slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

By Chuck Connell

There is a lot to like/admire about conservatism. The history of conservative philosophy includes private enterprise, free markets, an effective national defense, gradual social change, individual freedom, the importance of personal values in political decisions, religious tolerance, and the centrality of marriage and family to society.

Many of these values, and others often identified as conservative, are mine. I believe a happy family is the foundation for a good life. I attend Christian church services most every week. I own a business. I do not use illegal drugs or drink to excess. I believe governments and taxes should be as small as possible to get the job done. I am mistrustful of bureaucracies and people in positions of power, because I find them to be self-perpetuating and inefficient. I am attracted to members of the opposite sex. I think too many teenagers are getting pregnant, and I am uncomfortable with casual a******ns.

I call the act of living by conservative values “personal conservatism.” This is my value system and it works for me.

But there is another set of values, which are distinctly different, that have been at the forefront of recent discussions about politics and religion in the U.S. I call these values "angry conservatism", and they are harmful to a free society and, ultimately, are not really conservative at all. Angry conservatism is characterized by the following assertions, sometimes stated explicitly and sometimes implied.

I am certain my personal beliefs are correct. I am so sure about them, there is no need for me to listen to other points of view. There is no chance I will modify my positions in the future based on greater wisdom.

Not only am I certain of my beliefs, I am certain my beliefs are correct for everyone. No one can be happy loving someone of the same sex. For all 100 million women in the US, and 1.5 billion women in the world, a******n is a bad idea always.

My religion, Christianity, has a correct view of God. People of other religions, and even other denominations of Christianity, are mistaken in their view of God. I know the one true interpretation of what God is and how to live that knowledge on Earth.

The United States military are the good guys. Other countries and forces whom we fight against are the bad guys. Because we are good, we can do anything we choose in the cause of goodness, including very bad things. Torturing military prisoners is an international war crime when the bad guys do it, but a frat-house prank when we do it.

The federal government should be less intrusive in the lives of our citizens, reduce its budget, operate with fewer employees, and enact a lower tax rate – except to promote policies I believe in. To promote my values, the government should reach into people’s bedrooms to legislate private lives, interfere in rational doctor/patient decisions, increase its overall budget, create new federal bureaucracies, and tax our children to pay for these programs.

The common threads in angry conservatism are hubris and a purposeful ignorance about the complexity of the world. It would be nice to be certain about which values and opinions are correct. And it would be nice if what is right for me is “right” in some objective sense. Who would not love this kind of insight? But no one is that smart. One of the hallmarks of wisdom is knowing how little we know. Related to this is knowing we might learn something that will lead us to change our judgment on some important topic. Angry conservatives do not have wisdom.

Angry conservatism also is not really conservative at all. It is the antithesis of many traditional conservative values. Angry conservatism rejects personal freedom, by asserting that no one may have a valid romantic interest in a member of the same sex; religious tolerance, by claiming that Christianity is the only correct religion; a limited government, by injecting the federal bureaucracy in single individual healthcare decisions; and a balanced federal budget, by practicing huge deficit spending.

It is true that angry conservatives are advancing some of the social values of traditional conservatism. But they are doing so in a manner that should appall genuine conservatives.

This criticism of contemporary conservatism raises an important question: Aren’t liberals just as bad? There certainly are many people of the liberal persuasion who are too sure of themselves and don’t seriously consider conservative arguments against liberal orthodoxy. There is a qualitative difference, however, between liberalism and angry conservatism. Liberalism, at its core, allows for personal freedom on many choices, such as belief in God, sexual orientation, and a******n. Angry conservatism seeks to impose one personal value system (Christianity, anti-gay, anti-a******n) on other people. There is no significant parallel in modern liberalism. If there were, an "angry liberalism” would preach that all heterosexuals give up their lifestyle and choose a gay partner, all pregnant women have an a******n whether they want one or not, and all Christians renounce Jesus to take up the Zen pursuit of desirelessness. But no serious liberal proposes such a program.

