Middle America according to the Left.
We find ourselves in the midst of the latest leftist media attempt to explain to us exactly who and what we conservatives are. You know the drill: racist, homophobic, bitter, gun-slingin', bible-totin' Neanderthals. This effort to define their enemies happens every time the Democrat Party perceives itself to be in trouble.
You may recall that when America endorsed the Contract with America by giving Republicans the House majority in 1994, the late ABC anchorman Peter Jennings famously attributed it to a "temper tantrum" by the electorate. Similarly, when their idol, Bill Clinton, faced removal from office, his allies in the media dutifully regurgitated the daily talking points emanating from his infamous War Room. Their demonization of mild-mannered men like Ken Starr and Henry Hyde would have been laughable were it not so scurrilously effective.
Yes, liberal media spinners have had their way with manipulating public opinion for quite some time. They have ruined the reputations of conservatives with everything from live-mike verbal slipups to obscure misspelling errors. Democrats can be found with thousands of dollars hidden in their freezers or stuffing sensitive security documents down their pants, but call somebody "macacca" and prepare to face the lynch mob. So well have they honed their skill, that they even managed to select as the opposition for Barack Obama a man that almost no conservative could stand.
But while they are most effusive in pointing out the foibles of their opposition, they are not so forthcoming in addressing the rest of America. So, lest there be any confusion, or some among you who are still unable to read between the lines, let yours truly give a clear and concise encapsulation of just what the Left really thinks of you.
Blacks: No matter what liberals say, no matter how they try and spin it, they consider you to be lazy, stupid, slovenly and most importantly, prone to violence and crime. They love it when many of you revel in your victimhood and do all they can to encourage it. Their every action and piece of legislation they propose to pass for your benefit proves this over and over again. Even programs like affirmative action, although they seem high-minded and noble, only serve to taint any achievements you might have made without them.
They desperately want and need your children to embrace the gang and rap culture in order to keep them servile to "the struggle," and so they throw more and more money at an education system which values diversity over any real learning. And when some of you wise up and demand things like school choice, you are deemed as no longer "black" and therefore irrelevant.
Hispanics: Most everything liberals think about blacks applies to you, except that you have too many babies and therefore may have foreign attachments; not to your own native countries, but to Rome. Also, they feel that you came to this country, not to raise your children as Americans, but to enjoy living in your own little barrios — complete with all the poverty and devastation you fled — and be grateful to them for the opportunity to do so.
Senior citizens: Except for your slavish and misplaced devotion to them at the ballot box, liberals have viewed you as essentially useless since the 1960's. To them, you represent everything wrong with this country: you sacrificed all to ensure that your children would inherit the kind of America that would protect them from the same depredations of war and economic depression you lived through. And, reports to the contrary notwithstanding, Democrats have rewarded you by playing on your fears about Social Security for decades, all the while eating away at the financial security you worked your whole lives to build.
Younger Americans: In the minds of those on the Left, you have two options; you can either enlist with many of your college classmates to worship at the shrine of socialism, or you can join the rest of us who can't be trusted with anything; whether it's raising your own children, providing for the medical and financial welfare of your family as you see fit, buying the products you desire, or most of all, feeling secure in any wealth or private property you may accumulate.
Middle-class white men: Those of you who still vote for Democrats must truly be as doltish as Hollywood movies and TV commercials make you out to be. Liberals demonize you every day and yet you keep coming back for more; from feminist women who seek to emasculate you to any and all victim-groups who seek reparations at your hands for the dastardly crimes of your forefathers.
Yes America, although they will vehemently deny it, this is what liberals truly think of you. And in the past, too many of you haven't seemed to care. But now that you've given them the power they've so ardently desired, their agenda is making all of the above crystal clear as the months roll on. You can either embrace "the hope" or make a change come November.
Take all the “common wisdom” and endlessly repeated “talking points” of today’s conservative columnists and you’ll discover the Left’s biggest sin is a deplorable lack of honesty – Conservatives never hear the truth about themselves from the Left, but, then again, they don’t hear the truth about themselves from the Right either. Like any loosely affiliated special interest group, Conservatives are often manipulated with a familiar and much loved propaganda from their spokespersons – and that isn’t about to change.
