The reaction of the political left to the events in Arizona has strained mightily any conception that we Americans, as a people, share a set of values. While the initial reaction to the liberal slanders on the right has been justifiable outrage, a more careful analysis indicates a much greater worry. Are we, once again, a house divided against itself?
There is no other way to put it than that there was a sense of satisfaction on the left over the massacre – that the massacre happened and had as its target a Democrat Congresswoman appeared providential. This was their long-awaited “we told you so” moment. To put it bluntly, the massacre in Arizona – which the left now and forever, and in spite of all evidence, will hold is the natural effect of having conservative rhetoric abroad in the republic – demonstrates conclusively that the left holds conservatism to be wicked.
Considering this, it becomes worthwhile to ask if there is anything left and right agree upon? It is important because a society, to put it in St. Augustine’s terms from the City of God, is a group of persons who share a common moral code. Naturally, there are always going to be divisions of opinion about how the code is to be applied, but a genuine society – a united civilization – presupposes that certain things are right and certain things are wrong and acts, in the main, according to these views. To the left, the wrong of Arizona was not so much the shooting, itself, but the alleged climate created by the admission in to society of ideas which are wrong – to the left, that is, the common moral code proscribes conservatism.
Think about it: what unites conservatives and liberals? Upon what things can the most dyed-in-the-wool liberal and his conservative counter part agree? Do they agree on what constitutes marriage? What constitutes family? What the role of government is? Ah, but both the liberal and the conservative hold that the murders in Arizona are wrong. Really? In what sense? A liberal would have been ok, 9 years ago, with that girl being killed via abortion, even up to the moment she emerged from the womb…and as for 79 year old Phyllis Schneck, a liberal would be ok with helping her to commit suicide a couple years from now, if things weren’t working out well for her health-wise. Conservatives, on the other hand, are horrified not just if a lunatic kills them at 9 and 79, but if a perfectly sane person kills them 8 months in to gestation, or 8 months before the natural end to life.
Can this chasm be bridged? Its not a matter of one person wanted to spend a billion dollars on education and another person wanting to spend half a billion and they compromise at 750 million – those people share the same basic idea of paying for education, but just disagree on the details. But when it becomes a matter of one person saying a certain thing must be, while the other person says it must not be – and both are asserting their views as matters of basic morality – there can be no real compromise. A conservative says that gay marriage must not be because it is morally wrong; a liberal says it must be because basic morality requires it. Where is the middle ground?
Do keep in mind that this isn’t a plea for uniformity of thought and action – as a conservative I’m in favor of amnesty for some of the illegals in country; I do think that firearms ownership should be licensed like automobile driving; I’d like to sink our banks beneath the sea…things which, on the face of it, some liberals might subscribe to. And yet I remain a conservative, and my fellow conservatives don’t read me out of the movement because we share the same understanding of what is right and what is wrong. And while some liberals could acknowledge some merit to my views, we’d swiftly fall out over the fact that, unlike liberals, I think that illegal border crossing must be stopped regardless of expense, that people must be allowed to own all the firearms they wish and that the free market is the only rational economic policy. That, at times, a liberal or conservative idea can be compatible with the other side doesn’t mean there is a shared sense of morality – just an ephemeral coincidence arrived at by different paths of reason. I and any liberal out there simply do not agree on what is right and what is wrong – and so, in practice, we can’t work with each other for the betterment of society because we disagree on what constitutes “better”.
Does this mean we’re heading for a violent civil war? Not at all, but it does mean that we will, once again, cease to be divided. We will become all one thing, or all the other. Once we were half free and half slave, now we are half conservative and half liberal; as we once upon a time became all free, so we will in the fullness of time become either all liberal or all conservative. Calls to tone down the rhetoric are just words shouted in to a void – the rhetoric doesn’t cause the problem; it is a symptom, not the illness. The illness is that we have parted ways and have utterly different views of what is right and what is wrong…eventually, one side or the other will so predominate that it will be able to re-make the entirely of society in its image, and then the conflict will end, and rhetoric will tone down, and we’ll argue from a shared world view…until the next time we part ways, and have to decide again what sort of nation we wish to be.
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