Civility and the press
Authored: March 2nd, 2009 @ 9:22 AM
Anyone who has been watching the political debate from all sides as long as I have has probably felt the same thing as the columnist below expresses. While conservatives may feel some sense of disbelief at the public pronouncements of our collectivist opponents we will usually end our tirades with a sigh and a heartfelt “but they mean well“.
Indeed, it is in this spirit that we have set out to engage in civil conversation with both sides of the political chasm.
Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe is in our camp. His reprint of his inaugural column is a worthy read …
“Welcome to the much maligned world of the conservative“
Boston Globe
24 Feb 1994
Here is a brief excerpt to whet your appetite. Follow the link at end to get the whole story.
SO WHAT’S a nice conservative like me doing in a newspaper like this?
Wondering, for a start, why so many liberals think of conservatives not so much as people they disagree with, but as people they despise.
Most mainstream conservatives acknowledge that liberals are essentially well-meaning. Misguided, to be sure. And naive? Certainly. And elitist, self-righteous, collectivist know-it-alls, chronically unwilling to learn from their mistakes, clueless when it comes to the workings of the marketplace, always persuaded that the next government program will fix whatever went wrong with the last government program? Yeah. But well-meaning.
It should go without saying that you can mean well and do ill. Those liberal good intentions have helped pave more than a few of the 20th century’s roads to hell, from the Evil Empire to the welfare state to the meltdown of the American criminal justice system. Conservatives condemn the demonic results that liberal good intentions have led to, and with gusto. What they don’t do, as a rule, is demonize their opponents.
Liberals do.
Liberals look at conservatives and see moral cripples: Conservatives hate the poor. Conservatives are greedy. Conservatives have no compassion. Conservatives are Neanderthals . . . racists . . . homophobes . . . warmongers.
To be conservative, in the eyes of many fervent liberals, is to be by definition a vile human being — someone to recoil from, not reason with; someone to damn, not to debate.
Personal vignette: It was a roundtable discussion about poverty and social welfare policies in Massachusetts, and I had made some point or other about welfare and illegitimacy. The representative from the prominent, Boston-based foundation spoke up in disagreement.
“People like Mr. Jacoby can say that because they don’t care about the poor,” she began. “But the rest of us . . .”
They don’t care about the poor. Period, end of story. No room for differences of philosophy here. You’re a conservative? Then you’re morally defective, your views are warped, and would you please get out of the marketplace of ideas before you stink up the joint.
Read more at “Welcome to the much maligned world of the conservative“
Boston Globe
24 Feb 1994
The fervor of the true believer in the service of their beliefs leads to the most heinous of behaviors. Stalin, serving his true belief, killed between 10 and 20 million of his own people. Mao Zedong may have killed as many in his “Great Leap Forward“, again while serving the demons of true belief. The “liberals” Mr. Jacoby refers to suffer from this true believer condition, and I would quote Cromwell in response …
- I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.