When I cast my first-ever conservative vote – for Ronald Reagan, in 1984 – I didn’t tell anyone. Part of it was that the whole conversion from mushy-left to right was so very recent. Part of it was that I was still feeling my way around an unfamiliar place.
And a big part was that I really just didn’t want to be associated with “those” conservatives.
In the media of the day, “out” conservatives were pretty much portrayed as smug fundamentalist televangelists, warmongering caricatures or malthusian skinflints. I edited a college newspaper at the time, and our syndication service – the “Campus News Service” – fed us a constant stream of anti-conservative, anti-Republican propaganda in written and cartoon form, all of it based on the three stereotypes above and the notion, constantly hammered in story after story, cartoon after cartoon, that President Reagan was
a) a doddering buffoon
b) a warmongering psychopath
c) both.
I got over it.
I graduated, moved to the Twin Cities – and it got worse. The media of the day ranged from left-leaning (it was the golden age of Jim Klobuchar; Nick Coleman was just getting started as a columnist) to falling-over left. Just before I started my old KSTP talk show, I remember reading a piece in the City Pages about some counselor/”artist” type in some political action group saying – unchallenged – “liberalism is the only intellectually acceptable philosophy”.
The attitude one perceived could have fairly been called “contemptuous” against conservative people and ideas.
And on the issues? Well, it was at KSTP in 1987, in a discussion on handgun control, where I first heard the old chestnut “I think people who think they need guns are…[brief pause as a verbal wink and nudge] compensating for something…”. It is, of course, the standard line for anti-gunners who want to believe they’re bringing the forces of soft science to bear against their opponents without actually understanding any. And it is nothing if not contemptuous. And it’s not the only issue where conservative substance has been met for decades with ignorant contempt.
To sum up: Twenty years ago, the contempt for conservatives was everywhere.
One thing that was not everywhere was avenues for response. This was before the market drove talk radio to the right. This was before conservatives had any written outlet, short of the National Review and the odd token George Will or Cal Thomas column set into the OpEd page like an exhibit at a zoo. The Strib’s letters to the editor, then as now, published only the most carefully-bowdlerized selection of conservative opinion (seemingly selected for sounding the least coherent, at times)
Today, of course, it’s a different story. Conservatives have voices – and those voices pretty well crush the opposition (which is why the Democrats are talking about bringing back the “Fairness” doctrine). Conservatives have outlets, and they’ve become influential out of all proportion to their size, which is why George Soros and his deep-pocketed friends are trying to buy a share of the blogosphere; it’s not really working (which is why the left has already tried to regulate blog content).
At any rate, in the last twenty years – and especially the past five years or so – people on the left, especially people who remember what life was like back when the conservative in the street only got to speak at the bar and around the table and every couple of years at the polls have had to learn that there really are more than one side to an argument.
The masthead of Charlie Quimby’s blog reads “How Can People Disagree And Still Build a Decent World?”; it’s a good question, one that I ask a lot in this blog and – rather more often – in personal conversation. It is important, and not merely because I’m a conservative with a mother who thinks Jane Fonda is a reactionary.
Charlie poked a little fun last week at the selection of Republicans getting credentials at the Convention next month. The common thread he found: “From Ladies Logic to Grizzly Groundswell to Pair O’Dice you’ll find at least one thing in common: a fairly strong contempt for liberals.”
Over the weekend and still on the subject (having gotten some pushback from a couple of the bloggers he’d names), he asked:
It is possible to separate personal relationships and politics. The success of any free political system depends on it. But over the past 20 years or so, it seems to be happening less and less. Contempt — not just philosophical disagreement — has been ratcheted up and real tolerance for human differences over policies is given the sort of smirking pro forma observance we see between Hannity and Colmes…
The difference, I suggest, is that over the past twenty years contempt and ridicule (and the guys behind their respective curtains, ignorance and fear) have become two-way streets. There’s not more contempt and ridicule; you can just see it. And if you’re a Twin Cities’ liberal, you can see it aimed at you for the first time.
You don’t have to read Nick Coleman or Lori Sturdevant or Brian Lambert all that terribly long to realize that Minnesota liberals of a certain age just aren’t used to being questioned, much less criticized, to say nothing of being the objects of contempt. I’m going to venture that not one of them, growing up in acceptably-lefty households, coming up through a left-leaning academic establishment, and working a career in left-leaning newsrooms, has ever heard someone say “I don’t know why people need pay-equity laws, unless they’re compensating for something, nyuk nyuk”.
Or bloggers and their invisible moonbat/wingnut friends. Which is why here I try to make those exchanges real and open, aimed at understanding rather than refuting the other.
Contempt is the tip on the iceberg of ignorance and – toward the bottom – hatred. I try to avoid it, and seek out conversation with the rare liberal blogger who’s not too stupid and sodden with fake intellectual entitlement…
…oh, crap. Let me start over.
Contempt is the junk food of rhetoric; it’s cheap, easy, and sometimes all you have in the cupboard. It’s easy to say “I don’t use it”; everyone knows better. There are times when it’s the easiest way to respond to the gaffes and slights and sins of the “other” side. It was the same thing twenty years ago; if Hubert Humphrey and Ronald Reagan are the respective egos of the left and right, “guns are compensating for something” and “liberalism is a mental disorder” are the respective ids. And we all balance these in different ways.
At some point, contempt for ideas and values becomes contempt for a group becomes contempt for a person, as the bones in mass graves the world over attest.
True.
But a lot of things have changed in the last decade or two. Liberals in the Twin Cities are having some inevitable growing pains realizing that there is more than one point of view in this world (just like conservatives in Austin Texas and Chapel Hill North Carolina have been having to do).
It’s just all out in the open now.
The only real question now is how people deal with it – a question people have to answer whenever there is more than one side to a debate.
Which is why it’s such a new thing in the Twin Cities.
Also, it’s difficult to have compassion for a person who faces the world’s problems so completely differently.
I followed the gun conversation between Charlie Q. and Joel R., who made relevant and cogent arguments. But Charlie doesn’t debate with facts and logic, he raises questions to see how he feels about them. Nothing was decided because Joel was talking Fact and Charlie was talking Feeling.
Feeling people contemn coldly rational people, who in return contemn people who decide things on feelings. Not sure it can be otherwise. Just now, it’s more in the open and we can more easily find birds of our own feather to flock with.
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You view this as a Twin Cities thing. It’s actually fairly common all over the country, especially as the media becomes less relevant and more transparent.
We’re living through an interesting storm in terms of the MSM and the sheltering of liberals from “hateful thought” that might disagree with them. Watergate and the elevation of reporters to some heroic stature caused a lot of people “who wanted to change society” to go into journalism. They transformed what was a mildly left media into something much harder left and much more devoted to societal change. And at the same time, the country went Democrat in reaction to Watergate.
Well, you can only leave liberals in charge for so long before they totally muck up the country and Reagan came along. He was vilified by the MSM and routed around that censorship by nuking the Fairness Doctrine. And alternate media have sprung since then via the ‘net that have allowed even more voices of all stripes to flourish, and many of these have been distressing to the previously insular lefties.
But the alternate routing around has only exposed the shift in the MSM all the more, and certainly agenda journalism is thriving. The MSM can only wish that they were, however. The results are predictable: what the MSM is selling is being rejected, their ideology prevents adapting, so they’re getting smaller.
Of course, being good liberals they want to obey Reagan’s observation on their basic philosophy: ” If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
Liberals in the Twin Cities are having some inevitable growing pains realizing that there is more than one point of view in this world (just like conservatives in Austin Texas and Chapel Hill North Carolina have been having to do).
False. You neglect that the liberal MSM have always been able to route around the local conservative paper via national news broadcasts and the “big three” networks. So the “conservatives in Austin” (you’ve obviously never been to Austin to consider that city conservative) have had two points of view for years, unlike the TC.
I went from the Twin Cities as a nice, liberal kid, to a conservative hometown as a pre-teen. The shock of seeing an actual conservative paper was interesting, and the pairing with the national news meant that I got to see two sides to the stories of the day.
Of course, as I mentioned above, Watergate transformed the media and that hometown paper is now flamingly liberal and going down the tubes.
So the “conservatives in Austin” (you’ve obviously never been to Austin to consider that city conservative)
no, I know Austin is quite liberal. Just saying, conservatives in the greater Austin area a generation or two ago probably had a bit of culture shock that there was any real opposition out there.
“How Can People Disagree And Still Build a Decent World?”
Interesting. My last post is titled “Division Is Essential for a Healthy Democracy”.
