Sunday Night Journal — August 22, 2010
I’ve been thinking about writing this piece for some months
now, and putting it off because I really don’t want to do it.
I’d rather write about something else. I’d rather think
about something else. But the phenomenon keeps forcing itself on my
attention.
I tend to avoid situations, either in life or online,
where I will encounter angry bigots engaged in denouncing whatever they are
bigoted against. But sometimes it pops up unexpectedly: on Facebook,
for instance. A few months ago I read a wild flight of
anti-conservative vituperation, a friend of a friend commenting on
something the friend had said, and it occurred to me that what I was
reading was nothing more or less than bigotry. It revealed a mental
process not significantly different from that of a KuKluxer speaking
of African-Americans. The vocabulary and grammar were better, the
speaker being more educated, but the uncompromising hostility was the
same. It was liberal bigotry.
What do I mean by “liberal”?
I mean it in the currently popular and casual sense. As everyone who
has the least acquaintance with the history of the terms “liberal”
and “conservative” knows, the ways in which they are used
now are only loosely connected with the way they were used a hundred
and fifty years ago, and with their dictionary definitions. I know
this drives a lot of people crazy, particularly the
analytically-minded for whom precise definition of terms is of the
essence. But even these know who is being referred to when Nancy
Pelosi denounces conservatives, and when Sarah Palin denounces
liberals. And I’m using the term “liberal” in that
context. Someone who thinks Rush Limbaugh is a hateful menace to
society and Keith Olbermann is a courageous truth-teller is a
liberal. Etc.; I really don’t think I need to multiply the
examples.
What do I mean by “bigotry”?
Merriam-Webster’s
definition serves perfectly well for my purpose: “A person
obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and
prejudices; especially
: one who regards or treats a group (as,a racial or ethnic group)
with hatred and intolerance.”
Let me stipulate from the start
that conservatives are certainly capable of bigotry, and plenty of them engage in it.
It’s safe to say that few would argue with me on that point. (Many liberals
would go much further, and say that conservatism is more or less
identical with bigotry. And it’s just at that point that liberalism
itself becomes bigoted.) But this is more than just a tu
quoque (“oh yeah? Well, so
are you!”) argument. Bigotry is deplorable in any context, but
it is especially a problem for a liberal, because it is a crucial
part of the liberal self-conception that liberalism is the negation
of bigotry: liberalism is, among other things in this
self-conception, openness to other people and their opinions, and a
willingness to engage ideas on the basis of reason rather than
prejudice and emotion. Bigotry is, among other things, the determined
refusal of both those impulses.
Bigotry in a conservative is a
character flaw. But bigotry in a liberal is a fundamental
contradiction. It isn’t hypocrisy, exactly. Hypocrisy consists
in saying one thing and doing, usually in secret, another. And it
implies a consciousness that the thing is at least in principle
wrong. Liberal bigotry generally does not operate that way; on the
contrary, it is proud and open and gives no evidence of an uneasy
conscience. It is comparable not to a televangelist secretly
frequenting prostitutes, but—I will have to invent something,
because I can’t think of any actual event that makes the
point—to a televangelist openly running a prostitution service
and advertising it at the bottom of the screen during a sermon on
chastity, never noticing the distance between words and deeds.
The essence of bigotry is always
to look, and to be sure you find, only the worst in the group you hate, and
never to be fair, never to open the door to sympathy, never to
attempt to understand. That is an accurate working description of the
habitual attitude of far too many liberals toward conservatives. Two
developments of the past few years have provided clear examples: the
Tea Party movement, and the recently passed Arizona law attempting to
stop the influx of illegal immigration into that state.
I’m not a huge admirer of,
much less a participant in, the Tea Party movement; I do sympathize
with some of its views and basic grievances, but it seems
inconsistent and simplistic. And I don’t have a position on the
Arizona law, though I believe the residents of that and other border
states when they say that illegal immigration is in fact a problem
for them. My concern is not to justify or defend either of these. But
my basic sense of fair play is offended by the way the non-Fox media
and punditry have treated them, as well as the violent denunciations
of them I’ve heard in semi-private venues like Facebook.
In both cases the liberal
reaction seems to arise from a sort of emotional syllogism: we hate
people because they are racists; we hate these people; therefore
these people are racists. The Tea Party was accused of racism from
the moment it appeared, and convicted on evidence that ranged from
flimsy to nonexistent. The one big allegation, involving Tea Partiers
screaming racist remarks at black congressmen, has been pretty
thoroughly exploded, because video of the scene did not support it.
Even the New York Times
finally admitted that the event seemed not to have occurred as
originally reported (I thought I had bookmarked that story, but now I
can’t find it).
That there are racists in the Tea
Party, I have little doubt. That there have been occasional racist
signs and remarks at Tea Party rallies, I am willing to believe. But
there is no reason to believe that that the movement is racist in
its essence—apart, of course, from one’s conscious or
unconscious choice to assume so: always look for the worst; never be
fair.
There have been any number of
nasty people involved in liberal and left-wing movements in recent
decades. (See this
page for some recent examples in the anti-war movement.) There
were communists in and around the civil rights movement, to say
nothing of the anti-war movement(s). But no reasonable person—that
is, no person who actually wants to understand what these movements
are about, why they exist, what they want, and whether we should want
them to succeed or not—treats that as the last word, and writes
them off as, simply, communist operations, or otherwise defines them
by the most extreme or repellent people found in their midst. That is
what bigots do.
At some point over the past
thirty or forty years liberalism ceased to be defined as a way of
approaching politics in a spirit of openness, generosity, and reason,
and instead began to identify specific opinions as the necessary
products of that spirit, and to treat anyone who came to different
conclusions as an enemy to be destroyed. Liberalism tells us to be
open to the Other, to accept the challenge of seeing the world
through another’s eyes; it has largely closed itself to the
Other who votes Republican.
Of course this does not apply to
all liberals any more than it applies to all conservatives. But a liberal
can be forgiven for concluding, on the basis of listening to Limbaugh, Hannity, et.al.,
that hostility and bluster are the marks of conservatism.
And likewise, a conservative can be forgiven, on the basis of listening to Olbermann, Stewart, et.al.,
that hostility and snark are the marks of liberalism. It’s
time for liberals to stop congratulating themselves on
a virtue which they no longer, as a group, possess. Better yet, start
practicing it. And that goes for all of us.
)
Light On Dark Water 
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