Alterman's alternatives

Let’s face it. It’s not Kerry’s fault. It’s not Nader’s fault (this time). It’s not the media’s fault (though they do bear a heavy responsibility for much of what ails our political system). It’s not “our” fault either. The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the “reality-based community” say or believe about anything.

My response:

I know I'm in the minority on both sides, but I wonder if that doesn't give me a slightly better view through the fog. Consider: I'm agnostic. Thoroughly nonreligious. After 17 years of Presbyterianism which never took, I realized my agnosticism and walked away, never to look back. I admire certain aspects of religious faith, but as a matter of biology could never have it myself. My brain simply doesn't accept the world that way. That being said, I'm a quite conservative libertarian, for an eminently Lockean reason: Natural rights aren't a religious issue, they're a nature issue. My conservatism is completely secular, a conception which would be no surprise to Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Madison, Mason, et al.

As such, it's not that I don't care about the litany of things you relate in your November 3rd column for religious reasons. It's because, for completely secular reasons, I completely disagree with your litany’s perception of "reality." It’s simply not the reality I see. When I look at Iraq, I don't see "murderous quicksand and a killing field for our children." I see a nation undergoing a painful rebirth, for itself and for everyone, that couldn't be happening without the sacrifice of our own people, many of whom, if not most, are quite proud of the work they’re doing there, and, remarkably and nobly, quite willing to die for it. You may not comprehend the view, but it certainly exists whether you do or you don't, and apparently most of the American public sees the same. I disagree, too, that Bush is creating more terrorists, rather than merely bringing those who already harbor terrorist mindsets out of the shadows into the bright light of day where we can destroy them on their soil rather than on our own. That again I find to be a good cause and one worth pursuing. I disagree that Bush has “mortgaged our children’s future” for the most wealthy, since the numbers I’ve seen (from the CBO and from the Brookings-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center) support nothing like such a charge. I see a much improved and but still improving job situation and economy, not worsening ones, and a health insurance statistic that I find simplistic and lacking crucial context. I see a similarly simplistic and disconnected explanation for rising Medicare premiums, and a downright false claim about our air and water supposedly getting worse when a variety of data clearly shows the exact opposite. And while as a conservative I certainly do care about the expansion of the size of government in the last few years—it’s my biggest gripe with the president—I can also do basic math and find that compared to the last twenty-five years, the current deficit is fairly average relative to the size of the economy and is, more importantly, shrinking.

As far as Bush the man, I see a far different one from the one you obviously do. I see a man who, while born to a family of relative privilege and who obviously indulged that privilege, nonetheless learned the limits and lessons of those indulgences and became someone whose values I—and apparently a majority of American voters—can respect. If you don’t, you’re obviously entitled to your opinion, but my view isn’t wrong because you disagree. We simply have a different take on the man. As it happens, yours is the minority view, so you can take from that whatever lessons you deem appropriate.

In other words, if you’re in any mood to persuade, you’ll have to do better than simply dismissing those whose opinions differ from yours as delusional religious fanatics. We do, in fact, have reasons we feel the way we feel and see what we see, just as you do. I disagree with the liberal progressive project on fundamental moral grounds, and apparently more people agree with my assessment than yours. (Or at least more who vote.) In which case, it appears that unless liberals, progressives, what have you, want to continue to play a shrinking role in the American political pageant, they’re going to have to stop giving conservative views the middle finger and start persuading us why the liberal morality—since government is at bottom an expression of a society’s moral consensus—is so superior. So far your methods clearly haven’t been effective nor your arguments persuasive. That’s not our fault, that’s yours. It’s not one side’s job to agree with the other. It’s the job of the minority to persuade enough people that its view of things is correct to make it the majority. So stop complaining and start convincing.

My three cents.

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