For an example of “official” Conservative wisdom, America is definitely a “center-right” nation – sure we are, except when America is a “center-left” nation, like voting Obama a clear mandate, as well as giving him a Democratic majority in Congress thereby allowing him to have his way with America’s wealth and freedoms. Those folks who are “gonna take back our country this November” were among the same ones who pulled the lever for Obama. They were “center-left” then, but “center right” now. Conservative pundits have given these “center-confused” voters an overly rationalized absolution; it wasn’t really their fault, Obama talked fancy to them, they were disappointed with Bush, they were angry with Wall St., they wanted to demonstrate a long held yearning for America’s first black president (not counting Bill Clinton).
But whatever the reasons for past lapses of sanity, we’ve come to our senses, we’ve changed genders once again, we’re center-right now and not gonna take it anymore. And don’t try to confuse us with backward glances and demands for explanations of bizarre past behaviors. Like teenagers, sometimes our hormones direct our actions, our frontal lobes aren’t fully developed yet, we’re out of control at times, but the great thing about Americans is that we regain our sanity periodically and reassert our “center-right” beliefs with a vengeance – or so we’re told.
In truth, Americans are “center-irrational” all the time, 24/7 crazy and proud of it, an accurate reflection of a universal voting franchise serving as a mechanism for selecting political leaders and enforcing the will of the majority on taxpayers and non-taxpayers alike. While not in control of themselves, a small minority of voters, the “swing voters”, are in control of our collective political future, they’re truly the king makers, the silent tie-breakers working behind the scenes to impose an irrational will on Conservatives and Liberals alike.
If you’re thinking that certainly doesn’t describe me, I’m a lifelong Conservative, a rational voter driven by principles and quite capable of evaluating candidates and issues in relation to time tested concepts of good government, then bully for you. If that truly describes you, congratulations – but you’re a member of America’s most discriminated against minority group. The majority, your oppressors, are captives of their baser emotions, fickle, inconsistent voters who can turn 180 degrees in a few short months. Polls are proof of this irrational political behavior, but Americans are used to polls describing their lack of rationality, they ignore them when convenient and simply change history at will to fit their current mood. In less than 2 years, we’ve supposedly come full circle, the emotions that drove a vast number among us to vote Obama have turned to bitter ashes. Obama did exactly what he claimed he would do before he was elected, but whatever emotions drove us to approve of him then have faded, we don’t approve of him now, at least according to the polls.
To enforce the Conservative myth, the emotion junkies on the Right claim Obama lied to the electorate, he came off as a mild mannered, black Reagan during the campaign but is, in reality, a closet Marxist – and there will be no honest re-examination of what actually happened during the presidential campaign – where’s the fun in that? Looking back (and only a short while ago), the electorate saw no real value in McCain other than his claim to be a Conservative and a Republican, they heaved a sigh of relief when the alternative to McCain wasn’t Hillary Clinton, a shrewish woman candidate with a lot of baggage. The inevitable result was Obama and he didn’t disappoint the irrationals within the voting majority – he unleashed the whirlwind and the emotion junkies can sincerely thank him for doing so. All the base emotions which form the bedrock of American politics can once again be exercised without caution or restraint within the current political cycle.
But if you’re tired of emotion driven politics and want good government in lieu of emotional highs, you could, in truth, be either a Conservative or a Liberal. If a Liberal, your side never really loses, you’re forced to retreat from time to time, you may not even like the excesses the crazies among your ranks propose, but at least you’re on the winning team, your philosophical agenda goes forward like the political form of glacial erosion, frustratingly slow but constant in result. And you might have to secretly vote Republican next election to reign in some of the present insanity among your fellow travelers, but thankfully the voting booth has thick curtains to hide your actions.
If you’re a Conservative, there is no hope for you in the process. A Republican majority in Congress can produce only blissful gridlock, can bring you a brief respite from rapid and unrestrained socialism, but it won’t restore America to its former greatness. As long as Conservatives see themselves as members of “center-right” America, the beating will continue, the politics of emotion will always trump the politics of reason.
