BEYOND DEBATE

By Edwin Cooney

I think I’m getting old. I must be. It isn’t that I don’t like to argue. It’s just that old arguments get exceedingly boring after awhile.

A few days ago, someone sent me a piece called “Conservatives vs. Liberals,” which I sat down and answered with the idea that I’d use the answers to that commentary as this week’s column. The problem is, I just don’t have the heart for it. Don’t misunderstand me, I can answer these charges with the force of a political blowtorch, it’s just that it really doesn’t matter. It only convinces the convinced. Articles such as the one sent me and responses such as the ones I gave only reinforce. They don’t inform and, even worse, they don’t even come close to teaching. They’re designed to do one of two things: encourage or hurt. That’s all they do.

Okay! Here’s what the Conservatives are saying about Liberals in this piece. I’ve rewritten the complaints here in rather mild form:

Liberals don’t merely dislike guns, they don’t want other people to have them.
Liberal vegetarians want to ban all meat and meat products.
Liberals don’t stand up to foreign enemies, they surrender to them while pretending otherwise.
Homosexual Liberals demand government legitimization as a substitute for self- acceptance.
Liberal blacks and Hispanics want government to protect them rather than standing up on their own.
The Liberal poor expect others to take care of them.
Liberals want to ban talk show hosts they don’t like.
Liberal nonbelievers want to silence believers rather than just letting them alone.

Conservatives insist that they strongly disapprove of government as a solution to any socio/economic problem. Liberals, on the other hand, see government as a legitimate tool for the solving of socio/economic injustices. Ah! But so do Conservatives.

Conservatives want government to:
Put prayer back in the public schools.
Keep marijuana and prostitution out of the “free” market place.
Ban gay and lesbian marriages while at the same time providing economic benefits to traditional marriages.
Provide tax money through the voucher system to private and religious schools (especially Christian schools).
Build lots of prisons as long as they are not in their neighborhoods.
Provide sufficient federal money to large corporations for national defense research and weapons development.
Deregulate Wall Street and all banking operations.
Regulate smut and porn in movies and magazines.
Replace income taxes with a consumer or value-added tax.
Remove restrictions from the acquisition and sale of all guns.
Allow people to make their own choices as to whom to hire, to fire, to associate with or live next to.

In other words, Conservatives, like their Liberal cousins, demand that government reinforce their personal agendas. I remember a time when the federal government’s “top cop” was a Conservative icon. His name was J. Edgar Hoover. Also, I can’t help wondering what 1960 Conservatives would have said had Senator John F. Kennedy suggested giving federal aid to Catholic schools. The major difference between most Conservatives and most Liberals is whether individuals or whether the government should have the greater influence over America’s treasury. In other words, the strategy for Conservative problem solving is privately financed social pressure while the strategy for Liberal problem solving tends to be publicly funded laws.

While most of our “Founding Fathers” were reasonably well off for their time, Patrick Henry and a few others were the exception. Through The Enlightenment they successfully warded off monarchy. The Divine Right of Kings was substituted for the divinity of the people, but for the upper crust of the people (or, if you prefer, of society) that’s the way it was. It hardly could have been otherwise. It wasn’t intentionally exploitive, although there was plenty of exploitation of both slave and free labor from the onset of our republic.

Since FDR, another force has risen. Liberals, most of whom came from the working class, lack the monetary leverage Conservatives traditionally possess for their self-protection and upward mobility. Thus Liberals seek government-backed social affirmation for their inclusive agenda. Conservatives on the other hand utilize private pressure and money in the form of unspoken and unwritten but powerful rules devised to exclude the “riffraff” and sustain the status quo.

Here’s the bottom line. If America is about liberty and justice under law, when are we going to begin to be concerned about the liberty of those who disagree with us at least half as much as we insist on our own self-righteousness? If we insist that someone else is on the “radical” left, then where’s the “near” left? If we insist that someone is on the “wacko” right, where’s the “sane” right? Don’t we, after all is said and done, have an obligation to make ourselves come to grips with this whole idea that what we think is always right and that what someone else thinks is always wrong or, even worse, immoral?

Tell you what. I have the response I had intended to offer right here. If you’d like to see it, all you’ve got to do is ask.

Did I suggest at the outset that I was getting too old for some things? That’s certainly way beyond debate!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY