The Looney Liberal Chronicles: Chapter 2

 by Phillip Ellis Jackson  

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Don’t expect too much from a Liberal who thinks that “good” and “evil” are just four-letter words.

Chapter 2: Morality in Politics:  The Ox and the Moron

“Oxymoron” is defined by Webster’s as “a figure of speech in which opposite or contrary ideas or terms are combined.”  I’m tempted to end this chapter here, since that definition kind of says it all about the modern-day notion of Morality in Politics, particularly when the focus is on Liberal thought and the Democratic Party.

As I tried to show in an earlier essay, "Democrats Find God, but Lose his Address," the two parties routinely employ “moral” terminology to justify their positions, but approach the issue from slightly different perspectives:

God-Fearing Republicans:  “We oppose aborting an otherwise healthy, developing child when the life of the mother is not at stake.”

God-Fearing Democrats:  “We are moral God-Fearing Democrats who oppose Republican attempts to place any limitations on a Woman’s Constitutional Right to Choose.” 

God-Fearing Republicans:  “We support the President’s plan to reduce taxes to stimulate the economy.”

God-Fearing Democrats:  “We need to raise taxes on the rich (without defining ‘rich’ as a family of 4 with a combined income of $50,000) because it is the moral thing to do.”

To the Democrats, when not insisting that the notion of morality has no place at all in public debate, morality — once employed by these same Liberals/Democrats — becomes a tactic and a strategy in and of itself, not a bedrock principle upon which moral positions are constructed. 

When exit polls showed in 2004 that many voters embraced morality as a determining factor in their vote, supporting Republican candidates and rejecting Democrat ones, the Liberals found God.  And what did they do to capitalize on their new-found embrace of moral-based decision-making?  Cast aside the failed amoral, immoral, or simply non-moral expedient-driven policies of the past?  Not exactly.  Instead of re-thinking the positions the voters had rejected, they maintained the same old Democrat policies they had before, but injected the word “moral” into each sentence.  No need to say why supporting abortion or raising taxes is moral.  Just use the word over and over, and pretty soon, they were convinced, Democrat policies would be seen as a moral alternative to Republican policies.

They call this in psychological circles a form of “projection.”  I think that’s going a bit too far by ascribing a complicated medical condition to a rather simple calculation.  It’s better (and more accurate) to call it what it actually is: pure political pandering devoid of any real meaning or substance. 

And, it has a hallowed history in modern Liberal thought (which knows no national boundaries), as my Looney Liberal Chronicles illustrated a few years ago.

Following the attack on New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, I began a debate about pre-emptive military action (with its sub-theme of pacifism in the face of an obvious threat).  This discussion took place on two fronts; one with my liberal ‘defend America but don’t be mean to the terrorists friends,’ and the other with a group of Brazilians with whom I had been corresponding on an entirely different subject matter.

That particular conversation took place in August 2002.  It started innocently enough when one member of the group inserted a rather snide side-comment into the discussion about the U.S. enforcing the UN resolution on Iraq.  I’ve devoted an entire future chapter to the substance of this debate, but for purposes of this topic I’ve excised one email exchange in particular that dealt with the subject of “Good and Evil.”  Their English was quite remarkable, and I’ve only cleaned up a few misspellings or minor grammatical errors.  Otherwise, their words are exactly as they were written. 

As expected, those on the Left had trouble seeing the inherent evil in hijacking four planes, and slamming three of them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

F: The great question is, what is evil?   “Good” and “Evil” are metaphysical concepts, not political, or even psychological.
 
Phil: There’s not much “metaphysical” about slamming an airplane full of innocent people into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and killing over 3000 people. I have no trouble recognizing this as evil.  Why do you?

F: In the political arena, it’s hard to think in such moral terms.  Saddam Hussein, for example, is now the incarnate of Evil.  Okay, but was he evil when the U.S. supported his regime against Iran?  Or take Bin Laden himself.  When the U.S. needed someone to put up against the USSR in Afghanistan, he was the good guy.  His ideas, political and philosophical views, were the same as today, but the context was different.  So “good” and “evil” aren’t absolute terms, but contextual.

Phil: Which is what I’ve been saying all along.  Stalin was our enemy in WWII before he was our friend, and then he was our enemy again.  We didn’t support him when we did because he was a communist; we supported him because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  It was a strategic calculation, nothing more, nothing less. “Good” and “Evil” had nothing to do with it, any more than good or evil can be used to characterize my decision to shop at Wal-Mart rather than Target, or eat lasagna instead of spaghetti for dinner.

