[I’m exhausted today, so have a reprint from Eternity Road in September 2004. It addresses the cleavage between Left and Right in a way that many are still reluctant to acknowledge. Unfortunately, the great majority of the links no longer work. – FWP]
Via Sarah at Trying To Grok comes a link to an extraordinarily illuminating exchange between a conservative blog-proprietor and a liberal visitor:
I haven’t posted much today. One reason is I’ve been considering a question.
First, a little background. This is a conservative blog. We aren’t shy around here about professing our support for President Bush and other Republican candidates. If you had missed that point, let me invite you to take a look around.
We (the authors of this site) are Conservative Republicans. We write about Conservative Republican matters to our audience, who are mostly (go figger) Conservative Republicans. Makes sense so far, doesn’t it?
But over the last couple of months in particular we have noticed an increase in comments from Liberals. Not just trolls, although God knows we have our share of them, but from self-professed Liberals, Kerry fans, who sometimes even make a semi-intelligent argument, even if they’re usually wrong.
I don’t hold that against them. For the most part, they’re just misinformed.
But what I have to wonder is WHY? Why are they here? We certainly don’t have anything to offer them and their belief system.
And then it occurred to me why.
It’s because the Democratic party, which has now gone beyond leftist to outright radical, doesn’t have much to offer the average Democrat either. Democrats are seeking thoughts and ideas that their own party is no longer offering them.
Case in point: I’m a union member. The union I belong to has endorsed John Kerry. Out of the (100% union members) 30 people in the facility where I work, John Kerry can expect….zero votes. Some of the folks I work with are Democrats, but they recognize that Kerry is the WRONG MAN for the job.
My dad’s a lifelong Democrat. HE recognizes that John Kerry is the WRONG MAN for the job. He’ll be voting for Bush, at the age of 71 the first time he has ever voted for a Republican candidate.
And the Liberals keep coming here, and reading, and commenting. Oh, sure, they raise hell in the comments. They try to plead their cases. But you know what’s MOST important?
They keep coming back. They keep reading.
There may be hope for some of them yet.
That was the main body of the post, of course. But hearken here to one liberal’s response:
Three words: Know your enemy.
You want to see blogs with some serious followers? Go check out Atrios, with its comments in the hundreds for every post. Go check out Pandagon, with its everyday readers of 25 or more. Go check out dailykos, and tell me Democrats are giving up and don’t really like Kerry anyway.
I dare you.
Know your enemy — ?
I wouldn’t have goggled much at “opponent,” and only slightly more at “adversary,” but “enemy” connotes something much more significant.
An enemy is one who has pledged to break you to his will. Normally, you’ve made a reciprocal pledge about him. An enemy is one whose motives and objectives are absolutely incompatible with yours, so that the only way to settle things between you is the test of arms.
If Smith and Jones have compatible objectives, for example combating terrorism, curbing some destructive practice, or improving the lot of the underclass or the working poor, they needn’t be enemies. They might disagree on the proper tactics, and the disagreement might be quite dramatic, but the commonality of their values allows them to coexist amicably. Political adversaries with compatible values and morals are not enemies, any more than two engineers with different solutions to an engineering problem would be.
Only persons whose differences are on morals or values need be enemies. Morals are the set of constraints on human behavior that define what is not permissible in pursuit of any goal, however high-minded. You may be utterly sincere in your desire to better the condition of the poor, but if you advocate theft, enslavement, or murder as your means of doing so, you become my enemy. Values are, of course, the goals themselves. If my goal is to conquer your country and enslave your people, we will most certainly be enemies.
It is characteristic of those on the political Left today that they do consider us on the Right their enemies, with whom no accommodation is possible. Bear in mind that this is the case despite the superior success of Rightist policy prescriptions at achieving Leftists’ averred goals!
What can this mean?
To this writer it means that it’s time to ask what Theodore Sturgeon called “the next question.” The Right espouses most of the same goals as the Left: peace, security for Americans’ lives and property, an end to terrorism, economic improvement for the underclass, protection of the air and water against negligent or malicious damage, and so forth. We do differ on some “hot button” issues, such as abortion, but the commonalities between our stated objectives is overwhelming. So what’s the problem? Where’s the gulf that requires them to destroy us?
In part, it could be envy. There’s a substantial conservative majority in America today, and it’s getting stronger and more vociferous all the time. During our terms in power, we have been more successful at achieving what the Left claims to want to achieve than the Left has been during its own periods of puissance. Envy is a strong force, and its grip on men’s minds is a subtle and involute thing. It ought not to be discounted.
