Tonight’s the MDE/MNPublius bipartisan happy hour at Billy’s on Grand:

Hope to see you there.

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Speaking of graphics, I saw this in a post on Charlie Quimby’s blog the other day:

We’ll come back to that.

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Yesterday, I noted that among my favorite interviews on the NARN have been my discussions with Eric Black, Dane Smith and Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak. I genuinely enjoy talking, and occasionally sparring, across the aisle. Two things can happen; either your beliefs get stronger from being tested in the exchange, or their weaknesses are exposed, perhaps leading to their changing. This happened to me twenty-five years ago; determined assault from conservative classmates showed me that my big-L Liberal beliefs were untenable. So I changed.

And this ties into what I wrote Monday – about how seeing those across the aisle from you as human makes for better, more satisfying argument. In a larger, more important sense, it’s also kinda important for running a country.

Of course, the flip side is also true; if you can keep your enemies firmly, securely dehumanized – from calling your opponents “wingnuts” or “commies”, up to presuming that the government you didn’t elect is depraved and evil enough to, say, spread AIDS in prisons or blow up the World Trade Center – it makes for an easy, more facile argument.

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It’s generally accepted as conventional wisdom that political discourse in this country has never been more foulmouthed, polarized and angry that it is today. That’s a bunch of liberal crap…

…er, wait. Heh heh. Dunno where that came from. Anyway – let me start over.

It’s ahistorical, to say the least. The 1828 campaign, which saw Andrew Jackson topple John Quincy Adams, was marred by violence, and represented a clash of social poles that spat venom across and unbridgeable gap; it was the original “blue vs. red” election; indeed, some of the media parallels between then and today are just too tempting.

Of course, at various times in the 1890’s and 1930’s, people were genuinely, and rightly, worried about the “discourse” adjourning to bayonet-point – which, in fact, it did in 1861.

That was an ugly, polarized debate.

Today? All we have is people taking broad, often factually-vacant shots at those with whom they disagree. Many of these shots are made possible by that sense of dehumanization we talked about on Monday. The “debate” – which, on blogs, is entirely one-sided, even if there’s a “comment section” involved – is fueled by the very real human pathologies that regard…

1. …”our side” as being where all the righteousness is, while “their side” is vacuous on a good day, evil on a bad one.
2. “Their” side being vacuous-to-evil, of course, anyone to practices it must by extension be vapid-to-rotten as well.
3. As long as you can keep your “enemy” nice and abstract and inhuman, there’s no real human consequence to ascribing his beliefs to base, loathsome motives.
4. This is reinforced by the tendency on blogs (especially, in the Twin Cities, among bloggers on the left, although it’s not exclusive) to write pseudonymously – so that not only are their targets too abstract to treat like humans, but they themselves are too abstract to be vulnerable to the very treatment they dish out.
5. Finally, resistance to the very notion that one should try to get past the abstract, dehumanizing influences of the medium.

At the bottom of it, of course, is this; it’s comfortable sitting in your echo chamber, smug ‘n happy with your preconceptions and your prejudices, bristling at the idea of approaching it any differently, because it’s just so much fun hanging out with your friends and bashing on the conveniently-abstract, abstractly-evil “enemy” among us.

It’s always been fun getting beyond that – for example, at the MOB parties I wrote about on Monday, or at Flash’s “Drinking Moderately” soirees.

Of course, liberals react oddly to the notion of going to a MOB party. And conservatives stopped getting invited to Flash’s gatherings about a year or so ago; rumor (not from Flash, by the way) had it the lefties didn’t like being seen with the enemy.

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Which brings us back to Charlie Quimby’s question: “Is it OK to meet unconditionally with anti-progressive GOP operatives?”

