Liberals Are Done Debating

This week, for example, while thinking about the pope's take on global warming, I tweeted out this comment: "Celebrate climate change, an externality of the greatest poverty destroying program in the history of mankind." There is plenty to disagree with in my observation, I admit. Although I believe what I wrote to be true, I sent it out partly to elicit exactly the sort of reaction my tweet got -- with one person calling me a psychopath (a Slate writer, not some anonymous critic) and another calling me sociopathic, among other things. I don't mind the insults (perversely, in fact, I sort of enjoy them), but I do mind that the debate is over.

Conservatives may be ethically compromised, uninformed or -- if liberals are in a generous mood -- mentally unstable, but they can't be for real. At least, that's the sense I increasingly get from the left these days. Blame it on social media.

When a group confuses its politics with moral doctrine, it may have trouble comprehending how a decent human could disagree with its positions. This is probably why people confuse lecturing with debating and why so many liberals can bore into the deepest nooks of my soul to ferret out all those motivations but can't waste any time arguing about the issue itself.

Are you also corrupt? Probably. Bought off by big oil, big food or big something or other? Washington is teeming with Manchurian candidates, because no one could possibly be this malicious on his own. Why should liberals debate a point when they can debate your imaginary sugar daddy? Why else would conservatives "hate workers"? Why would they "bet against America"? Why do they want to destroy democracy? Why would conservatives vote against their own interests? Someone pays them to lie.

Or maybe you favor inequality, injustice, rape culture and poverty because privilege clouds your sense of decency. If you were born wealthy (anything over 130 percent of the poverty level or so), how can anyone expect you to have empathy for the destitute? You certainly don't possess the life experience or skin color to challenge leftist economic doctrine. For inexplicable reasons -- that can't possibly have anything to do with a genuine belief in supply-side economics, a belief in property rights or an aversion to punishing success -- tens of millions of you spend your political lives protecting the interests of billionaires for no other reason than that you hate the poor.

You hate a lot of things, don't you? Like half the country, you're furtively racist and irrationally misogynistic. The American idea is erected on a foundation of intolerance, according to one of the most celebrated thinkers on the left. You hate black people, sure, but also brown people. So this bloodlust manifests when you oppose the president on foreign policy, for instance. (Then again, maybe it's the Israel lobby paying you off.) You're not anti-Iran deal; you're pro-war. Just as you're not pro-Second Amendment; you're pro-mass shootings. You're not concerned about terrorism or (genuine) illiberalism; you're a bigot. You're not pro-school choice; you're anti-children. You're not pro-traditional marriage; you're anti-dignity. You're not pro-entitlement reform; you're anti-retirement.

You're not in favor of a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to climate change policy; you're anti-science. Skeptic. Denier. Psychopath. Why do you hate Earth?

Don't like big government? You're a nihilist. Forget what your policy does; watch your tone. Transphobic. Homophobic. Eleutherophobic. Sure, you may claim that you want to save unborn girls from the scalpels of Planned Parenthood, but your real goal is to control women. Even if you're Carly Fiorina.

Or maybe you can't see things clearly because you're hooked to the most addictive opiate imaginable, religion -- which, let's face it, you probably don't properly understand or adhere to correctly. Here, let them tell you what Jesus would do. Are you part of some regressive denomination that follows doctrine and hasn't been poll testing on the left, that isn't always pleasing to millennials' ears, that hasn't evolved properly or that still clings to "religious freedom"? You're a modern-day Orval Eugene Faubus, probably. We can sue you into compliance or mock you into the 21st century, because clearly you're too selfish to be part of our future.

What conservatives (and some libertarians) possess are not arguments but corrupt and nefarious ambitions. Defend yourself. What you can't possibly have are legitimate differences of opinion.

First of all, not all the 48ers were socialists.

But the ones who achieved high public office and Lincolnian appointments as political generals (e.g. Schurz), were.

Funny how we don't run into deepthink articles in middlebrow Stateside magazines about the socialists' bromance with Lincoln, and vice versa.

Outrageous hypothetical: "Would Lincoln have supported suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolt?"

.....and the Southerners are always the put-upon working guys.

The Southern legacy boys were mostly killed on the battlefield during the Late Unpleasantness. I'm sure you'll have heard.

