George Rebane
In his inauguration speech President Joe Biden went out of his way to emphasize and promise that his would be the administration to heal the chasm that separates Americans and bring us together again – he would unite us all. From the policy statements that his WH started to issue immediately put paid to that particular inaugural lie; the new administration’s efforts to unite handily beat the setting sun to the horizon on that auspicious day.
But lying is not the only precursor to the Left’s love affair with disastrous public policies. We have to credit them also with a genuine desire to benefit society, which, after all, has been the overarching objective of collectivists – socialists, communists, …, Jacobins – since the French Revolution. Their problem becomes evident when they present the fruits of their deliberations and then attempt apologetics to bolster their freshly minted policies. It becomes immediately clear to most who pay attention, especially those with some book-learning, that their supportive logic for any given policy simply does not tie. It isn’t the kind of logic that the rest of us have been taught and successfully practiced in our professions.
This dichotomy between thinking processes by the Right and Left continued unexamined and fruitlessly debated for over two centuries until some psychologists and brain scientists at the University College London decided to do a clinical study and try to answer the question of why the logics used by the two sides are so different. I reported on that study (here and here), and was a bit astounded to learn it revealed that collectivists use a different part of their brains than do the conservatives to solve policy problems that require use of logic tools.
That clinical finding finally convinced me to reject the late Sen Daniel Moynihan’s ‘You can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.’ It turns out, as amply verified by years of public discourse, that we can indeed have our own opinions, facts, histories, sense of justice, …, and yes, even logics. And having such private and personal ontologies, that nicely tie in our minds, makes it easy to resist not only the opposing beliefs of our fellow citizens, but correct interpretations of realworld happenings and observations. In short, in such a cognitive environment no productive learning can take place.
To bring the reality of this interpretation closer to home, RR comment streams are full of some pretty twisted expressions of liberal logic. A landmark episode on what can only be tagged ‘looney logic’ involved the 2010 debate about the difference between giving and getting. This was graphically detailed in my 7sep10 post (here) and its comment stream. Unabashedly, the liberal readers equated the giving to various charities and the receiving of funds from public agencies. There I wrote –
In recent weeks I have been taken to task for both not revealing the causes to which I contribute my personal funds, and for revealing from what sources others receive funds for their personal benefit. In the discussions surrounding both cases, it was made clear to me by several liberals that both cases are equivalent. In other words Case A and Case B as shown in the figure above are equivalent in the liberal view of the world. And being so, both come under the same rules of disclosure when the parties in Cases A and B meet for public discourse. Furthermore, there is no differentiation if the person receiving funds gets those funds from tax-payer or public sources, they are still equal.
So according to such logic, today’s Dems, as they feverishly attempt to expose Donald Trump’s income sources, should have no problem disclosing to what extent and which causes they support. Of course, their logic here is so perverse that they would never consider disclosing such personal disbursements while willingly trumpeting Trump’s (or any other political enemy’s) income sources and amounts.
The actual logical schema here is simple. Disclosing your funding sources, especially if they are public, is a duty for someone who serves as a public outlet for partisan or ideology-promoting content. The public has a right to know who enables the messaging that they are consuming – in short, who really is talking to them. This is totally different than demanding that a private individual or privately-funded institution disclose whom they are supporting, especially if the recipients are non-profit organizations that may or not have a partisan bent. If I as a private individual am also a public personage and ideologue, then my equally partisan recipient may, subject to our mutual agreement, disclose me as a supporter. Were I instead a disperser of public monies, then my recipient would have no choice but to disclose my agency and me as one of its benefactors. In any event, there is no logical equivalency between such giving and getting.
More examples could be given to illustrate the different logics used by the Left and Right. I’ll finish with one with which I, and now our entire community is familiar. Jo Ann, representing only herself and not The Union as a member of its editorial board, or the county Republicans as an officer of the NC Republican Women Federated and member of the Republican Central Committee, wrote a short column for 12feb21 Union. Therein she described herself with attributes that are noxious to all self-respecting, politically correct progressives, and cited President Biden’s appeal for unity with her side of the political spectrum. It’s important to note that she made no appeal to the Left to be accepted or ‘unified’ with them.
Instead, referencing the ‘my way or the highway’ ultimata of Teams Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer, she asked how such diktats would ever serve the fine-sounding, and by implication now clearly fraudulent, unity rhetoric of Biden’s inaugural. Her online column has drawn 150+ comments, a record of some sort for the newspaper. These were overwhelmingly from leftists whose reading skills and logic totally missed her very clear question, and instead attacked her for supposedly demanding that national unity required the Left to accept her stated values and beliefs. The mind-numbing comment stream is still online available here for your perusal. It is (almost) incomprehensible that so many of our now liberal neighbors can exhibit such willful and terminal ignorance while they hold themselves in high esteem.
So again I ask, how can any productive conversation toward a reunification be had with people who lack the most basic understanding of the printed word, and let their blind and abiding hatred of the ‘other side’ totally eliminate any possible common ground on which to meet. We must always remember, it is the Left that does not want the Right to depart, and promises to use force to keep us together on their terms (programs they advance daily). It is the Right that wants to initiate a national dialogue for a peaceful parting, instead of demanding that the Left embrace our Constitution, capitalism, minimally regulated markets, small government, national sovereignty, private property, and personal freedoms that encourage responsibility and enterprise. The logical difference between the two positions is simple and easy to grasp, they need not be confused.
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