George Rebane
A recurring theme on RR has been debating the fundamental asymmetry giving rise to the polarization between conservatives embracing liberty and free market capitalism, and liberals embracing big government socialism. The Great Divide is one foci of the debate about how to resolve this asymmetry. The nearby graphic communicates the essence of this resolution, and drives liberals into apoplexy as these pages have witnessed. But it doesn’t have to end that way. Just a thought.
[Addendum] Bob Crabb’s series of ‘Yes We Con’ essays on the Republican lovefest (aka convention) in Tampa highlights the polarizing truth of my little statement above. Now before going further, Bob is a friend and a man whose work (both graphic and lexicographic) I admire. While doing his best to cast a gimlet eye on both parties, according my compass, Bob still steers his ship of slate a bit left of center.
This assessment is apparent in his recounting of the recent damp days in Tampa. There Bob’s reportage again percolates the notions that the conservatives and their Republican flag bearers are basically evil in thought and deed, and out to do the little guy in along every aspect of life – his job, his health, his education, …, and, here’s where it get a bit gritty, also his opportunity to better himself, his family, or his situation.
The Left, on the other hand, is just a bunch of good-hearted, ecologically sensitive, bureaucratic bunglers with deep souls who do their best to deliver social justice within a tough and rapacious environment ruled by rule-breaking capitalism. But they are learning, and if we give them just one more chance, they will get it right and there will be happy dancing in the streets.
This then is the middle ground in which we are invited to gather for the great journey ‘forward’. But it turns out that the so-called middle ground today is inhabited almost entirely by expatriates from the Left who have been shocked by the realities that their more devoutly radical brethren have delivered. They recall being true believers themselves before they saw their dreams turn into dysfunction, and then decided to quietly emigrate to a land of no clear ideology. There they would remain in that everlasting political calm, looking at both sides, and periodically clucking their tongues at what now from their new vantage appeares as the polarized extremes.
It turns out that the problem with these middle roaders is they ended their journey a little too soon – they never reached the middle, because it was hard to completely cast off those delightful, simple, and pure certitudes that first clarified a complex world to young minds. Some of those wonderful tenets, or at least their echoes, must surely still hold – let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water and all that. And so they came to homestead a patch of ideologically barren turf where they sit today and sarcastically judge the quick and the dead, and issue their plaintive calls for the rest of us to join them.
What these self-declared middle roaders fail to see is that they have neither old nor new solutions to attract, let alone bind, the collectivists and the classical liberals. There is no there there. They stopped where the ground is still slippery and still slopes to the Left.
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