The only legitimate way good and evil enter into the conversation is when we discuss the underlying motives of the action, or the tactics we use to support the strategy.  One could argue that Hitler was a greater threat to the world in 1942 than Stalin, so we used Stalin to help defeat Hitler.  That was the underlying motive for our action, not a decision that Stalin was “good.”  The same logic applies to the Iran-Iraq war, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

Conceivably, we could have armed the Mujahideen with tactical nuclear weapons, or ultra-sophisticated conventional weaponry, but instead we gave them stinger missiles and other limited support.  We didn’t do this because we thought Bin Laden and his cronies were saints, we helped them because the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented a greater threat to the world.  And our help was measured and temperate. 

If Israel had been attacked, we would have done a lot more because their value system is much closer to ours, and our motives would have been only partly strategic.  The main reason would have been more directly tied to the fight between “good” and “evil.”

So context is everything.  Just because I helped you doesn’t mean I automatically support your philosophy. I may, or I may not. It all depends on the context, which allows me to vary my response precisely because there is a difference between Good and Evil.

Why is this so hard to understand?

I thought I’d nailed the issue perfectly, but another person, L, added his opinion.  According to him, maybe the U.S. can determine what is good and what is evil, but then so too can our enemies.  Only they have a different frame of reference.  So in the end, it’s all relative.

L: When the U.S. attacks Afghanistan or Iraq, I’m not arguing this is right or wrong.  It’s in the defense of your particular interests, of what is good for you. Reciprocally, when Bin Laden attacked the U.S. he believed he was doing good for his cause too.  So, to put the question in moral absolute terms is to vitiate it, since what is at stake is not a moral fight, even if both sides think in such terms, but a clash of opposite interests (including, naturally, survival or a retaliation for past offenses).

Phil: I’ll leave aside your inference that we brought 9/11 on ourselves because we wouldn’t let Israel be exterminated as so much pabulum (that, after all, is our main “offense”), and address your other point, which is this: there’s no universal notion of right and wrong, good or bad, so every morality is equal to every other morality.  My morality says don’t break into other people’s homes and kill their children to avenge some perceived wrong.  Yours says that’s perfectly okay, so I guess we’re both acting morally by me respecting your home, and you violating mine. 

This is the worst kind of bankrupt, relativistic morality around.  The same people who advocate this drivel are usually the ones to claim it’s “immoral” for the U.S. to attack another country preemptively, execute our prisoners who are convicted of a capital offense, restrict a woman’s “right” to abortion, or pursue any other cause or policy they personally object to. 

You can’t have it both ways.  If Benny-the-Butcher Bin Laden cannot be morally condemned for killing innocent Americans, then don’t question anything the U.S. did, or will do, anywhere in the world.  And if one day our CIA assassinates your president or our military just decides to get up that morning and take over your country for the hell of it, don’t complain because there’s nothing wrong, or bad, or immoral about this action.  It just “is.”

This, inevitably, led to a charge that the U.S. was immoral anyway (though to the author the verdict was still out on Bin Laden, because he was using God to justify his actions just like Americans do when they ask God to watch over and protect our nation).  The evidence from him was two-fold.  First, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, killing enemy civilians.  And second, our government shot women and men in Vietnam who were not uniformed combatants.  This, and the invasion of Afghanistan by U.S. forces that must have killed innocent civilians somewhere, at some time, in some place, “proved“ the point.

By now my head was spinning from the manifest stupidity I was supposed to treat as a legitimate opinion.  Instead of using the occasion to vent about the complete incoherence of that line of reasoning, I decided to reply to him knowing that it was hopeless to change his mind, but with the thought that there were others in the group who were actually engaging in a reasoned conversation, and they might learn from the response.

Phil: Tell you what.  When you read a little more about the development and use of atomic weapons against a country that attacked us first, and where one million U.S. soldiers were projected to die in an assault on the Japanese mainland, and factor in that we have not used atomic weapons since, not even in the mountains of Afghanistan, we can talk.

And when you’ve read a little more about the Viet-Nam war — its origins and how it was fought against regular NVA soldiers and irregulars not in uniform — and understand that contrary to your assertion the U.S. did not kill two million people in Viet-Nam, but did prosecute its own soldiers for war crimes, we can talk.

And when you can understand why a nation that was attacked on 9/11 might want to pursue the people (and their allies) who allowed this to happen, instead of thinking that it’s “funny” to see innocent people jump to their deaths from the top of the World Trade Center, we can talk.

And when you can structure a debate that doesn’t rely on moral relativism to equate Bin Laden deliberately targeting innocent women and children with the innocent people who are accidentally killed during wartime, we can talk.

