It's OK if you're a Republican

I’ve noticed for some time that when you’re a liberal, you’re told to attempt to be objective. Hear the other side out, don’t be coarse. Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and the right wing can make the facts up as they go and distort truth, and no one blinks an eye. But unless you’re Alan Colmes and thus completely deferential to the right wing, you must hate America.

They say there’s more to right wing politics than Rush, Hannity and Glenn Beck, but I’d like to know where this moderate, objective, rational, truthful camp of conservatives is.

Is it supposed to be Jonah Goldberg, who wrote an entire book dedicated to the idea that liberalism is akin to fascism? Or perhaps it’s Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., the father of modern conservatism, who was booted from the magazine his father founded after not following the right wing path of McCain/Palin during the 2008 presidential election?

In his contributions to the Federalist Papers, James Madison wrote of the dangers of factions and how the power of a majority may hurt that of a minority. The right wing and the Tea Party groups are attempting to hijack any attempt at actual civil discourse with their rhetoric in order to maintain the status quo of keeping the power in the hands of the haves, not the have nots.

The words of Madison are echoed in the sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, who acknowledged that it is necessary for the survival of our union to work together, to find what he called “the better angels of our nature.”

But when one party is the party of no, and they are but shrill banshees decrying anything left of Ronald Reagan as a communist, fascist threat to freedom and the American way, we can have no progress as a society.

I’d love to meet these calm, well mannered conservatives, Republicans and Tea Party advocates willing to discuss the mutual problems and benefits of our society. But I have yet to find them. Some trolls of the Internet have more civility than you find at Tea Parties and the media.

And that’s what is perhaps most hypocritical and unsubstantial about these Tea Party groups. They speak of holding government accountable, when they are no better than those currently in power.

But unfortunately, there is no middle ground anymore. The Democrats keep moving further and further to the right, yet the voices on the right, both in the political arena and media, refuse to budge.

This reality is why the liberal sections of America must push back. The conservatives have controlled the debate for too long. While liberals argue amongst themselves about whether the word order on NPR makes it liberal, even “liberal” CNN and conservatives call our own government the “Department of Jihad” and completely reinvent the argument from their own perspective.

Instead of letting conservatives dictate the terms of conversation, and relying on the Daily Show to inject humor into this reality, liberals must worry less about fears of objectivity, and more about actually informing the public regarding the misinformation spread by the right.


E-mail: mrstraw@indiana.edu