation.
I do think we’ve reached this sorry point because controversy sells and everything in our nation is driven by consumerism. Our materialism has drowned out our good will.
The comment from the conservative Evangelical really isn’t surprising. For Evangelicals and American Protestants in general, the Nation substitutes for the Church Universal. One goes from a visible local congregation to an invisible universal church. Moreover in America’s early history, the civil authorities had to enforce morals and church discipline. Especially in Puritan New England, the magistrates worked with the pastors and called synods. So to a good American Protestant, the Nation is the Church – and our diplomatic and military goals are beyond question.
Likewise, liberal social engineering can become the Social Gospel which is beyond criticism.