You know, one of the response I get when I hit Anne Coulter for calling liberals fags, traitors and godless; something I hear when I disagree with Ramesh Ponnuru for calling the Democrats the Party of Death; a common thread when I call Sean Hannity out for his Enemy of the State routine is this:
“Mike, you asshole. Liberals do this all the time! When we tried to reform the school lunch program, they said we were starving kids! When we tried to reform Social Security, they said we wanted seniors to be eating dogfood! When we grow Medicare 7%, they say we’re slashing it by not growing the program 7.1%! They constantly paint us as heartless evil bigots and monsters who only care about empowering rich white people! And you know this is true because any liberal reading this blog is nodding his head sand saying, ‘But all that is true!'”
The thing is:
Not all liberals are like this. Barrack Obama, for example. Just because some conservatives call liberals godless doesn’t mean we all do.
Two wrong don’t make a right. We know better than this.
Illogical and name-calling are all many leftists have. But we have facts on our side. The school lunch program is bloated. Social Security is going bankrupt in a decade. Tax cuts have demonstrably grown the economy under Kennedy, Reagan and Bush II. The welfare system has been a disaster. Socialism has put Europe 20 fracking years behind us on the economic scale. Ten years ago, the conservative books were things like All the Trouble in the World or The Way Things Ought to Be or Freedom in Chains – or classical works like the Road to Serfdom or Freedom to Choose. These were books that used facts and logic to build up the conservative ideas of limited government, states’ rights and fundamental liberty. Look at today’s books. Just look at the titles — Godless, Party of Death, Deliver Us From Evil. Are these the heirs of Ronald Reagan?
Speaking of Reagan, did he ever engage in this crap? No, because Reagan was a master negotiator who knew that, no matter what liberals said about him, he had to work with them. He reserved his ire for the real enemy – the Soviet Union. When he called them an Evil Empire, it meant something. When you denounce liberals as the Party of Death, what do you then call terrorists? The Part of Mega-Death? And what does heavy metal music have to do with anything?
Reagan also realized that you win elections by giving people something to vote for, not something to vote against. Bush should have destroyed Kerry in 2004. But it was close because he didn’t have anything to run on – other than that Kerry was evil, I tells ya. Eeeeeevillllll!
If conservatism is ever going to rebound, it is not going to be from name-calling and creating a state of fear. It is going to be from thoughtful people like Andrew Sullivan, P. J. O’Rourke and George Will making coherent argument for conservative principles. It is not going to be from denouncing global warming, but from acknowledging its potential while cautioning about the uncertainties of science. It is not going to come from monster-under-the-bed stories about terrorism, but from an informed rational position that freedom must be defended from the barbarians. That’s the path. Let’s choose it!