Conservatism has acquired a bad reputation lately among liberals. The problem, however, is not core conservatism, which many liberals practice in their own lives. The problem is the extension of conservative positions to an angry, coercive set of beliefs. Angry conservatives assert that they know things which are beyond the human capacity to know: the t***h about God, and the correct deeply personal decisions for other people.
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Chuck Connell is a writer and software consultant in Woburn, MA. He can be reached at connell@chc-3.com or www.chc-3.com.

Mr Bombastic

What a load of crap.

son of witless

No, what a load of projection. The following statement: " I am certain my personal beliefs are correct. I am so sure about them, there is no need for me to listen to other points of view. " It is the left who refuse to allow dissenting views. They are the ones who shout down their opponents on University Campuses. They are the ones who run echo chambers disguised as political websites. Go ahead, try to post on their discussion sites.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

The t***h of the matter, IMO, is that there are good and bad groups/individuals from both liberal & conservative backgrounds. The sadness is in the fact that the current ideological divide is so great that neither will allow themselves to accept the strengths from the mainstream of both, and minimize the zealotry of the extremists. This article simply views one man's perspective of that dilemma.

son of witless

So your solution is what? The article equates the far ends of both sides. I reject that. Yea if you want to equate the outer limits of both, but that is not where the divide is. How about the middle of each zone? About half of each half. In there no reconciliation is possible. I have also found that all such pieces as this that masquerade as center or center right are really l*****t. The point of this is to persuade the right to compromise while the left holds to it's principles. We on the right are done compromising. We are done being shamed as r****ts so that the C*******t Left can run r**t over our country. No there is no coming together. One side will be defeated. That is how it ends.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Pew Research Center's Fact Tank - Our Lives in Numbers
June 17, 2014
Which party is more to blame for political polarization? It depends on the measure

By Carroll Doherty

Our report on political polarization in America has renewed debate among journalists and academics over what is called “asymmetrical polarization” – the idea that one party has moved further ideologically than the other. A number of congressional scholars have concluded that the widening partisan gap in Congress is attributable mostly to a rightward shift among Republican lawmakers. But what about the public? Have Republicans nationwide shifted further than Democrats over the past two decades?

The report addresses this issue in considerable detail. What we find is clear evidence of more ideologically consistent thinking on both sides of the spectrum, as well as greater levels of partisan antipathy, though the latter is currently more acute on the right than on the left.

Ideological consistency. Currently, 23% of Democrats have liberal views across nearly all items on a 10-item political values scale, while another 33% have mostly liberal views. Among Republicans, comparable shares have either consistently conservative (20%) or mostly conservative (33%) attitudes.

In both parties, the shares expressing mostly ideological views have increased, but in very different ways. The percentage of Democrats who are liberal on all or most value dimensions has nearly doubled from just 30% in 1994 to 56% today. The share who are consistently liberal has quadrupled from just 5% to 23% over the past 20 years.

In absolute terms, the ideological shift among Republicans has been more modest. In 1994, 45% of Republicans were right-of-center, with 13% consistently conservative. Those figures are up to 53% and 20% today.

But there are two key considerations to keep in mind before concluding that the liberals are driving ideological polarization. First, 1994 was a relative high point in conservative political thinking among Republicans. In fact, between 1994 and 2004 the average Republican moved substantially toward the center ideologically, as concern about the deficit, government waste and abuses of social safety net that characterized the “Contract with America” era faded in the first term of the Bush administration.

Since 2004, Republicans have veered sharply back to the right on all of these dimensions, and the GOP ideological shift over the past decade has matched, if not exceeded, the rate at which Democrats have become more liberal.

A second consideration is that the nation as a whole has moved slightly to the left over the past 20 years, mostly because of a broad societal shift toward acceptance of homosexuality and more positive views of immigrants. Twenty years ago, these two issues created significant cleavages within the Democratic Party, as many otherwise liberal Democrats expressed more conservative values in these realms. But today, as divisions over these issues have diminished on the left, they have emerged on the right, with a subset of otherwise conservative Republicans expressing more liberal values on these social issues.

Partisan Antipathy. Among members of both parties, the shares who express very unfavorable opinions of the opposing party have approximately doubled since 1994. Today, 43% of Republicans have a highly negative opinion of the Democratic Party, while nearly as many Democrats (38%) feel very unfavorably toward the GOP.