One of the things that puzzles me about conservatives is why they seem to feel so ashamed of the things liberals often call them, such as “racist, homophobic, bitter, gun-slingin’, bible-totin’ Neanderthals.” It seems to me that, by spinning such labels just a little, conservatives can come up with a list of ‘good’ words to apply to themselves. The realities to which these words refer are regarded by conservatives not as bad things but as sound principles. Clearly, “Neanderthals” can’t be salvaged, but everything else can be turned into a positive point about conservatives. The conservative should stand tall and proud when resisting the expansion of gay rights, should feel righteous anger at liberals who reject him, should embrace guns for reasons both constitutional and manly, and as for the Bible, the conservative should have no qualms about being known, even reviled, for his or her embrace of it. Doesn’t Holy Scripture itself make this point clearly enough?
Fabrizio’s “clear and concise encapsulation of just what the left really thinks” about blacks, Hispanics, senior citizens, younger Americans, and middle-class white men is as full of generalizations and stereotyping as anything produced by her ideological enemies. Conservatives are still as good as anyone on the left at producing examples of political smears, providing ample illustrations for my students of the ideological mentality at work.
The last time I looked, it was the Right and not the Left that has played on the fears of senior citizens about Social Security all these years. Conservatives, not liberals, oppose this example of liberal social policy. The very idea of conservatives as defenders of Social Security is laughable. Of course it is now in their political interest to portray themselves as such, but this is a short-lived enthusiasm
The cliché of ‘emasculating’ feminists is probably older than Fabrizio herself. I suspect that she has been the beneficiary of feminists who worked for equality of economic opportunity in the workplace. If married, she is the beneficiary of feminists who worked to expose domestic violence against women and sexual harassment in the workplace. Doubtless, such benefits are invisible to her, as they are for many conservatives. Of course, we liberals never hold our breaths waiting for expressions of gratitude from conservatives.
As for ‘racism,’ I’ve saved this for last because I am convinced that its place in conservatism is unclear to most conservatives. There is good reason for this, because we liberals have worked to reduce racism in this country for decades, and most conservatives have long since imbibed our koolaid about equal rights. However, it is very easy to find conservatives who insist on the notion that there are morally and politically significant differences among the races, as well as to find conservatives who reject, as their predecessors rejected, the goals and tactics of the civil rights movement. Bill Buckley and “National Review” stood firmly against the civil rights movement, as anyone can see by viewing Buckley and Christopher Hitchins on NRO.
The problem can be stated very simply: conservatism, in any sensible version, claims that some identifiable set of social, political, cultural, economic, and moral conditions, existing at some point in the historical past, were better than those that obtain today, for reasons having to do with inherent rightness and decency, often understood in religious terms. A conservative, then, must be a traditionalist. The past embraced by the conservative has to have been real, and not imaginary. In the case of the United States, the open practice of and massive cultural support for white racism is a part of American history. It cannot be wished away, as some conservatives fantasize they can do. Such open racism was challenged and finally largely subdued solely by liberals, whether through federal court decisions or as a consequence of civil rights protests. And I hope no one is politically illiterate enough to think he or she can defeat this point by noting that congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The majority of congressional Republicans at that time were moderates or liberals; conservative Republicans in Congress were few, and Barry Goldwater voted against the bill. The pro-civil rights Republicans of that time were what are now called RINOs. The Democrats at that time had a large conservative wing, consisting mostly of Southern Democrats, and were not then the liberal party they came to be, even as the Republicans at that time were not yet a largely conservative party.
As for the genuine conservatives of that era, they usually stood with Buckley, “National Review,” and “Human Events” in opposition to any and all court decisions or laws that would challenge racial segregation. My point is that conservatives in search of principles need to return to conservatives who truly stood on conservative principles. A conservative cannot be an advocate of the process of expanding the scope of rights and liberties. The very idea of extending rights and liberties to parts of society previously deprived of them to any degree belongs, correctly, to the ideological Left. Conservatives used to know all of this; too bad they no longer read Eric Voegelin fulminating against the ‘liberation rabble’ of the modern age. However, ignorance of their own intellectual tradition is no excuse for conservatives, and it does not stand in the way of a liberal who seeks to teach conservatives what they are so willing and able to forget about their own teachings.
That’s funny. I don’t think anything at all like what this author says I should think like. Must be why I’m a socialist, not a liberal.
