And although liberals dominate the academe, Hollywood and the mainstream media, President Obama and other top Democrats have to sound, now and then, like Republicans when it comes to national defense, faith, taxes, etc.
Is it the messenger or the recipient of the message?
It can’t be the message itself, of course. Like most liberals, my friend believes that the other side is a group of stupid but cunning people and that most members of the public are gullible, and that is why they keep voting against their own interests that were already defined for them by their intellectual betters, the liberals. Most conservatives, too, have no doubt that their political opponents are left loonies and unreconstructed hippies whose thought processes have been irreversibly damaged by drug use. In other words, both sides of the political divide are morons and members of the public can’t think for themselves and deserved to be brainwashed.
But caricature is not analysis, and I’m now old enough to realize that people who disagree with me are not necessarily idiots. Insults, to be sure, are par for the course in politics, which is a full-contact sport. The objective is to win. You cannot rally the troops if you tell them that the opponent is just like us, but with a different opinion.
No. It has to be a clash of good and evil upon which the fate of humanity rests.
I’m no longer a liberal, but I’ve to admit that there are many brilliant men and women who are liberals. There are also many brilliant persons who are conservatives. So what makes us adopt and then cling to a certain set of ideas? What makes us prefer this one and not the other?
As someone who developed an unnatural attraction to politics and history when he was in kindergarten and who attended his first political rally when he was 11, I recently retraced my dizzying political meandering, from the right to the left, to the center, and to the right again, and now realize that it’s all deeply personal. Our upbringing, our life experiences, how we see them and the lessons we draw from them vary. And it is these that shape or re-shape our political outlook. Now because each of us is a unique individual, it is unlikely that we will agree with each other completely. Liberals disagree with each other. Conservatives too. And don’t get me started with Communists. There are factions, and then there are factions within factions. This is our lot as humans and why a pluralist, representative democracy is the only system that works: it allows us to be individuals.
Democracy will mean different things to different nations, the king of Jordan once said on CNN, but that’s bull. When people say democracy they always mean the bill of rights, free elections and the consent of the governed. Re-defining democracy is the M.O. of autocrats.
But to return to my liberal friend. I asked him if it’s possible that the American people who believe right-wingers do so because they agree with the conservatives? In the 1980s, the GOP memo was that taxes were high, government was big and the commies were evil. Short and sweet. And true. Voters found it convincing and the Republicans swept all the presidential elections of that decade. From 1932 to 1948, the Democrats reigned in the polls for the simple reason that their message was in tune with voter sentiment.
Right now, the conservatives are saying that the federal government is overreaching again, which will lead to wasteful spending and higher taxes, which will stifle growth. The liberals have other ideas, which I find unconvincing, but that’s me. Let’s see how both parties fare in November.
Finality, as one great politician once said, is not the language of politics. Variety is.
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