So many questions:

1. “Is it OK” according to what standard? Who set that standard? Why?
2. What are the consequences of meeting with the “operatives” if it’s not OK?
3. If it’s not “OK” to “meet with” Michael Brodkorb (over happy hour – the most innocuous and levelling institution Western Civilization has developed since the Polar Bear Run), what “conditions” would make it OK? Handcuffing all Republicans? What? Help me out here.
4. So if it is objectively proven that “progressivism” is actually intensively regressive, would that change the ground rules for this “Meeting?” (Trick question; it has been proven, albeit subjectively).
5. GOP Operative? So friggin’ what? A guy’s gotta have a job. And Michael does it well – indeed, he eats your party’s lunch so regularly that he’s become, if anything, a bigger source of derangement than Michele Bachmann and Katherine Kersten – two other conservatives that beat the local left like bongo drums, and have earned boundless hatred for it. And while I scratch my head at some of Brodkorb’s more gossipy revelations, after a while you have to look at his record – exposing Franken’s tax problems, which are on a whole ‘nother level than a squib Playboy interview – and realize the guy’s on the ball. Criminy, the way to learn to do things better is to have contact with those who do it better than you – and Brodkorb does it better than most of you. Grow up and cut the drama.
6. OK, let’s back out of the ideological swamp; if it’s not “OK” to “meet” (i.e. have a beer) with a “GOP operative” (and a room full of his friends, and yours as well), where do you stop? Should we not work together, too? (It’s not an academic question – the left actively purges “anti-progressive” thought in industries they control, like academia, education, unions, etc). Not worship together? Yep, you’re working on that. Not live in the same neighborhoods? At what point does contact – “meeting”, drinking, working, worshipping, studying, living – with those with whom you disagree, make you…unclean? Subject to dire consequences of “non-OK”-ness? Whatever you’re worried about?
7. Indeed – what in the hell are you worried about?

I’d expect that question from a lot of people before I’d expect it from Quimby. Yesterday, by way of pleading the sincerity with which he looks for conversation across the aisle, he elaborated:

Real community and real civility — civitas — come about when antagonists find something important they truly want in common. Something they cannot have without respecting the other’s perspective, values and rights.

Does anyone see the leaps series of hopscotch-like hops here?

Put aside your (plural) Brodkorb derangement for a moment here; does anyone seriously think that any of us on the right don’t seek a better country and society?

And before you answer “but conservative polices won’t lead to a better country and society”, just stop. In many ways, they do, and have – which is why all of us conservatives subscribe to it.

To ascribe it to other motives – that we’re idiots, that we’re tools of powerful interests that control our feeble little wingnut minds – is to buy into the “Dehumanizing” we talked about on Monday..

And liberalism has had its place (he says, clenching his teeth as he types) as well, and done the odd bit of good, by some definitions. Whew. That was tough.

More importantly – assuming there’s nothing worth talking about with liberals is just as dumb.

Quimby also asks:

Why would I or any progressive attend a branded event that seems calculated to create a veneer of bipartisanship for perhaps the most partisan attack blog in the state?

Dunno, Charlie. Why don’t you ask the MNPublius guys, among the few most respected “progressive” bloggers in the state.

If they can tough it out…

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For my part? Of course it’s “OK” to “meet” with “anti-liberty” “pro-speech-rationing, anti-growth, anti-market, pro-racist-gun-control” “operatives” over a couple of beers. For those with the intellectual horsepower to pull it off, it can be a fun challenge. For those who can take themselves and their beliefs a little less teeth-clenchingly seriously than normal, it can be fun to get out and mix it up with, or even just meet, other people. And as someone who not only “meets” with “operatives” across the aisle pretty regularly (and used to be one of them, for that matter), I’ll tell you something if you promise to keep it very quiet.

Ready?

(There are no consequences. It’s OK. It’s just casual contact with your fellow US citizen and, by the way, human. Nobody’s going to think the worse of you – assuming the left really doesn’t have some kind of purity police that show up at these things and takes names. They don’t exist – right?)

(And by the way, Michael Brodkorb doesn’t eat babies (just Democrats’ lunch) – he is, indeed, one of the nicer guys you’ll meet. Your face won’t peel off in divine retribution if you’re seen in the same room as him. Again, barring some kind of DFL purity police. We can bar that, can’t we?)

Shhhhhhh. Mum’s the word.

So I’ll hope to see you at Billy’s tonight. Hopefully the “consequences” are manageable.