Today’s conservatives can’t tell the difference between a socialist and a liberal. They’ve lost the ability to make such distinctions because they taste victory and understand that one of their chief–and most effective–weapons is the charge that liberals and socialists are really the same thing. I’ve seen plain old everyday New Deal programs which have been given abundant popular support and enjoyed, a few decades back, bipartisan support in Congress, get rebaptized as evil leftist policies that lead us inexorably to the Gulag. It’s really the case that today’s conservatives believe that federal hot school lunches are just one step away from death camps. Being conservative means being unable to see these sorts of differences. However, I love to insist on moral integrity for conservatives.
Given what they believe about every government activity from federal testing of prescription drugs to Social Security, I insist that real conservatives simply say “no” to receiving any benefits from any of these programs. No SEC to check on the financial sector. No FDA for food and drugs. No federal meat inspection. No CDC. No federal money for medical research. No federal money for energy research. In fact, no federal money for any research by anybody, period. No government spending on education. In fact, no ‘government’ schools at all. (So any conservative who sends his or her kid to a public school is a traitor.) No income tax deduction for the interest on your home mortgage. Well, I can spend all day with this, but I hope my point is clear. Conservatives should all take a pledge to refuse all government benefits and services. If they do that, and live up to their pledge, maybe I’ll deign to consider some of their arguments, although I doubt it. And I’m certainly not going to hold my breath. I’ll go back to classical liberal John Locke in the “Second Treatise of Government;” if a person receives the benefits of government, he has given his tacit consent to it, and is obligated thereby. If he does not want to give his consent, he is free to leave the country. Conservatives should go back and read this and give it some thought.
I’ve seen plain old everyday New Deal programs which have been given abundant popular support and enjoyed, a few decades back, bipartisan support in Congress, get rebaptized as evil leftist policies that lead us inexorably to the Gulag. It’s really the case that today’s conservatives believe that federal hot school lunches are just one step away from death camps. Being conservative means being unable to see these sorts of differences.
Most of the “plain, everyday New Deal programs” were and are socialist/collectivist, to the extent that much of the New Deal was later struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. From a philosophical and moral standpoint, there actually isn’t a difference between “soft” collectivism and “hard” collectivism. Whether the government withholds your wages from you and then keeps them at the end of year if you refuse to purchase health insurance (ostensibly bestowing a “benefit” upon you whether you consent or not), or the government knocks on your door, drags you out of your house, and takes all of your jewelry and valuables is irrelevant – both acts are acts of coercion and theft. where you’re wrong is that this is a much more libertarian position than a conservative one. Many conservatives, particularly George W. Bush-esque “Neo” conservatives, support most of the New Deal, and even some of the Great Society, but simply wish to preserve that ratio of public-to-private balance and nothing more. “Conservative” is a term that is relative to some standard. Many modern conservatives are conservative relative to the standard of an already quasi-socialist 1960′s. For what it’s worth, I would be more than happy to take you up on your offer, but unfortunately, most of the “benefits” that hypocrites like me receive from government are compulsory. I would happy to opt out of social security, but the tax gets withheld automatically. I would be happy to take drugs not approved by the FDA, but the FDA doesn’t allow drugs to be manufactured, sold, or distributed which it does not approve. I would be happy to purchase securities from a bank without SEC approval, but such banks are not allowed to sell securities. When the “benefits” are compulsory, you cannot castigate as hypocrites the people who disagree with the “benefits” but still reap them because they have no choice. Failing to escape from a rapist is not implicit consent. Perhaps you should give that some thought before you question the honesty of people with whom you disagree. You, after all, are just as free to find a country with a constitution amenable to socialist collectivism – they exist in abundance.
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[...] Medio América, de conformidad a la izquierda. Nos encontramos en medio de los últimos medios izquierdistas intento de explicarnos exactamente quién y qué somos conservadores. Lo de siempre: racistas, homofóbicos, amargo, armas slingin ', la biblia Totin los Neandertales. Este esfuerzo por definir a sus enemigos que sucede cada vez que el Partido Demócrata se percibe que en [. . . ] URL del artículo original http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2010/04/19/the-view-from-the-left/ [...]
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