I've been making the case that we conservatives need to stop speaking in a manner that only convinces conservatives and start speaking to liberals or 'progressives' as they often call themselves, in a manner that they will understand.
We know that they don't think the way we do - they'll even be happy to tell us so. They'll tell us that we aren't as 'open minded' as them, and we're closed off to possibilities. We in turn think that to them, the results that a policy achieves is a slow second to the way implementing that policy feels to them while being implemented. And our counter claim about conservative 'closed mindedness' is that we're closed minded to policies that have already proven themselves as failures.
But whichever side of the gap your on, the gap is evident. Liberals do not think the way we do which means we cannot communicate with them the way we would communicate with each other. We need to speak to them as if they're speaking Chinese - or rather, as if they were adolescent children. Liberals will no doubt chafe at this latter description but I don't mean it as an insult at all. They will themselves say that conservatives have no heart and are too cut and dried. They see us as a voice of authority and restriction - much like a child see's a decent parent.
So taking some of my own medicine, I decided to take a look at how "Progressives" describe themselves and what they believe. I thought I should begin to teach myself some of the foreign language of cushy self congratulation that they speak to each other, so that I can figure out how to translate what I think into their terms. And in a single dailykos posting I learned a great deal about the language of liberals. Let me use their bullet points to help illustrate what I mean:
Civil Rights. To a liberal, the idea of civil rights has something vague to do with preventing discrimination and persecution. But as we all know liberals aren't just perfectly happy to institutionalize policies of intentional discrimination against religious citizens for example, they actually insist on it. But when they do so, they change the terms of the argument. To them the debate about religious liberty isn't about religion, it's about sex. And sex is something they're always in favor of. But the point of this is not to discuss hypocrisy - the point is their language.
In the dailykos post about civil rights, they talk about intentions (of course) and present themselves as the defenders of equality. But the policies they have implemented lately are actually doing all they can to restrict equality of opportunity in the interest of implementing equality of outcome. In effect they are restricting the freedom of one person with the idea that it will somehow redistribute that freedom to another. It won't work - it never does. That's a foregone conclusions. But they sell it as a push toward greater freedom, even though the net effect is that freedom on the whole for all Americans is actually reduced by the policies they implement.
Their Energy Independence bullet is a similar thing. They present a policy of implementing crushing taxes and deeply distortive tax policies which will enable rampant corruption, as protecting the public from some amorphous great green cloud of malfeasance called 'deadly pollutants'.
This post mentions the BP oil spill as if it happened yesterday so it may be that the post itself is a little dated. But it mentions nothing of how the loss in economic activity imposed by their policies will result in fewer jobs, greater poverty and greater hardship for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. All they talk about is the idyllic return to Eden that can only be provided for us by a great and powerful federally funded oz. It's all intent, no effect. And the intent is to provide us with the liberty and safety that comes from somehow removing ugly pollutants. As if declaring clouds illegal will ensure nothing but sunny days.
The third bullet point is particularly interesting because the second and first bullet points are in direct contradiction to it. In describing their goals toward 'Job Creation and the Economy" they proclaim themselves as 'stand[ing] for the values of hard work and responsibility', but the policies that they have implemented in the first two of their goals would do the exact opposite.
Their 'civil rights' policies ensure that minority citizens have a great many advantages over non-minorities (Asians are minorities in the US as are Jews, but neither counts as a minority according to progressives because they score too well on IQ tests) and their energy policy would intentionally allow them to pick the economic winners and losers in spite of any 'hard work and responsibility' that is demonstrated by their less politically appealing competitors.
But like I said, that isn't the selling point. The selling point is that there will be more liberty, more freedom, more good things and less bad. There will be no costs, only benefits. The used car they're selling will have lots of newness and bright red paint complete with extra shiny, and it will produce no noise, no dirt, and no exhaust. In effect the liberals sell their ideas to a group of people conditioned to an impulse buy. They aren't thinking about mileage per gallon, managing snow or bad weather, or paying insurance costs. Those are dirty ugly 'grown-up' things. They are only thinking about how cool they will look behind the wheel. And if we want to sell conservatism, this is the buyer we need to sell it to.
