How to Lose Friends and Alienate Liberals
Occasionally one of my liberal friends compliments me as “a sensible conservative” (SensiCon?) and tells me that they – being sick of those infuriating FOX News Neanderthals -- want my opinion about X or Y.
“Oh, ” I blush, “you are just too sweet. Well, here is what I think . . .” and then I try to say something profound and reasonably evenhanded about an important issue of the day. Usually there is a pleasurable amount of back-and-forth about, say, affirmative action, and then we both leave the conversation feeling mutually self-satisfied with our equanimity and hopeful that ten thousand happy tomorrows will be governed justly and wisely by such as we.
Except on two topics. Abortion (I am pro-life in ways that would frighten all but Cardinal Ratzinger), and lately, the Tea Partiers.
It usually goes a lil’ somethin’ like this: my liberal interlocutor tosses me the softest of softballs, the “Teabaggers,” and then smilingly sits back to watch me hit it out of the park like a nearly-sober Mickey Mantle.
“Wellllllll, I dunno,” I say equivocatingly.
The corners of my liberal friend’s smile begin to fall.
“They say and do some really dumb stuff, sure,” I pronounce, “but people should be angry right now. And angry people who take to the streets don’t usually hoist articles from Foreign Affairs or The Atlantic on placards. Protests are inevitably a little goofy: the original Boston Tea Party was a bunch of drunks—some dressed up as Mohawk Indians, for Pete’s sake—willy nilly destroying valuable property over a tax that wasn’t even that high.”
Utterly shocked at my intellectual incontinence, names like Christine “Yale Sux, LOL!” O’Donnell come sputtering out of my dear liberal’s mouth.
“See, I know. I never said they were perfect. But normal people, people who actually matter in this crazy little democracy, sometimes get specifics wrong when their hearts are in the right place. Spending is out of control, our economy is flailing as businesses sit on the sidelines in Obama-induced uncertainty, and the national debt keeps piling sky-high while our betters in Washington tell us that, whoops, in fact there were no shovels ready when we sold you that big-ole ‘stimulus.’ It’s no surprise that normal, everyday people have gone a little wild.”
At this point, my liberal friend is not just reconsidering our friendship, but also my sanity. Picking up on this, I cite some specifics I don’t like about the Tea Partiers, (inter alia: Sharon Angle, the aforementioned Christine, a predilection to not trust science at all, a lust for RINO-hunting that feels Salem Witch Trial-ish,) and I note that I think we need lots of other voices in the party to balance them out, (e.g., Frum, David; see also, um. . . me).
But then my interlocutor brings out the coup de grace to end my mental lapse.
“OK Cheves, fine, I can see the bit about the deficit and all, but the Tea Partiers are so damned . . . anti-intellectual! They actually hate knowledge! They are the new Know-Nothings!”
I sigh and smile and set down my coffee/Scotch/fork/whatever. “Some do that and many other bad things, yeah, and shame on them. But conservatism is born from a humility that common folks should be left to decide most of life’s biggest quandaries for themselves. Sometimes that sentiment regrettably lapses into anti-intellectualism. But the Tea Partiers are doing some really good work in expressing, however inarticulately, the insight that the problem with liberalism is that smart folks in government think they know better simply because they’re, you know, smart. So, good for them.”
By now, my disappointed, nay, ashamed friend changes the subject to something else and I am left with my street cred as a SensiCon in tatters. This bothers me. A lot.
That is, until I realize something. Impressing liberals with your reasonableness and insight is a lot like winning the lottery: you’ll gleefully take it on the rare occasion it happens, but you never, not for one minute, make it your Plan A.
That would just be insensible, wouldn’t it?