David McElroy

It’s interesting to hear what conservatives say when they’re talking just among themselves. Same with progressives, libertarians and other groups. Despite the groups’ very different beliefs, there’s a common thread that I tend to observe.

In all of these groups, they might argue among themselves at times, but you can tell they generally come from the same set of assumptions about the world. I tend to listen to a lot of these sorts of discussions. I rarely participate, because I’m getting to the point that it’s not worth arguing. So I just listen and try to figure out what groups believe and how the social groups interact. It’s sort of like being a political sociologist without getting paid for it.

When I listen to the supporters of pretty much any political viewpoint, I can understand the logic of what they believe — if I simply accept their assumptions about the world. No matter how much I disagree with them, I can almost always understand where they’re coming from.

But the vast majority of these people are disdainful of those in other groups. They clearly don’t have any understanding of what the other groups believe or why. What’s more, they’re not really interested in what the other groups believe or why. They’re mostly interested in making fun of them or putting them down in various ways, many times viciously. Within the groups, there seems to be an air of superiority that is amazingly similar. If you removed the ideological content of what they were saying and just looked at the social content of what they were expressing, you’d be hard pressed to figure out which groups were which.

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You might be surprised how much email I get from people looking for advice about how to choose between two romantic choices. It all started last summer after I wrote about the dangers of losing both romantic choices if you refuse to make a choice. I had no idea this was such a common issue.

I wrote that article last year after meeting a young woman named Ashley who was trying to decide between two men who both loved her. With most articles I write, a piece will get a huge readership in the first week if it’s ever going to become well-read, but then it doesn’t get a lot of readership after its first few weeks. A popular article might have thousands of readers in its first week and then almost nobody in the months to come. The article about choosing between two loves was very different.

That article wasn’t one that was passed around and linked by hundreds on Facebook, but it’s attracted a steady stream of people reading it every single day since then. Even after a year, it’s a rare day when that article isn’t read at least 50 times. And people almost always find it through search engines. Just to grab one random search string that brought someone to the page on Wednesday: “how to choose between two women you love.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week because of a particular email I got from a young man last week. We’ll call him Ben, although that’s not his real name. Ben told me — at length — about the two women in his life. One is his current girlfriend and another is a long-time friend who’s been more than just a friend. Ben and the current girlfriend are “taking a break” for him to think about what he wants.

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It was 12 years ago today when 19 men hijacked four airplanes and crashed three of them into buildings in New York City and Washington, D.C. Many millions of words have been written about those attacks and their cause, but it seems that most people are still just as clueless about why the attacks happened as they were 12 years ago.

George W. Bush famously told us that the attackers hate Americans because we are free. In a speech to Congress, he said, “Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

Bush was out of touch with reality, even though his defenders continue to look for ways around this. Those who attacked this country were very plain about their grievances and their motives. They hated this country because of the U.S. government’s constant interference in the affairs of their nations. This isn’t news to anyone who’s followed the history of the last hundred years and who’s listened to what these groups have said.

The U.S. government has spent the last century intervening in the affairs of people in the Middle East (and elsewhere). Our rulers have supported tyrants and claimed it was in the name of freedom. They’ve spent billions and billions of our tax dollars to give dictators the weapons with which to murder their people and each other. Our government has chosen which groups to support and which regimes to bring down, all on the basis of which groups were willing to act as puppets for what people in D.C. wanted. (And they sometimes support a dictator today and then call him the devil tomorrow when it suits their purposes.)

That’s why they hate us. It has nothing to do with our “democratically elected government.” It has nothing to do with our freedom of religion, speech and so forth, although they surely wouldn’t respect those things. They hate us because of things that have been done to their nations and families — in our name — by the U.S. government.

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