Can the difference in thoiught process be any clearer?
What Charlie and his ilk fail to recognize is that the left worked very hard to earn my contempt.
Every year, as I read that the Democrat schools have once again sentenced hundreds more kids to a life of struggle and failure my anger and yes, utter contempt is fueled.
The tens of thousands of students that have hit the streets functionally illiterate to secure the power of the teachers union and it’s Democrat puppets can’t express themselves; they literally don’t have the words….so I do it for them every day.
Contempt? Oh, yes I have that.
So what’s your point?
The left is not blameless in creating or widening the divide, and I do not want to live in a community where everyone agrees with each other.
Kermit, my question — “How Can People Disagree And Still Build a Decent World?” — is not denying the importance or value of disagreement. Rather, it’s asking whether we can find constructive ways to disagree that still lead us to accomplish what we could agree upon: building a decent world.
Nate, I’m glad you followed my dialog with Joel R., but I’m sorry you insist on using your reading of it to characterize what I’m trying to do. My goal was not to debate Joel but to hold up emotional arguments that are often used to support gun control so Joel could respond to them in ways that liberals might be able to listen to him. Though I was never hard over on gun control, I will say that our conversation made me more open to Joel’s point of view and more inclined to support him.
Charlie, our differences have gone way beyond the bounds rational disagreements. We’re through the looking glass here.
As long as the left continues to deny the very humanity of an unborn fetus to support it’s argument in favor of abortion; as long as the left continues it’s determined campaign to undermine and debase all that is uniquely American; as long as the left continues to support a public school system that fails to educate thousands of our kids each year so that a trade labor union may retain it’s political and financial power; as long as the left continues to promulgate the preposterous proposition that two men buggering each other is in any way equivalent to the nuclear family you are not going to find many takers for reasoned debate.
Let’s allow, for purposes of civility, that there are some incredibly emotional issues involved here, and agree – for purposes of getting along in my comment section – to disagree about abortion, exceptionalism, education, worker’s rights and gay marriage.
While I am pro-life, a believer in exceptionalism and open shops and traditional marriage, it’s not really the subject of this post.
You’re dancing around the crux of the post, Mitch. The question posed is “How Can People Disagree And Still Build a Decent World?”
My point is that as long as we can’t come to within a country mile of even agreeing what decency is anymore, we can’t.
Charlie says that the ability to separate politics and personal relationships has declined in the last twenty years. Whenever I hear people make claims like this I wonder when this golden age of civic discourse whose passing they lament actually took place.
As recently as the late-Sixties and early to mid-Seventies people on the Left and the Right just weren’t calling each other names, they were killing each other. As Mitch noted (and I too recall) the Eighties weren’t exactly a time of tolerance and good will among political men either.
In Mitch Pearlstein’s book “Nixonland,” he posits that the political turmoil from 1965-1972 destroyed the national unity consensus (which he claims was illusionary anyway) that we were all just Americans working together to solve our problems and that we’ve remained irrevocably divided since.
That’s certainly an approach.
And subject of a future post.
I seem to recall a few rather snide Quimby-isms. Not to mention a few assumptions, much like this idea that (words to the effect of) civil discourse is dead or dying.
Where?
Charlie, my answer to you is not that simple. “Constructive ways to disagree”. Hmm. That is such a contradiction. You claim you want to “build a decent world”, and yet that would seem to require me to abandon principles.
The policies and principles espoused by the Left have demonstrably done the opposite of building a decent world. For me to anything but oppose them would be a betrayal of my own humanity.
Too often the Left’s demand that we “work together” is a thinly veiled demand for capitulation. There’s lots of cooperation in China. And Cuba. And Zimbabwe. And North Korea….
I hope Mr. Contempt himself pops in. You know… the whole, “three more fingers pointing at you”.
And I’m not talking about Mr. Knopfler.
When the Democrat parties declares the following organizations evil and therefore need to be destroyed, you know we have moved beyond just minor differences of opinion:
Boy Scouts
Salvation Army
Catholic Church
ROTC
JrRotc
Christmas
Charlie said: “My goal was not to debate Joel but to hold up emotional arguments that are often used to support gun control so Joel could respond to them in ways that liberals might be able to listen to him.”
