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TweetWow, what an interesting article I just read. Yea Yea, it’s a few months old, and somehow I missed it, but I just came across it and I want to share it with you anyway.
One of my new favorite sites for good information and good writing is City Journal. This one is titled “The Big White Lie” by Andrew Klaven. Here is some interesting stuff:
The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.
Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.
I’ve always loved the fact that I can tell things how they are and I that I don’t have to spin something up to cater to an agenda. You see, my “agenda” as the left calls it, is simply Telling it like it is, calling it as I see it. I don’t ignore what’s happening in the world everyday, I don’t ignore the left pandering to their particular audience, I don’t ignore the threats coming from the Islamic countries of the Middle East, I don’t ignore the political correctness of the Media, I don’t ignore the fact that in Leftism, The Mob is greater than the individual.
This is leftism’s great strength: it’s all white lies. That’s its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they’re installed. But because it depends on—indeed is defined by—describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence—he’s not crippled, dear, he’s handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s redeployment—leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.
This is no small thing. To rewrite the rules of courteous behavior is to wield enormous power. I see it in Southern California, in the bleeding heart of leftism, where I live. I’ve been banned from my monthly poker game, lost tennis partners, lost friends—not because I’m belligerent but because I’ve wondered aloud if the people shouldn’t be allowed to make their own abortion laws, say, or if the world might not be a better place without the UN.
Living in Southern California, I too have experienced this, and for the most part I just sit there with a grin on my face and usually don’t comment when some leftist idiot spouts off the latest talking points of the mainstream media. You know why? It’s becuase I don’t have to argue. I already know they don’t know what they’re talking about. To own them (lecture them) would be a disgrace to them and their intelligence and a lot of times I prefer to stay civil with a person (because it’s usually a mutual friend or colleague) until they openly bring the fight to the forefront, as to which then, I end up having to [Pwn] them with the FACTS. I don’t ask for it. I’m just forced into it once I see there’s no way out except to barrel right through their argument with REASON and CLARITY. Yes, I’ve lost a lot of friends in SoCal because of it, but who cares? I still have my family and I get to maintain my sanity.
It’s a rotten feeling. I sometimes think that I’d rather be deemed evil than a boor. Wickedness has some flair to it, even a whiff of radicalism. If you molest a child, there’s always a chance that you can get the ACLU to defend you as a cultural innovator. But if you make a remark at table about the destructive social effects of broken homes and then discover that your dinner partner is a divorcée—trust me, you feel like a real louse. It’s manners, not morals, that lay the borderlines of our behavior.
This, I believe, is the reason conservative politicians so often lose their nerve, why they back down in debate even when they’re clearly right. No one wants to be condemned as a brute—especially not conservatives, who still retain some vague memory of how worthy it is to be a lady or gentleman.
And because we’ve allowed leftists to define the language of political good manners—don’t say women are less scientific; don’t remark that black people bear the same responsibility for their actions as whites; don’t point out that the gunman was a Muslim, it’s not nice—the sort of person willing to speak the truth isn’t always the sort of person you want to be seen with. It sometimes takes, I mean, a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity to withstand the obloquy attached to stating the facts of the matter. If these people in their public personae seem harsh to more genteel conservatives, it may be because it requires that extra dollop of aggression to shatter the silence created by the Left’s increasingly elaborate sensitivities.
Still, mannerly as we would rather be, truth-telling continues to be both compelling and ultimately satisfying. There is, after all, something greater than courtesy. “Firmness in the right,” Lincoln called it, “as God gives us to see the right.” We find ourselves at a precarious moment in an endeavor of great importance: namely, the preservation of Western rationalism and liberty. It does mankind no good to allow so magnificent an enterprise to slip away merely for fear of saying the wrong thing.
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