But there’s another, darker pair of possibilities, which has even more explanatory power and could well be the key to American political acrimony at all levels and over all subjects:
- They’re lying about their goals.
- They think we’re lying about our goals.
Among ordinary decent Americans who style themselves “liberals” and take a passing interest in politics but don’t consider themselves activists, the first hypothesis doesn’t look good. Decent Americans are, after all, exactly that: decent Americans. Decent people understand that cooperation is the key to achieving any social objective. They don’t attempt to deceive others about what they want. A few might think conservatives are being cagey about their real goals, but only a few. Most of them know too many conservatives personally, and therefore have ample evidence to corroborate the premise of conservatives’ candor and benevolence.
Among left-wing activists, on the other hand, matters are much different. For one thing, their societies tend to be closed to others of different opinions. As a result, they are self-insulated from evidence that would contradict whatever they might choose to believe about “the enemy.” For another, their politics is powered by the assumption of differential rectitude: the premise of their own moral superiority to those not of their kind, brilliantly delineated and explored in Thomas Sowell’s The Vision Of The Anointed. They cannot afford to concede conservatives superior insight on any topic, or moral acceptability on general principles; that would undermine their anointed status and send their concept of their place in the world crashing to the dust.
Evidence for this is everywhere. Look at the moral haughtiness and outright contempt for conservative views to be found among such as Oliver Willis, Kevin Drum, Markos Zuniga and Duncan Black. Look at the venom dripping from the pens of those who flock to their banners. Look at their casual dismissals of the notion that any conservative might have wholesome aspirations for the less fortunate, or the notion that a conservative could possibly be a good and worthy man. Look at the way they routinely assert that whatever tactics their side employs are just dandy, since they’re on the side of the angels, whereas when conservatives do the very same things, their indignation knows no bounds.
Near enemies, by the way, must always get more attention and effort than far ones, which is why leftist activists hold defeating President Bush and Republicans generally to be infinitely more important than extirpating the terrorist infrastructure from the Muslim Middle East.
If you grant the Left’s premises and close your mind, as leftists do, to the counter-evidence to them, the rest of their aggressive, take-no-prisoners attitude towards us follows remorselessly. But that’s almost unnecessary to say. Many conceptual aberrations and diseases of the mind are logically impeccable, if you grant the absurd assumptions at their bases. (Arthur Herzog, in his book The B.S. Factor, defines a paranoid as “a logician with a fractured premise.”)
Consider also this: the extraordinary dismay among leftist activists when someone they consider “one of us” defects even on one subject. The best illustrations of this in recent years have been the awakenings of Gregg Easterbrook and Bjorn Lomborg to the failures of statist-interventionist environmentalism. These men received so much vilification, and such savage assaults on their worth as human beings, as to suggest that they’d declared fellowship with Osama bin Laden. Conversely, a conservative who changes his views, such as Glenn Loury, is hailed as a sort of hero, and is feted in a manner more appropriate to a great military commander or a mighty savant. The intensity of the denunciations and accolades marks the enveloping us-versus-them attitude as essentially religious, rather than analytical and respectful of the evidence.
Could leftists be lying about their goals? Might their much vaunted “compassion” be a mere smokescreen, and power over all the rest of us be their true and only objective? In a very few cases, yes. But such persons are less likely to be “ordinary” Americans than politicians with large public profiles and much notoriety. Whatever their station in life, these are the very definition of monsters: men who have sold their souls for power and recognize no constraints in the quest for it. They cannot be saved by any human exertion; they can only be watched, and put down when it becomes expedient to do so.
We must concern ourselves with the followers of the “conservatives are secretly evil” axiom. These can yet be salvaged, even if they remain left-aligned, simply by confronting them with the counter-evidence they have been denied, or have denied themselves: ourselves, our courtesy, our humility, and our sincere desire to see things get better for everyone. Given time, a sufficient interpenetration could defuse the hostilities and return America to the days when a defeated activist could sincerely wish his victorious opponent the best of luck, as Hubert Humphrey did when he lost to Richard Nixon in 1968 (“He’s going to have my help”), or as Dan Quayle did when he and Bush the Elder lost to Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992 (“If he runs the country as well as he ran the campaign, we’ve got nothing to worry about”).
Remember this when tempted to designate someone your enemy: you will force him, willy-nilly, to do the same to you. He might have wanted to grant your integrity and benevolence, but your declaration of war will compel him to reciprocate, if only in self-defense.