Then finally there is their view on Education. In practice they promote a policy of ensuring maximum union rolls for largely incompetent public school teachers, and as many advanced degrees as possible in comparatively academic majors like art history and 'puppetry'. And in the process of obtaining those degrees, each student is given a healthy dose of progressive conditioning where they are taught that they are snowflake special, and that their feelings should be the paramount motivator for any public policy they support. There is no area where liberalism has proven a more disastrous failure than in the area of education. But when selling it, that breathtakingly deficient performance is presented this way:
"As the global marketplace grows more competitive, we need to expand opportunities for higher education and job training. We are committed to increasing the college-completion rate as well as the share of students who are prepared for budding industries with specific job-related skills."
Now a conservative will look at the effect of these policies and the way they are presented, and come to the conclusion that the liberal ( or progressive) is simply lying. And measured by conservative standards that may in fact be true. But we aren't talking about conservative standards or conservative communication. We're talking about liberals and how they speak to themselves. And on that scale, it's also absolutely true that they don't believe they are lying.
As far as they're concerned, there is a very clear line between your intent, which should be as fluffy cozy warm as possible, and the policies you implement to bring that intent to fruition. And I continue to maintain that their big selling point is the concept of liberty.
Liberals have presented conservatives to the modern voting public, as the un-cool parent. We are the voice of authority - the voice of traditional morality. We represent the kind of restriction that any teenager can probably benefit from but won't like it when they're forced to. There is no doubt that traditional morality would be a good thing for our society to embrace - its' guided the west to be the globe's dominant culture for centuries. But through all that time, teenagers have never cared for it and have only embraced it eventually, as they matured.
Now though, the great wealth and success of the west is being turned on itself as modern liberals are no longer being forced to eventually mature. Instead they stay suspended in a permanent adolescence. So they continue well into adult hood to think like adolescents, and continue to prefer adolescent things. They do not 'put their childish things aside - ever. Instead, what they want now is to spend their lives drinking beer, smoking pot, and performing lewd acts on themselves and each other. This sounds like great fun for a party, but it's no way to run an entire civilization. However, to this stated desire, conservatives have nothing to say except that "they really shouldn't." This is true of course, but no teenager will ever vote for it.
I continue to maintain that the 10th amendment and a return to a focus on greater 'liberty' will be the salvation of the conservative movement (if it's going to be saved at all.) Unraveling and distributing political authority should be our entire goal. And I believe it's possible to get liberals to support that effort by a focus on greater liberty. But it will involve allowing things which to conservatives look very scary and politically unappetizing. The war on drugs will have to go for instance. I personally am not a big fan of legalized drugs. But I view it, in my conservative way, as a small price to pay if it means saving the broader parts of the conservative movement.
There are other things too. Things which we view as openly immoral but will have to let 'those people' in Berkeley and Chicago do, if we are to save 'our people' from the crushing liberalism of the Federal state. They (liberals in Berkeley for instance) will no doubt want deep restrictions on religious freedom which they view as a pariah. And we will have to hold our nose and encourage it for the liberty it will give us to protect our churches elsewhere. This is a hard choice to make. But we are not children, we're conservatives. And the only real shot we have at seeing hard choices made if we decide to be the ones to make them ourselves.
The last time that a conservative worldview made real inroads into liberal-dom, it was being marketed by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman. And at the time the central theme of conservatism's message - the real selling point, was that although it involved respecting tradition, it was the aspects of our tradition which actually provided more liberty to more people than the top down, command and control, labor union dominated view of the left at the time. "Free -Markets" were a big selling point. They even had the word 'free' in them. And a sound bite like that is how you sell an idea to adolescents.
The problem though is that today, liberals have won a great many more arguments. And now the things they're demanding are much further along the decadent political spectrum than they were before. In the 70's it was the 'freedom' to not wait in long gas lines. Today it's the 'freedom' to take money from the church collection plate to pay for your abortion. Back then it was the 'freedom' to work overtime without union interference. Today it's the 'freedom' to not work at all and have someone else pay your bills.
Now that I've seen their message with a new eye though, I don't see how we can convince these people of anything that doesn't appeal to their most prurient motives. And it really does seem to me that the only way to reconcile that kind of decadence with a conservative world view is to isolate it via the 10th amendment. Break it up. Make it local. Get the lifeboats in the water before the ship finally sinks. Encourage the distribution of political power and then trust people to vote with their feet if we can keep the cost of that move low enough. It's the only thing that looks like a path forward to me.