The old man may have received a Confederate governmental pass to go home and keep his slaves from rising and slaying a la the heroic Nat Turner and Cincque; but his sons and stepsons did not; and like Bobby Lee's junior kinsmen, they remained in the saddle while they were able.

Part of the poverty of the South after the Civil War had to do with losing the war. Part of it had to do with the slump in agricultural prices, something which affected farmers in other parts of the country as well (including the West and the rural Northeast).

Which was the triumph of the risen Gilded Age class, or O. Henry's "Four Hundred".

Northeastern businessmen have always lived on the spread between materials cost and selling price. That's why (not even my colleagues, a lot of them, figured it out) the Bush family have been the biggest enemies the American oil industry has had since John D. Rockefeller tried to corner it by himself.

Northeastern businessmen hate farm prosperity and oil-patch prosperity alike, and for the same reason: They're on the opposite side of the table, when the dullards come to market with their goods, not realizing that the Chicago pits are rigged against them -- for over 140 years, rigged I said. Yellow sheets, Henry Hub gas, West Texas Intermediate quotes -- all phonied up by the meddlesome hands of businessmen's conspiracies, exactly the ones Adam Smith warned us about, now all grown up from huddling in a back booth at the Rose and Crown, to mahogany-paneled back rooms at the Chamber of Commerce, to unlocatable chatrooms in Vaporland. Occasionally, a few words escape a keyhole, as when Enron's traders were caught notoriously laughing and sneering about mulcting natural-gas and electricity prices on the West Coast markets. But mostly it's business as usual, with evergreen quarterly checks rolling out to Muffy and Buffy and Chip and Skip, and irreproachable blue-haired ladies living in you-can't-afford-it-here-do-we-need-to-explain-it-to-you "good buildings" on Fifth Avenue.

Meanwhile, the land has fallen into the hands of the same corporations that beggared its former owners, corporations that now have created something like a Leninist agricultural economy and foster "modern" agronomy with hireling hands who would be lucky to share the old kholkhozy's payout of annual crop receipts to its workers' soviet.

Modern access-capitalists (Ayn Rand's loathesome Orren Boyle) don't hate socialism; they just want to be the guy you can't dissent from.

.... most of the socialists in Germany (Social Democrats) in the 1950s opposed Communism and the GDR.

Certainly in the 30's the socialist and communist parties of central Europe kept separate identities (although Hitler, in his purges and his rants, seems to have treated them as interchangeable) -- I rely on Wm. Shirer here -- but after World War II, who constituted Germany's GDR but "reliable" people (see Robert Conquest on "reliability" versus doctrinal purity for Communist 'crats working at the practical level), and did it matter whether they'd been members of the Communist Party in the interwar period? I ask not to push an answer, because I don't know about the composition of the GDR's rank and file, but because I sense a weak supposition in your argument, that interwar Party affiliation counted for a lot.

I'd need to know more about the size and composition of the GDR government before I could guess whether only simon-pure Communists filled its ranks.

Those were hard times for a lot of people. Putting so much reliance on cotton, though, was a lousy move. Even without the war and even without increases in domestic production those prices were going to fall when Africa, India, Latin America and other parts of the world enter production in a big way.

True, even without hardship-generating moves by big bankers to capture the wealth of others by engineering market crashes (the German bank crash of 1877, which went international, and the Panic of 1893, for which the smoking gun has now been found in an old desk drawer: a contemporary banker's memo that nails the blame and limns the conspiracy) that allow them to skim off assets at hugely-depressed prices.

But it's a mistake to think that U.S. cotton growers and northeastern banks lending against their crops in 1857, say, were wrong to foresee clear sailing. The Egyptian and other cotton industries were initiated by the Union blockade and Confederate boycott of the war years, aggravating postwar problems by enlarging supplies.

But I don't know about clinging to grievances from a century ago. Being perpetually angry about things that happened before you were born (and being so one-sided about everything that happened) may stoke your self-righteousness, but it may not be the best way to make friends or win allies.

Tell it to the Jews. They only need one good ally, just as they did in the time of the Maccabees.

Tell it to the Irish. Tell it to the Russians. Tell it to everyone who desires a Great Justice against historical malefactors and, as one of the Roosevelts called them, "malefactors of great wealth".

And lastly, to your warning that I will die friendless in a cardboard box, it's like Kenny Loggins sang it: "I'm alright -- Nobody's worried 'bout me", which would be true in any case.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.