Conservatives don’t understand liberal groups — and vice versa

By David McElroy · November 13, 2012

The re-election of Barack Obama honestly stunned many conservatives. They could understand some people being confused enough to vote for Obama four years ago, but as they watched his actions during his first term, they were certain that most people saw the same danger they saw.

Now those conservatives are left confused and scared of what’s next. Mostly, though, many of the conservatives I know are trying to figure out what went wrong. How is it that what was so plain to them wasn’t plain to a majority in the country?

Deep down, most people believe that other reasonable and intelligent people are like them. It makes sense on some level. If you assume that you’re intelligent, informed and reasonable, you assume that similar people would come to similar conclusions. And if they don’t come to similar conclusions, well, they’re not very bright. Or they’re ill-informed. Or biased. Or unreasonable. Somehow, there’s something wrong with them.

Conservatives have believed that they were in the majority for years. Even during the tumultuous ’60s, Richard Nixon told conservatives that they were the “silent majority.” In the ’70s, the Rev. Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority to become a political force for social conservatives. In both of these names, you see the assumption that the majority are obviously “with us.”

Those who think this way honestly don’t understand people outside their group. They just know there’s something wrong with those people. They see those on the left as selfish, stupid and unthinking people. They see them as lazy folks who only want a handout. And they probably live in California and eat foods that normal people can’t even pronounce.

Those on the progressive left are exactly the same way, but in reverse. They can’t see how any intelligent, informed and reasonable person could come to any political position other than the one they’ve come to. To them, conservatives are stupid, ill-informed and unreasonable. Probably racist. And they probably live in trailer parks and don’t go to dentists.

I have lots of friends on both sides of that divide. As an anarchist with wildly independent views on pretty much everything, I have a foot in each camp, at least socially. Some of my friends are Bible-believing social conservatives who are in church two or three times a week. Others among my friends are socially liberal, gay, artsy and intellectual. There’s a good bit of overlap, of course, but it’s easy to stereotype them.

I like the people in each group. I strongly disagree with both groups, because each side wants to control people, just in different ways. But I understand what each side thinks and why it believes what it believes. If there were a formal debate, I could represent either side, because I understand where each side is coming from. I understand why they believe what they believe.

Many people in this country today believe the biggest political problem we have is figuring out how “both sides can work together for the common good,” but that’s very mistaken. There’s a fundamental divide between the two. There’s not common ground that reasonable people can find. Each side believes that what the other believes is evil. They’re not going to suddenly learn to get along.

Conservatives believe that if they just work harder, they can convince a majority to give them power to change everything to the way they want things to be. Those on the progressive left believe that if they can convince a majority to give them all the power, they can correct all the problems created by those nasty conservatives. This struggle is going to get worse, and it’s going to get nastier.

This country is fragmenting and it’s going to get worse. Demographic changes mean that the white people who have traditionally been the vast majority of voters are slowly losing their super-majority. In 2000, 80 percent of voters were white. This year, only 72 percent of voters were white. Hispanics are the fastest-growing group, but there are also more blacks and other minorities. It just means that the old days of white interest groups battling it out for political power (with one of them aided by a small group of minorities) is ending. It’s not going to be long before “minorities” collectively form the majority.

If you think the disagreements are serious today, wait until racial groups that have been minorities start taking control. They’re already signed up for the progressive left — and there’s going to be a lot more interest in “soaking the rich” as that shift happens.

The WASPish America of our dim memory is gone and isn’t coming back. The fissures between us are going to get more and more serious. Anger is going to be stronger. Social and economic breakdown will eventually happen.

Doesn’t it make sense to be thinking now about how we’re going to handle that breakup? We can keep pretending that we’re united and indivisible or we can negotiate terms of a breakup for those who want to go their own way. That’s the only thing that will stop the violence that I fear.

Sadly, I suspect that all of the mainstream groups would rather keep demanding control of the entire pie rather than allow the pie to be split. It doesn’t make sense, but these groups which fundamentally don’t understand each other are convinced that they’re ultimately going to win in the court of public opinion.

We’re in for rough days. I just can’t tell whether it’s going to break down in five years or 50 years. It has to happen at some point, though. I’d rather have a plan to deal with it — and a ways to break up peacefully — instead of waiting around to get hurt.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts