George Rebane
It turns out that my ongoing assessments of our Great Divide have been in error – the gulf between America’s Left and Right is significantly wider than what I have been reporting. This latest epiphany came to me as I was perusing ‘Another Day of Conflicting Realities’, Bob Crabb’s latest post and comment stream in which he takes me to task for my posting “left/right polarization will make a quantum leap to a much higher level in the next twelve months, exceeding by far anything we have witnessed to date” (here), and then goes on to verify this assertion.
In my years of observing the advent of our Great Divide, I have repeatedly sought to identify and solicit examples of the claimed ‘common ground’ that remains between our two receding poles. No one has stepped forward in these or other pages to point out even the remnants of a bridge to such a hopeful place. Everything that one side or the other offers is rejected a fortiori by their opposites with a counter offer of ‘my way or the highway’.
The nature of my epiphany was found in the extended comment by one of our county’s liberal intellectuals who also tracks and contributes to the goings on hereabouts. He advises Bob’s readers that (seatbelts please) “The American liberal movement actually has not become more liberal or radical while all of this has been going on. Consider just Democratic choices for president in the last several cycles–Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton were all moderate to centrist democratic choices in their respective races; rather than shifting to the left Democrats have shifted to the center– and the fact that every effort Democrats have made to compromise with the current administration on policy issues has been rejected.” Gore and Obama centrists??!
Another worthy comes right out with what appears to be the local Democrats’ received wisdom, that their party has actually been migrating right toward the center. Since my counter position was the focus of the discussion, I contributed my two cents –
What a marvelous viewpoint – “rather than shifting to the left Democrats have shifted to the center”. Does anyone other than the far left base really believe this. We have an overflowing record over the recent months of moderate Democrats publicly advising their alt-left colleagues about the party’s leftward drift turning into a socialist stampede. And, of course, the other half of the country, also invisible to the Left, needs no further evidence of this very visible process. And yet, and yet, in these foothills our local lefties have not a clue of this ongoing phenomenon, as they watch their accused ‘authoritarians’ remove government from hundreds (thousands?) of regulatory authoritarian diktats that were ensconced by, yes who else, the Left. … BTW, it would be most interesting to see even a short list of Democrats’ “compromises”.
Considering me and mine to be beyond the pale of reasonable discourse, I was directed to the arguments and “logic of a well-educated college professor” in a desperate attempt to direct some light of truth to my eyes. Said college professor is none other than the leftwing ideologue and clinical psychologist John Ehrenreich who writes ‘Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?’ in Slate, that standard of liberal elocution.
In his piece the good professor selectively intertwines certain polled beliefs of the looney Right with scholarly references to cognitive foibles shared by all humans, as recently and most convincingly reported by Kahneman et al. For example, as a versed propagandist, he confounds the Republicans’ use of the ‘death panels’ label for the panel of experts originally specified in Obamacare with the skepticism of preventable manmade global warming voiced by many on the Right. (The panel was written in to perform the needed culling of high-cost medical procedures to patients who would benefit minimally due to age or pre-existing conditions. It was quietly removed after the political uproar correctly pointed out that the panel’s recommendations would necessarily deny healthcare coverage to certain populations, thereby contributing to their earlier demise. However, all nationalized healthcare systems must needs have such ‘death panels’ in their, usually futile, attempts to contain runaway costs.)
Ehrenreich’s point to the unwary Slate reader is that these weaknesses condense in and express themselves almost entirely from the nervous systems of conservatives, concluding that “if you add up all of these particular differences, you get two groups that are systematically(sic) motivated to believe different things.” (His arguments advise the use of ‘systemically motivated’ instead. BTW, there is ample clinical evidence that liberals and conservatives use different parts of their brains to reason as reported here by the NIH.)
Dr Ehrenreich glibly generalizes to the entire Right the views of its fringe minority. He holds the Left immune from such generalizations of traits, and ignores all of the manifest impacts of liberal (collectivist) public policies on America’s urban concentrations of the lightly read, and totally invisible to him are the historical and ongoing tragedies of leftist governance.
The takeaway from this on which we can all agree was summarized in my ‘They Sure Ain’t Like Us’. And given what has happened since then, we have apparently burned the remaining bridges between us. The result we witness today is that America’s radicalized Left (now dominated by the socialists Sanders, Warren, Waters, Ocasio-Cortez, …) wants simply to subjugate its Right, while the Right is desperately looking for peaceful solutions in which both sides can live side-by-side, each practicing their own values and mores in cultural and commercial constructs that define their worldviews.
[31aug18 update] Mr Steven Frisch has joined us in discussing the quo vadis question – well almost. (He is a progressive and has been a major antagonist for years on these pages, and repeated that role on the cited RL Crabb blog.) He answers the Democrat goals question (twice) and I present them below in their expanded form.
No poverty: expand ethical capitalism and democracy
Zero hunger: expand ethical capitalism and democracy
Good health and well-being: invest the proceeds in people
Quality education: invest the proceeds in people
Gender equality: give women equal rights
Clean water and sanitation: stop pouring shit into our water
Decent work and economic growth: expand ethical capitalism and democracy
Reduced inequalities: share the proceeds more equitably
Sustainable cities and communities: recognize that resources have limits
Climate action: stop pouring shit into our air
Peace, justice and strong institutions: cooperation instead of war
Partnerships for the goals: leave you fools in the dustbin.
His readings and, presumably, education drive him to the conclusion that these goals are unique to collectivists and not shared by conservatives. In fact, he claims that on RR such a world has never been contemplated, let alone approaches to its achievement explored. I can only attribute that error to either his reading skills or the urge to promote the established progressive narrative. The 12-year record of these pages stand in stark contrast to his politicized assertions.
Even a casual perusal of the listed goals reveals them to be tautological platitudes that are embraced by every politician of every hue (yes, even Lenin spoke of the ones applicable to his place and time). They are the kind of ‘motherhood and apple pie’ shibboleths that speak most strongly to Democrat-generated constituencies doomed by Democrats to live in festering urban plantations. In there they have been taught to believe themselves to be victims by their sinecured leaders, but for exactly the wrong reasons.
Seeing that list of goals in the comment stream launched a number of more astute RR readers to ask the obvious question and point to the obvious answers – how do we achieve these goals, and what is the history of past attempts by collectivists (socialists, communists, …) to get there. Their centrally planned and ruthlessly executed paths have always involved the Stalinist mantra – ‘To make an omelet, you first have to crack a few eggs.’ The uncountable eggs cracked over the last century number in the hundreds of millions, with uncountable more hundreds of millions of stifled and dreary lives condemned to wholesale national gulags from which attempted escape was a capital offense.
The Frisches of our country cannot and therefore dare not describe how they will “expand ethical capitalism and democracy”, what “proceeds” from where they will “invest in people”, what additional “equal rights” for women they have in mind, and how will these be enforced, how will whose “proceeds” be “shared more equally”, by what means will excess “shit” be determined and kept from our air and water, and finally what magic formula have collectivists, who have been this planet’s prime warmongers, suddenly discovered, short of an omnipotent global tyranny, that will ensure “cooperation instead of war”.
All these leftwing elitists can tell us is a repeat of what they have always promised the lightly read and historically innocent – ‘This time it will be different, this time we will do it right.’. And that again is the old refrain of the Democratic Party today as it proudly raises the socialist banners for the long march to its government of “peace, justice, and strong institutions”. From these strong institutions, bestowed by our enlightened betters, will issue a new and improved constitution that will open with ‘You, the People, …’.
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