The Right is Wrong and So's The Left, Part 4: How David Brooks' Most Recent Column About Tolerance Showed Hos Intolerant the Left Can Be

 

I remember reading an old chestnut about how a college professor marked his tests. Before he began grading, he divided his papers into those of the good students and the bad ones. