ARROGANT SOCIALIST SMILES: Contrary to the current spin, most Americans, relatively speaking, share many overall beliefs. If you could construct a questionnaire, keeping the language as neutral as possible (stripped of legislative specifics, partisan and media buzzwords, etc.), you’d find a lot more common ground than you’d expect. People look at the partisan split and argue that the country is somewhat evenly divided along ideological lines, but this misses the bigger picture of our basic closeness.
What divides us is a wide range of things. The division is now being driven by partisan political positioning, suggesting that one group of Americans traitorously threatens another. Few politicians from any political party are above such pandering, nor is the broadest range of political activists. Our diversity is more a consequence of biology/ingrained survival instincts than ideology. In a sense, we always feel threatened, especially by what’s “foreign.” Being able to put faces on such fears offers a kind of comfort.
Some tentative suggestions of the areas that mold our differences more than ideas:
Deliberate: strategies on how to achieve social, political, and diplomatic goals.
Obscure: semantic reactions and sensibilities. We react to certain words differently. It repulses us to hear expressed one way an idea we strongly support when offered in completely different language.
Obvious (though ever more distorted by distance and social change): beliefs influenced by one’s ethnic, religious, and/or national-origin background.
Core: family and economic background, personal abilities.
Most controversial: biological determiners, in the broader sense, in terms of who we are, “What is biological, what is learned, what is social, what is philosophical?”
None of these can be laid out as a clear map. Each individual is impacted in different ways; influences are subtle, obscure, fragmented, distorted, and so on. Only a small part of our political decision-making process is deliberative, so much of it derived from the ingrained, unconscious, emotional, and reactive.
The social/cultural/political reality of our world is complex, complicated, contradictory, and evolving — interacting, working, governing, and living together is damned difficult for all of us. Trivializing the near impossibility of respectful social navigation by denying that there are legitimate differences over unsolvable issues but instead blaming other groups makes life so much easier — it is just good guys and bad guys. From a recent e-mail:
“We said liberals were anti-American. We said they were traitors. And we watched the evidence mount. The Rosenbergs. Whittaker Chambers. The Church Commission. The counterculture. So-called ‘peace protesters.’ Jane Fonda. Jimmy Carter’s arrogant socialist smile. The pro-Sandinista Congress.
“We called them traitors. And everyone laughed. …
“We claimed liberals were creating failure and misery, so they could build a massive welfare state to honor their hero, Karl Marx. We said they were pitting one American against another, Balkanizing us into little groups. We noted liberals attacked and destroyed the morality that had preserved the individual freedom they desperately wanted to crush.”
Here’s beauty: “We said they were pitting one American against another, Balkanizing us into little groups.” Probably, it would be easy to find a similar rant from the left, though I’m hearing mostly from the right.
ENERGY POLICY WITHOUT POLICY: The conservative Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page (regularly proving time travel is possible, as it is sent in from the Neanderthal age) both came out against the recent energy bill on many points. Twelve hundred pages drafted solely by Republicans, with the Democrats given 48 hours to consider it before the House vote. Does anyone genuinely believe this is good government, in the best interests of the republic and its citizens? Sure, it’s great Democrat-bashing and really puts them in their place, but we’re all going to pay for this over a very long time. There’s more pork in this bill than in the most ambitious Hormel-related farming operation.
The bill offers all kinds of tax incentives and restriction exemptions to traditional fuel industries. Given that fossil fuels are finite, the bill offers no significant restrictions on vehicles’ gas consumption and only limited alternative-energy development (ethanol is another cash gift to Midwest farmers, and only this administration seems excited about hydrogen research). Bush pushed hard for drilling in Alaska but didn’t get it. Now, wasn’t a lot of oil transported by the Alaska pipeline shipped to Japan because it was more economical than sending it down to the lower 48? Currently there are tens of millions in tax incentives for a new pipeline that would be more costly because, instead of cutting through Canada, it has to stay within our borders. My question is, what happens when we begin to suck our fossil fuel reserves dry, even if this takes a couple of hundred years? Where will this leave foreign suppliers? Wouldn’t it be better not to touch them now, not just out of environmental responsibility, but because, in case of future international diplomatic meltdown or catastrophe, they’d be available? I’m guessing most folks are counting on a future Democratic administration to save our asses by funding the hell out of developing alternative fuel sources.
The diminutive peace movement did itself no service with its recent demands that we immediately pull out of Iraq. The Bush administration’s politically motivated June deadline is equally misguided. As wrongheaded as the invasion was — and, even more destructive, the trumped-up hysteria of its necessary immediacy — we’re stuck there now. The best course is to internationalize both the military and rebuilding efforts, but our moves in that direction seem disingenuous at best. Pulling out is the worst option for this country, the Iraqi people, and world stability. Even the most extreme apologists for the current military situation (“You liberals just don’t understand the ways of the world, especially when it comes to violence”) ignore that Iraq’s military/security stability is just a beginning, not an end. Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds have to figure out how to live together in a country cobbled together by European imperialists. Don’t expect the first election to provide an easy blueprint for the future.
The attempt to provide rebuilding funds in the form of loans instead of aid was equally misguided. Not just Muslims, but the whole world, think that oil was the United States’ driving consideration, and any attempt to extract money from Iraq simply offers confirmation. I don’t have the space here to go into why the Vietnam comparisons don’t work. Unfortunately, the more likely model is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which mobilized Muslim militants and, as much as anything, led directly to 9/11. Wizard of Oz hallucinations about filters and blaming any negatives on news media may feel good but solve no problems. We’re in it deep, seem to have little idea as to what to do next, and are more than potentially screwed.
FROM TWO FLOUNDERS: We all know what an impervious jerk I am. Here are details from two readers.
After my column claiming we weren’t influenced by advertisers’ dollars, one of the folks making that connection sent an e-mail “not intended for publication.” The comparison was made that politicians taking money from business might claim they weren’t influenced by them, but as citizens we had a right to know. The same went for newspapers: When we sided with our advertisers against public health, readers should question the source of our income. A disclaimer was suggested: “NOTE: The Chronicle receives much of its revenue from entities strongly opposed to clean indoor air. Those who are in favor of it give us nothing.”
Is that a joke? (Honestly, I’m pretty dense.) Sources funding politicians, elected by us, should be clear. But this writer is suggesting that you, our readers, are so freaking stupid that we needed to point out Chronicle ads as potential influences. If we polled our advertisers, I suspect we’d find most in favor of the smoking ban, but we’re too busy coming up with a service where we offer to tie your shoelaces for you. Questioning why a note to me shouldn’t be for all our readers, I also offered that this was exactly the level of self righteousness expected from anti-smoking activists. The response was: “Wow, you’re even more pompous and delusional in private than you are in print.” But the writer cautioned me not to print it, so I won’t.
Today’s Insightful Thought From Carl Swanson: “Actually Louis, you simply cannot imagine someone calling extremists for what they are. Louis, you keep pretending that fringe assholes have something worthwhile to add to the debate, and they don’t. If you cannot honestly disagree with someone about politics, I feel really sorry for you and anyone like that. Making the broadest generalities and putting the absolute worst possible spin on everything someone says or does is pathological, nothing more. It shows intolerance, and an absolutist way of thinking that really points out some serious issues with any person not willing to allow others to come to a different conclusion than their own.
“You do defend the status quo with your intolerance of opinion other than your own. You attack anyone who does not agree with your agenda, which halts any change at all because the people you attack are now forced to defend themselves against your allegations.”
Guilty as charged of all of the above, with more to come. Keep reading. 
This article appears in November 21 • 2003.