Even so, today there is greater partisan antipathy on the right than the left. In the current survey, we asked those who had a very unfavorable opinion of the opposing party: Would you say that party’s policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being, or wouldn’t you go that far?” Among Democrats, 27% go so far as to say the GOP is a threat to the well-being of the country. A higher percentage of Republicans (36%) say Democratic policies threaten the nation

The disparity is much larger when ideology is factored in. Among consistently conservative Republicans, 66% regard Democratic policies as a threat to the nation’s well-being. Substantially fewer (50%) of consistently liberal Democrats think Republican policies represent a threat to the nation.

One caveat: There is no trend on the “threat” question. Other data show that Republicans are intensely opposed to the Obama presidency, which is likely a factor in their highly negative opinions of the Democratic Party. At a comparable point in George W. Bush’s second term, negative views of Bush among Democrats were on par with negative opinions of Obama among Republicans today. But it is not possible to determine the depth of Democratic antipathy toward the GOP at that time.

The Personal Side of Polarization. Among the questions we have gotten on polarization is this: If Republicans and Democrats increasingly view the opposing party in highly negative terms, do they also view each other more negatively?

Comparably small shares in both parties – 15% of Democrats and 17% of Republicans – say they would be unhappy if a family member married someone from the opposing party. Even among consistent conservatives and liberals, the numbers who would have angst over a family marriage to a someone from the “other” party are not very large (30% of consistent conservatives, 23% of consistent liberals).

Yet on another dimension of personal polarization – having friends who generally share your politics – consistent conservatives stand out. Fully 63% of consistent conservatives say most of their close friends share their political views, compared with 49% of consistent liberals. Moreover, far more on the right (50%) than left (35%) say it is important to live in a place where most people share their political views.

While these “ideological silos” are more common on the right than the left, what is equally striking is how little it matters for those with a mix of liberal and conservative views. Just 25% of those with mixed ideological views say most of their friends share their views and just 22% say it is important to live in a community where most share their views.
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IMO, you and far too many others have a defeatist attitude towards reconciliation of our nation's divide. I, however hopeless you may think it is, remain optimistic. "I don't like that man. I must get to know him better." [quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln]

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

Many times I've called on true conservatives to rise up and denounce the neo conservative movement, which is giving "conservative" a bad connotation. This is the first sign I've seen that there are indeed any true conservatives left alive. I've also called on true liberals to rise up and denounce the neo liberals/progressives, who are doing the same thing to that venerable philosophy - I've not heard anything of the sort from them.

The problem is, we're an "all or nothing" society, and have been for some time. We don't believe in compromise as that's a form of surrender, and we all agree that surrender is a dishonorable act. Well, that isn't exactly true is it, we DO believe in compromise and surrender - as long as it's someone else surrendering to US. We disguise this selfishness as being "true to ourselves", or "true to our values", but those disguises unravel very quickly when examined in the light of how we act. When confronted with our hypocrisy, we blame someone or something else for our failure to hold to our own "values", or use some other form of rationalization.

True conservatives and true liberals have many attributes in common, such as, both philosophies believe in individual rights and liberties, both agree on equal opportunity for all citizens and they differ only slightly on the role of Government in the effort to secure these things. There's plenty of "common ground" to build effective and efficient legislation around, but we haven't seen any of that in most of our lifetimes, because it isn't politically expedient to do so.

In order to develop and maintain and adversarial role, such common ground as exists has to be suppressed or eliminated, and that narrative promulgated to the masses, in order to entice v**ers to v**e for US and not THEM, the wider the divide the better as it's easier to maintain. It is literally another civil war, fought without bullets - so far. Our values are malleable, subject to political expediency.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

son of witless

I reject the central premise of the article. “asymmetrical polarization” is not the problem. It views the conflict between right and left as the problem. As if there is no right or wrong. During WW2 the problem was not that both sides were polarized and if only they could come together to resolve their differences. There probably were some unethical people on the Allied side and probably there were a few moral individuals on the Axis side. No matter, one side was evil and had to be defeated.