See, that’s exactly the problem. I thought the purpose of the conversation was to discuss whether the Legislature should adopt two specific laws, pros and cons, whys and why nots.
Instead, every time you raised an emotional concern about guns and Joel made a logical response, you raised a different emotional concern until eventually the personal tragedy card nuked the possibility of further conversation because for many on the Left, feelings trump facts.
If the quote above was your stated purpose at the time, it wasn’t clear to me. Sorry that I misinterpreted what you were trying to do. Perhaps next time we can be more clear – are we trying to talk about the facts of a situation, or how we feel about the facts of a situation? Makes a difference whether we ultimately solve a problem or just moan about it.
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You forgot a couple of groups the left despises, Chuck.
US Marines
US Navy
US Army
US Air Force
US Coast Guard
Fathers (unless there are two)
Mothers (unless there are two)
Caucasians
Men (especially caucasian men)
You can’t have a title like “two-way sluice” without thinking of Monty Python. From the Australian Wines sketch…
“Quite the reverse is true of Château Chunder, which is an appellation contrôlée, specially grown for those keen on regurgitation; a fine wine which really opens up the sluices at both ends.”
NICE call, JK! A fine and underrated sketch.
Chad,
Mitch P is a good example of a nuanced conservative with strong principles who can still work across the aisle. Maybe not with everyone, but I don’t think that should be the measure.
I don’t think discourse has to be free of conflict, and it certainly wasn’t over the last 40 years. But for a variety of reasons, the ability (or willingness) of elected officials to work together across party lines has diminished.
Badda,
Guilty as charged. I’m not so saintly that I can stay out of every fight that comes along, and I don’t always practice what I aspire to.
Kermit,
I don’t think it’s simple at all. Reasonable people on both sides have principles they don’t want to abandon — but they also share things they’d like to fix. Solving problems when people disagree is hard work with uncertain rewards, and that’s why some people don’t want to even try and some on both sides just maneuver for the other’s “capitulation.” (If there’s memo to lefties on how to turn America into North Korea, I missed it.)
Chuck: Ditto on the destruction memo. But this is how we end up talking to each other if we insist in drawing things in absolutes.
Nate,
It’s interesting to me that “emotion” was your takeaway. Certainly there was some of that, but I went back and took a look, and what I saw was an extended conversation in which I gave Joel, a very knowledgeable source, a lot room to develop his points. No disrespect to Joel, but when I raised a question, he could come back with 2,000 words and sometimes I resisted responding in kind. The back and forth that might’ve accomplished what you were looking for — and held the attention of readers less than immersed in the bills — was not going to emerge with two expansive writers. I expect Joel and I will re-engage on this topic some day, and maybe we can be more concise.
Jeff,
We should all be able to agree on Monty Python!
If there’s memo to lefties on how to turn America into North Korea, I missed it
It’s filed under “Change we can believe in”.
Obama supports required national service:
* Expand AmeriCorps from its current 75,000 positions to 250,000, with new units to deal with education, clean energy, health care and homeland security.
* Expand service programs involving retired individuals and those over age 55.
* Double the size of the Peace Corps from its current 7,800 volunteers to 16,000 by its 50th anniversary in 2012.
* Set goals for middle-school and high-school students to serve 50 hours a year of public service, and for college students to serve 100 hours a year.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22117627/
Your labor belongs to the state. Sounds like North Korea to me.
Very thoughtful post Mitch. I’m not sure how any liberal could’ve thought a conservative to be a Malthusian. I assumed they all thought of Malthus as some sort of 19th century visionary. Perhaps it only shows the intellectually vacuous notion of the “Left=smart/right=stupid” philosophy still strongly shared in Twin Cities circles.
But for a variety of reasons, the ability (or willingness) of elected officials to work together across party lines has diminished.
Oh, I agree, there’s far less bipartisanship than there used to be. Now, let’s be very careful and see which party actually enforces more discipline and more partisanship in their votes. Why, it’s the Democrats, and by a rather large margin! Amazing! Why, it seems that those wingnuts are actually willing to listen to arguments, think for themselves and challenge authority more than the moonbats!
Whoops! That should have been Rick Perlstein not Mitch Pearlstein. RP is def not conservative.
I guess I had a few too many Flaming Mitch’s the other day.
Mitch, mitch, mitch, mitch, mitch, mitch, mitch, mitch, mitch, mitch, mitch…