On the issues that matter most to me, the sacredness of sexuality/marriage/family and of innocent life, our President-elect is my very worst nightmare. Nevertheless, I like him; I respect and admire him as a decent, intelligent and competent leader; and I will honor him as our President.
I like:
- His paternal love for his daughters.
- His spousal relationship with Michelle.
- The pained and dignified way in which he disengaged from Reverend Wright.
- The spiritual search that led him to Christianity.
- His tone and manner: even, mellow, calming, reasoned, and respectful.
- The way he thinks: rational, orderly, comprehensive, analytic, open-minded.
- His passion for more universal health care.
- His community organizer background and his sincere concern for the poor.
- His disposition to diplomacy now united with a realism about the use of force.
- His turn to the middle in appointments like Gates and Clinton.
- The tolerance for moral conservatives shown by his invitation to Reverend Warren.
- The emphasis upon competence and experience shown in his cabinet selections.
- The fact that he plays basketball and the way (as I have read) that he plays the game.
- His repugnance at the use of torture.
- That he is our first black President and that he is genuinely post-racist.
- His fine education and accomplishments in working his way to the top of our society.
- The optimism and hope he has aroused internationally.
- The competent way he ran his campaign.
- The respectful and moderate way he handled himself in the debates.
- His practical shrewdness as a politician.
- And even his lean, athletic virility and masculine demeanor.
I could go on. My appreciation, affection and even admiration for my ideological enemy is enabled by my Catholic faith which admits for diversity in policy and situates politics and government as less than ultimate in importance.
Question: How many liberal Democrats view Bush or Cheney or Palin or Huckabee with similar respect and affection? None that I know…and I know plenty! Otherwise balanced and reasonable people become apoplectic and borderline hysterical at the mention of these names. It is not merely that they disagree on policy; rather, they compulsively disparage the moral character and intellectual competence of these leaders. Is it possible that these politicians are as morally and intellectually deranged as the liberal imagination constructs them…or is there something in the liberal mind that tends to personal resentment and emotive condemnation? Is there an intrinsic illiberalism to the liberal mind? I think there are several factors that work towards this irrational toxicity.
1. Liberals inflate the importance of politics and government, while conservatives deflate the same. Liberals have great hopes in regard to government (“The Great Society,” etc.) while conservatives have minimum expectations. The later give more importance to smaller communities (family, Church, business and other mediating communities) by a stronger sense of subsidiarity. Liberals expect centralized government to ensure full employment, provide child care, sex education, health care for everyone, and bring peace on earth without use of lethal force. In the liberal narrative, Bush single-handedly sunk the world economy, brought war to the Middle East, mal-distributed our national wealth, disenfranchised minorities, desecrated the environment…and did all of this through a combination of incompetence and evil intentions. One wonders: how could an incompetent moron influence the world on a scale with geniuses like Hitler and Genghis Ghan? Obama is hailed as the expected Messiah while Bush is condemned as Satan incarnate. By contrast a moral conservative deflates Bush’s influence and is not seriously disappointed in his administration since expectations are not great about the ability of government to overcome evil in our world.
2. Residual class resentment. A legacy of envy remains as Republicans are viewed as wealthy, powerful, and greedy. This is ironic since we know that today self-described conservatives are less affluent than and more personally generous than self-described liberals. Big business, especially groups like litigation lawyers and the finance community, poured millions of dollars into the Obama campaign. Today’s Democrat Party is a coalition of power elites and the Republican Party is more and more composed of a populist, countercultural underclass drawn to Huckabee and Palin.
3. Liberals are more secular with less attachment to faith, tradition, and authority. This is not to say that all liberals lack faith; but that secular elites exercise an inordinate influence and liberals tend to privatize religion and thus leave the public square bare and secularized. They are loyal to John F. Kennedy’s pledge to keep his faith out of government so they nod their heads solemnly as militant secularists disparage as “theocrats” those who advocate religious, family and life values. Removed from Church and tradition, liberals sanctify their politics and ideology as a religion. As a result, ideological enemies (e.g. those who oppose governmental medical coverage or favor the invasion of Iraq) become demonized. Since there is little taste for the supernatural, the transcendent or the eschatological (or at least no space for it in public life), the political becomes the ultimate. Therefore, political disagreement becomes personalized and absolutized as first-order in ultimacy, not second order.
4. Liberals have lost a sense of original and actual sin. A liberal can be described as one who does not confess sins because he self-identifies as a “good person.” Evil becomes re-positioned onto an oppressor class: Neo-Conservative Republicans, white males, heterosexualists, militarists and oil magnates. A fierce indignation and righteous wrath is directed at these groups as the primal agents of evil in an otherwise serene world.
5. Feminism has successfully redefined as pathological masculinity and values associated with it: objectivity, rationality, law, authority, tradition, obedience, and heroic combat. There has resulted an “effeminization” of liberalism in the form of emotivism and over-personalism. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of this was Senator Kennedy’s emotive, indignant, personalized attacks against Judge Alito as racist at his confirmation hearings. Alito maintained an impeccably sober, judicial, intellectual demeanor as he analyzed law and precedent in an impersonal way, free of anger or defensiveness. It was a clear confrontation of the emotive, resentful ideologue with the sober, indifferent (in the classical Ignatian sense) scholar.
6. Implementation of the liberal agenda of libidinal license has generated a reservoir of repressed sexual guilt. Unacknowledged and unconfessed, this becomes transformed and projected in accusatory rage at an evil and incompetent class of people.
7. Knee-jerk, post-Vietnam anti-American-militarism exploded with inordinate indignation and self-righteousness about the Iraq war. This was, of course, the energy that fueled Obama’s momentum in the Democrat primaries.
Conservatives are not free of this fault. I recall a virulent form of it directed against Hillary during the Clinton presidency. However, I do not listen to right-wing radio; I read the Times, listen to MSNBC, and live in blue NJ, and am incessantly subject to the liberal rant. It is good to know where it is coming from.
Happily, President-elect Obama, the new liberal Moses, has some sort of immunity to this liberal virus of personal resentment. He was especially impressive in the debates where he responded respectfully to the disparagement and emotivism of Senator John McCain. He is a good example for all of us.
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