For most of my young and adult life, I have identified as a political liberal. My family were peace activists and poverty lobbyists, and we attended a loving little liberal church, Unity Church, in Wichita, Kansas for most of my childhood. I helped lead protests of the B-2 bomber when I was a kid. We attended yearly peace rallies, World Instant of Cooperation, every New Years' Day, when I was growing up. I developed much of my interest in politics by our lobbying activities in grassroots groups like RESULTS International, by far the best and highest purpose political group I have ever belonged to.
But, today, sadly, I cannot identify as a political liberal, anymore, as they currently stand. Because that kind of liberal - a Democrat, someone who might sympathize with radicals, someone who might be a closet socialist or an open socialist - is not only wrong on so many important policy matters - believing that people are not or should not be responsible for more in their lives as they are or should or that government responsibility for such matters would be just as good or better than people being responsible for such issues on their own or with the help of family or non-profits or more decentralized routes to equity or care - they are not only subject to the temptations of power and pride, like any person or group or member of any ideology, but they are now synonymous in my mind with "bully".
Liberals are bullies.
Or at least they have become bullies during this political period. They will make excuses for it. They will rationalize the hypocrisy of both being a bully and trying to face up to bullying in the schoolyard and the rest of the world. They will pretend that it is all for the greater good. Or whatever millionth jaded excuse they have for being such pricks.
But the bottom-line is that they have become bullies.
And I just could never ever identify with such bullshit. It's dishonest. It's wrong. It's ugly. And it has convinced me that, at bottom, their ideas have become stagnant and bankrupt.
Because people with better ideas don't have to bully.
The degree to which we don't rely on ideas, generally, is the degree to which we are manipulative pricks in the world.
And I just could never, ever, in a million years, look up to or be inspired by such complete bullshit. It's one long lie. And I want nothing to do with it anymore.
Conservativism and liberalism both have stronger, more coherent, more internally consistent and more realistic strains to them. They both involve more freedom, more decency, more humanity, more compassion and other liberal democratic virtues. The last 7 years has been one long regression and backwards movement on those virtues - in government, in much of the media, in the business world, and even in too much of academia, sadly, in all the places where pressure, manipulation, propaganda, strong-arming, and other forms of aggression are rationalized for any and every purpose - as we sink lower and lower into the bullshit pretending like our lies and illusions are really more truth or wisdom than they really are, while being progressive in other ways - in academia, largely, in Hollywood and in the entertainment industry, of course (John Stewart and Stephen Colbert have done more to influence a younger generation, politically, that Congress and the President could never touch) and among media and political and everyday people and all those places in the culture where freedom has been expanded, broadly. But it's the bullshit and the lying that holds us back.
That's why the Nazis and Communists were able to do what they were able to do for so long. Because they enforced measures that kept people mired in the bullshit for long enough for them to make the bullshit look more like honest governance and honest life than it really was. They were masters at making the lies look more honest than they were because people were so confused, all the time, about what a more honest reality looked like because there was little room to be honest about that reality.
And that is the direction that democratic countries, including the United States, have taken in the last 7 years or so.
Democratic cultures have always had this more dishonest fact of their existence. But they have been more honest because there has been more freedom and room for them to be honest than other cultures, including about what shitheads they were and are to one another.
And that's why I'm so sure that this period will pass. Because liberal democratic cultures have, and America, specifically, has always transcended such periods after a time - the era of Prohibition in America and in most liberal democratic countries stands out prominently in my mind, on this count, right now, as the issues of drug prohibition so parallel that period and its ills - and because such periods constantly have people mired in the bullshit. And eventually people want something more honest. And they must become more honest if they are going to avoid the mistakes they make when they are not so honest.
Well, I can't honestly say that I could call myself a political liberal anymore - I am a "small l", "small d" liberal democrat, meaning someone who values both the institutions and the values that make up a culture that is free and democratic, even as those institutions are now and perpetually flawed and in need of improvement and correction, even as they perpetually resist such improvement and correction - because to be politically liberal in 21st century America, like too often to be conservative in 21st century America, means to be a bully. And I just can't be a bully and pretend otherwise.
Most people have joined this crowd.
And I want nothing to do with it. And I don't give a shit what ideology it comes from. And I don't care if it crosses ideology. And I don't care if it crosses culture. And I could give two shits about whether the whole fuckin' world decided that being bullies was ok or killing Jews was ok or enslaving Africans was ok or whatever the fuck bullshit rationalizations that people have perpetually had for what fuckin' pricks they are.
I don't give a shit.
I want nothing to do with it.
And the whole lot of folks who have chosen bullying over thinking can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned. And once the gas runs out on this bullshit - which it will, mark my words, because people eventually get tired of the bullshit - then people can either say they are sorry or they can find some genuine remorse in their own heart. But there will never be a time when either I will treat it like it's ok or it will ever really be ok. It will always be bullshit, it doesn't matter how people try to paint it.
Nazism and the Holocaust were ugly and bullshit no matter how many people they tried to bully into going along.
And this works the same way, and I don't give a shit how people might pretend otherwise.
Eventually, no matter how intimidating someone or something might seem, if it's bullshit - if it's premised on lies, as this period is - it will fall apart. The veneer always comes down. Always. It cannot maintain itself. Because anything based on lies cannot sustain a culture or a people. People need honest answers and solutions to their problems. No amount of bullshit could ever substitute. I don't care how much people try to bullshit on that one.
So political liberalism and political conservativism, as far as I'm concerned, are ideologies with some decent ideas but which will mean nothing the more they get lost in their own bullshit and the more detached they become from the honest realities of peoples' lives. Despite all the propaganda to the contrary - George Orwell would have a fuckin' field day with this godforesaken, propaganda-soaked, bullshit political period - neither party or ideology either has a monopoly nor even a really strong grip on the everyday realities of peoples' lives in America, in liberal democracies, or anywhere in the world.
Luckily liberal democracy offers us the tools to dig ourselves out of this mess.
But it's a mess. That's for sure. And liberals and conservatives and everyone in between have a lot to answer for honestly about what bullshit they have enforced on the peoples of liberal democracies. And we will account for it. If we care at all about being more honest.
Love,
Ben
