Right Wing Nation

Being a liberal is much like being an alcoholic. You live in a fog of fantasy and reality cannot break through. This is particularly true if you’re an academic, live in a college town, and are surrounded by nothing but liberals who live in the same fantasy world.

In this fantasy world, black is white, down is up, heros are villains, criminals are victims, and victims are instigators. Thus, Bernard Goetz was a “vigilante” but the criminals who tried to assault him were “victims of our racist society.” Liberals use “cowboy” as a pejorative, even as they hail Mumia Abu Jamal, a convicted cop killer, as a hero (they have little to say about the policeman he murdered in cold blood). Veterans and patriots are sneered at as “rednecks” while terrorists are idolized as oppressed victims of our evil American imperialism.

All tradition and history is suspect, because everything in the past was evil unless proven otherwise—hence in part their aforementioned scorn of patriotism and the flag. Try to discuss, say, affirmative action with a liberal, and he will immediately bring up Tuskeegee, or some other irrelevant racist incident—because liberals will not disucss facts or reality, will not answer if you ask what good forty years of it has done, when more black males than ever before are murdered and imprisoned for violent crimes. It is society’s fault—traditional American society, that is. Mom and apple pie is the source of all evil in the world.

Logical process or consistency is ignored because it does not exist in this fantasy world. That is why a liberal will perform acrobatic twists and turns when confronted with facts and reality. That is why the same people who protest Old Navy for buying clothes from sweatshops buy their own clothes from K-Mart, and see absolutely no inconsistency. If you point it out, they will suddenly start screaming about exploited children, and will never address the issue that they themselves are wearing clothes made in sweatshops.

The irony is that liberals believe they are intellectuals, and that non-liberals are stupid, bigoted, or evil. If you are obviously intelligent, they assume you hate Bush, that you believe the fiction that all of Europe is as free as the United States, and that the United States needs to become a socialism. This is ironic, of course, because in fact, liberalism is irrational and illogical, and at the end of the day, is a fantasy.

To be a liberal, you have to be able to whine about the economy and jobs one minute, then insist that corporations must be more strictly regulated the next (and if you don’t know how idiotic this is, you’re a liberal—seek help). You have to be able to call an American who uses the word “girl” a sexist on Monday, and on Tuesday, defend Muslims who force their wives and daughters to wear burkhas. You have to be able to insist that America’s biggest health problem is obesity, then turn around and moan about the disappearance of the American middle class and state that one out of five children is starving to death. To be a liberal, you have to believe that George Bush is some sort of conservative, despite the big government programs he has put in place and despite the fact that he hasn’t lifted a finger to outlaw abortion or dismantle any other pet liberal program; you have to be able to believe that George Bush supports a Constitutional amendment against gay marriage because he’s a religious bigot, despite the fact that both he and Cheney publically supported states’ rights to recognize civil unions.

To be a liberal, you must be able to think putting bags on prisoners’ heads at Abu Ghraib constitutes horrific war crimes, yet support for President Kerry, who by his own sworn testimony, is himself a war criminal. To be a liberal, you have to be able to scream about corporations giving money to Republican candidates, yet believe accepting money from a European millionaire (Soros) for Democratic candidates is perfectly fine. To be a liberal, you must be able to fear John Ashcroft as some up and coming Eichmann, yet at best shake your head sadly and say “Oh, that was a tragedy,” when Waco—Reno’s mass murder of citizens by government thugs—comes up in conversation.

To be a liberal, you must insist that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were innocent and that McCarthy was evil, despite the fact that KGB records released after the fall of the USSR show conclusively that Hiss and the Rosenbergs were spies, the CPUSA was a front for espionage–and McCarthy was right.

To be a liberal, you must believe that the Constitution was written by “dead white males” and needs to be overhauled, updated, interpreted—unless the topic is the First or Fourth Amendments, in which case you must scream about your Constitutional rights as loudly as you can—and you must believe that the Second Amendment isn’t valid, or applies only to a militia (if you believe that, you can’t read English), because you must fear responsible, armed citizens who refuse to be victims. To be a liberal, you must believe that “hate speech” codes on campuses are not Constitutional violations to be taken seriously, yet in the next breath state that the government’s ability to see what books you’ve read at the local library is evidence of an evil Republican police state.

To be a liberal, you must be able to nod sagely and agree with Moore and others that America is paralyzed by a culture of fear, yet not be able to see that liberalism is that culture of fear. To be a liberal, you must disavow any imporance of responsibility and believe everyone is a helpless victim of circumstance and sexism and rasicm and whatever the ism of the day may be, and believe that everyone is entitled to the money tax-paying citizens make. You must be able to believe that stealing others’ hard-earned money is not stealing (what choice do they have?) but instead is compassion and justice. To be a liberal, you must believe that we as a society need entitlement programs for those who do not work, and further, that taking advantage of those entitlement programs should not be stigmatized. To be a liberal, you must be able to believe that urban crime and poverty is caused by institutionalized racism, and that a subculture that worships violent criminals and convicts and idolizes violent crime, sees all blacks as victims of the man, applauds the murder of police, and scorns education as selling out to the white man has nothing to do with crime or poverty.

To be a liberal, you have to be able to say—with a straight face—that Iraqis were better off under Hussein than they are today. To be a liberal, you must be a consequentialist, and believe that the ends justify the means (be sure to invoke Ghandi and MLK here) and care only about issues–never the process by which they are implemented; you must believe that any opposition to Roe vs. Wade can only be by people who want to outlaw abortion, and not by anyone who believes (rightly) that the SCOTUS overreached their authority. To be a liberal, you must be confused and mystified by anyone who insists that the process is more important than the issue, that states should make the decision and not the federal government, that Federalism is what separates us from Europe and the world’s democracies, and we must at all costs maintain that separation. Don’t even try to discuss the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with a liberal.

Look around. Liberalism is not merely a different political perspective; liberalism is a disease and it’s poisoning the nation. Students and their parents believe they are entitled to As in class, even if they didn’t do anything. Politicians and pundits speak of tax cuts as “transferring wealth” (where’s the transfer in allowing you to keep more of your own money?) or “giving money to the rich” (how is allowing you to keep more of your own money giving money to you?) Even the Republicans now are liberals, throwing money down the cesspool of medicare and increasing federal control over public education.

To liberals, it’s all about their pet issues. To conservatives, it’s about the survival of the United States. And that pretty much says it all.