In this battle of right and left in America the problem is not in the conflict. The problem is one side is evil and must be defeated. The question is which side are you on and which side do you see as evil. If you study any history and American history in particular you see that it has always been this way. Jefferson and Adams headed two parties that saw each other as evil. After both were long out of politics they became close friends. Later on you had the pro s***ery faction against the anti s***ery activists. They politically warred for decades and ultimately that resulted in the Civil War and one side winning.

Right now you have Conservatives and Liberals. The war is eternal, but you have to look at it as the war between the current generation of each political philosophy. Conservatives being human are not perfect. Liberals do not even aspire to perfection. They are not even good. They are the anti American Tradition Party. They are the party of Atheism-antiChristian-antiJudaism, t*********red bathrooms, Gay Marriage ( those opposing must be punished by the courts ), anti free speech, pro i*****l i*********n, anti gun, and pro welfare for the able bodied.

Like the Axis Powers, there will be no common ground. Peace will come when either we win or they win. We know it and they know it. You do not know it.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

I would agree, although not totally, that you present a good argument, SOW I do reject, however....without prejudice, your last complete paragraph's all-encompassing assessment of liberalism. I know many family members and friends who are nowhere near your description of liberals, and they are, along with most liberals...good people. The largest part of my family and circle of friends who are conservative, are (as you say) far from being perfect...though fine people, also. You seem locked into stereotyping, possibly stemming from viewing left-wing radicals as typical liberals. I beg to differ.

son of witless

I am a veteran of these ideological arguments. I also have family members who lets just say are different than me. That does not make them evil, it makes them wrong. When I say one side must be defeated, that can go two ways. Either they must be discouraged so they give up, or they must be converted. I would hope that with age and experience they will be converted, but I will accept the other.

Unlike Liberals I do not wage unrestricted war on my foes. Even in the most heated family arguments I never seek to silence them. Yet the recent history of Liberals is nothing but, the pursuit of silence on opposing viewpoints. From destroying the careers of scientists who do not buy into G****l W*****g, to the r**ts and intimidation of Conservative speakers and even Left wing Apostates on university campuses, the Left is all about the destruction of the First Amendment.

That even more than their wrong headed beliefs is why they must lose.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

I am also a "veteran of these ideological arguments."

Having said that, I must respectfully suggest that although you appear a decent guy (not necessarily one of those "bad conservatives"), you fall into the category of the much more hallowed, self-righteous and principled individuals...as opposed to the deviously 'wrong-headed,' stubborn and obstinate individuals who don't share your views. Inevitably, the terms int***sigent and incorrigible come to mind. I note & admire your passion, however we may disagree.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

son of witless

I enjoy the discussion and most of the time I am dealing with people who are more interested in destroying me than my ideas. I therefore am pre programed to trade insults rather than ideas. I have many times honestly questioned the left wingers on OPP only to be ignored, insulted, and not engaged. 15-20 years ago I was on political blogs where I could trade ideas and not insults with honest liberals.

Perhaps I have descended to the level of the current opposition. If I am self righteous, I am open to being persuaded, but not by anyone I have debated on this board. Again, I am willing to put my ideas out there and defend them. That is all I ask of anyone here. I don't care how crazy I think someone else's ideas are, I will give them a fair hearing if they are willing to answer me t***hfully.

I am repeating myself and I apologize. Who is to say if my ideas, your ideas, or anyone's ideas posted here are valid? The best test is to post and defend the ideas and see if they can survive here. Trouble is none of us have agreed on the ground rules.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Son of Witless, I admire and respect posters of your calibre even as I am sometimes in disagreement. This one by you brings to mind a quote I remember posting a while back. I believe it is attributable to Mark Twain, although I cannot be sure...and it truly doesn't matter. It is similar to a simple but memorable line from Shakespeare's Hamlet....."To thine own self be true."

"Each of you, for himself, by himself, and on his own responsibility, must speak. And, it is a solemn and weighty responsibility and not lightly to be slung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government or the empty catchphrases of politicians. Each must, for himself alone, decide what is right and what is wrong and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your own convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable t*****r, both to yourself and to your country...let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country...hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of."

Although rather lengthy, it is a rule of thumb we should all aspire to live by.