I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican. Harry Stein
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and personal. And one of the things that never ceases to astound is the depth of their ignorance; how, relying as they do on their own ideologically driven media and tending to hang out almost exclusively with those who do the same, they simply have never been exposed to all manner of information vital to seeing the world as it really is.
Just recently, while having dinner with a couple of friends on the opposite side of the political spectrum - both of them possessing degrees from what pass as prestigious universities - my wife and I kept exchanging incredulous looks as, on topic after controversial topic, they revealed themselves to be clueless dunderheads. While proudly pro-union and especially full of gratitude to the SEIU for all it had done on behalf of ObamaCare, they were completely unaware that public union pension plans had brought state governments across the country to the brink of collapse. Speaking of which, while they of course greatly admired the Canadian and British health care systems, they dismissed as right-wing invective even the most easily confirmed reports of rationing and extended wait times for treatment. Then, of course, there was global warming - not just “settled science,” but, as “everyone” knows, the gravest threat to humankind’s existence. No, they hadn’t heard about the massive fraud foisted on the world by the “scholars” of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, let alone the growing body of scientific evidence contradicting the outlandish claims of the climate alarmists; it had appeared (in highly sanitized form) only belatedly in the Times, and then buried way back, and they’d failed to unearth it. And, too, lest we forget, in their view Obama remained the ultimate bipartisan-a “healer” - but he’d been consistently thwarted by those vicious Republicans.
So, once again, my wife and I were reminded that, among the many things about which liberals know so astonishingly little, is us. For, of course, what they think they know about conservatives, they’ve picked up by innuendo or, very nearly the same thing, the commentary in their preferred media, from people like Paul Krugman or Frank Rich in the Times, Katie Couric or Harry Smith over at CBS, or just about anyone at MSNBC or NPR. It basically boils down to this: Conservatives are greedy, hard-hearted, evil bastards and are, by definition, wrong about absolutely everything. More than a few of them would, if they could, make us wear warning bells like medieval lepers and force us to shout, on every approach, “Unclean! Unclean!” (Maybe they will, if Obama gets to appoint an additional Supreme Court justice or two!)
Not long ago, Dennis Prager produced a splendid column about liberals and their capacity for self-delusion called “When I Was a Boy, America Was a Better Place.” Basically, it was a catalog of the disasters liberalism has visited upon American culture in recent decades.
• Restrictions on free (and honest) speech in the name of sensitivity.
• The remaking of American history into therapy for minorities and women.
• A general decline in civility.
• The absence of fathers from countless homes.
• The stigmatization of men as potential predators.
• The corruption of childhood through an aggressively sexualized culture.
What’s funny, if that’s the word, is that even those comparatively reasonable liberals who decry these and other cultural changes cited by Prager seem to have no idea that any of them stem from liberalism. As one such guy I know put it, apparently oblivious to the contradiction, liberalism “stands for progress; conservatism stands for turning back the clock to the bad old days.”
In fact, what we conservatives stand for is a commitment to enduring verities and immutable standards, which is quite a different thing. Meanwhile, for liberals, the very meaning of that magic word “progress” is subject to constant and even violent revision.
As a reformed lib myself, I vividly recall how, during the debate on the Equal Rights Amendment in the early Seventies, my friends and I used to sneer at the ERA opponents’ claims that its passage would lead one day to coed bathrooms on college campuses and women in combat. Just as liberals do today regarding health care, we labeled these arguments absurd right-wing canards designed to scare the hell out of credulous Middle Americans. A couple of decades later, countless millions of liberals themselves were dismissing the notion of gay marriage as an outright absurdity. Today, in liberal land, to so much as question the desirability of any of these things is to cast suspicion upon oneself as a closet reactionary.
I swear, to try and find any logic in it is to make one’s head spin.
Of course, that’s precisely the point. When you’re talking liberalism, you may be talking many things - self-righteousness, good intentions as an end in themselves, obliviousness to consequences - but logic is not one of them. Liberals feel what they feel, when they feel it, and what they feel at any given moment is what they know.
This is why anyone who believes that a liberal can be straightened out if only reality is explained to him, simply and clearly, is doomed to fail. I made that mistake myself some years back, at book length. That volume was entitled How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), and I truly expected that (a) most of its readers would be liberals curious to know why one of their own would desert the tribe and (b) it might engender some interesting conversation across ideological lines.
The reader is free to imagine me smashing my forehead and exclaiming “D’oh!”
Truly, I’ve never been so wrong about anything in my life. I literally cannot say with complete certainty that a single liberal even read it. And I include family and friends, none of whom seems to have gotten past the most cursory skim. One old friend, in a moment of unembarrassed candor, told me he read the title and “was sickened.” Another, a guy on my over-40 softball team, claimed to have read it, sneeringly referring to it as How I Lost All My Ethics and Became a Fascist, but when closely questioned didn’t seem to know anything that was in it.
It is a mistake I won’t make again. This book is not only about, but also expressly for, those who already know exactly what I’m talking about - those for whom a red flag goes up every time they see the words “diversity,” “multicultural,” or “nonjudgmental.”
As it happens, there are lots and lots and lots of us out there, a good many more, in fact, than even we sometimes realize. That is one of the many, many blessings of the Tea Party movement and, indeed, if one looked closely enough, it was clear even in the gruesome 2008 election results that left so many of us feeling more isolated than ever. Let’s put it this way: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a lunatic like Noam Chomsky is considered mainstream, there were 4,664 estimable souls who pulled the lever for McCain-Palin; in San Francisco, which lays out the welcome mat out for the drug-addled homeless like other cities do for free-spending conventioneers, an intrepid Republican named Dana Walsh racked up 16,149 versus Nancy Pelosi (and never mind that Cindy Sheehan outpolled Walsh nearly 2-1); in Chicago, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.’s Republican opponent drew fully 29,050 voters, not a single one residing in a cemetery; and, yes, even in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, ground zero for elitist know-it-alls, media narcissists, airheads in the arts and America-hating academics, the Republican challenger to formerly rotund liberal icon Jerry Nadler polled 35,822.
As a matter of fact, this book’s working title was Red Manhattan , the reference of course being to Red State types marooned on that magnificent, accursed island. But I soon saw that the title provoked confusion. Some took it to refer to Communists of old, of which there remained plenty in Manhattan, and others objected on geographical grounds, since I was dealing not just with beleaguered conservatives in New York but anywhere self-satisfied liberal ignorance holds sway.
Among the alternatives I considered were In Darkest Blue America, Among the Savages in Darkest Blue America, and Behind Enemy Lines, and each was obviously wanting. But, as we know, in their perverse way, liberals never fail to come through. I was still struggling with the title problem when, one evening, my wife and I attended a dinner party. It was primary season, early on in Obama mania, and when, inevitably, the discussion turned to the glories of The Messiah, I felt compelled to sound a mild cautionary note about his lack of experience. At this, the guy beside me, who’d known me all of fifteen minutes,