And when you can see a fundamental difference between the practice of capitalism and Islamic terrorism, we can talk.

You are a moral relativist of the worst kind.  You are dishonest in your claims of humanitarianism, because you either cannot recognize true evil, or will not.  I have absolutely no interest in carrying on a conversation with a demeaning, self-important, uneducated fool.  Please spare me a response, because I have no intention of replying to your bullsh*t disguised as debate. I will not allow those who have chosen to present their views in a thoughtful, reasoned way have their good character tarnished by including such a condescending ideologue in these discussions.

Okay, so I did do a little venting, but the message got through.  It’s all right to disagree in the free exchange of ideas, but you can’t just make things up to support your position. It’s bad enough when American liberals trot out the Social Security and dog food scare every four years to frighten senior citizens into voting for a Democrat, but it gets particularly offensive when these same liberal apologists can’t even tell the difference between John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy. 

What is it about modern liberalism that values moral equivalency over moral values?  I think the answer is relatively clear.  Whether it’s in Brazil, France, the U.S. or anywhere else in the world, I blame the laziness and self-importance of people on the Left for adopting a morally-superior attitude that recognizes no such thing as genuine morality.  Just a few moments of thought about the issue would be enough to pry open the cobwebs in the deep, dark recesses of their mind and get them to start asking some poignant questions.  But laziness is only part of the answer.  At least on the domestic U.S. front, this uneducated Intelligencia would not exist in the form it does today if it hadn’t been for the 50-year media monopoly in this country. 

As I explained to my friend Harry in an August 2000 email, I believe that public policy decisions are in fact tied to issues of morality, at least for accountability purposes.  But any public sense of right and wrong has been skewed by an agenda-driven media that defines this concept exclusively in liberal terms, which is to say, no terms at all.

Phil: For the past fifty years the news media, entertainment industry, and elected officials have perpetuated the theme that the government has a “moral” responsibility to provide extensive support and assistance to the under-privileged of our society.  People whose life style and self-destructive decisions have placed them in a situation of need are treated identically to those who, through no fault of their own (mental illness, unavoidable misfortune, etc.) need outside support to weather a crisis or provide for their family’s long term needs.

Thus, it’s “moral” to simply give people welfare, but mean spirited to make them work for their government handout.  It’s moral to take one man’s money who’s saved and sacrificed to provide enough tax revenue to support someone who gambled and drank his earnings away.  It’s immoral to say to homosexuals engaged in unprotected sex “don’t do that” since you may get AIDS, and then taxpayers will have to help take care of you.  But it’s moral to say to a drug company we’re glad you took the risk to develop a new drug (risking financial loss if your research failed), but now that you have it you shouldn’t charge very much for it because people want it.

Fortunately, with the rise of alternative media, these liberal orthodoxies are being questioned for the first time, and many are beginning to collapse from their own weight.  It’s hard to demonize rich people for not paying their “fair share” of taxes when people learn that “rich” doesn’t automatically mean “Bill Gates,” and that an infinitesimally small percentage of U.S. taxpayers actually pay the overwhelming majority of federal income tax.  Liberal notions of morality only hold when the alternative arguments are hidden from public view.

Once the free flowing exchange of ideas begins to take place, conservatism always wins. Unless, of course, you’re Andy Rooney, Michael Moore, Bill Moyers, or any other Liberal icon who has an alternative explanation for phenomenon: the people are simply too stupid to understand what’s best for them.

* * *

I’ve written extensively on the subject of morality and politics in earlier postings, so I won’t repeat a lot of it here.

Suffice to say, I don’t believe that every political act involves a grand moral issue.  Nor is every perceived issue of morality one that measures up to the test of the universal moral code.  But there are some issues in politics and society that deserve to be viewed from a common moral framework, and it does a disservice to this debate to either deny that fact outright, or so muddy the issue with selective, convoluted expressions of morality that the discussion is rendered meaningless.

It’s no accident that this chapter on morality and politics is the smallest chapter in this series.  Once we acknowledge that morality can play a direct, but carefully circumscribed role in the making of public policy, and once the few simple truths about morality itself have been revealed, there’s not a lot left to be said.  The real battle then takes place on the policy field, where the practical application of morality and politics is put to the test. 

And what better place to start than the region of the world that gave birth to the three great religions of our time, and whose modern day practitioners posit the moral superiority of their words and actions.  The Middle East.

Look for the next chapter coming soon – “The Middle East:  The Gift that Keeps on Giving.”

Looney Liberal Chronicles

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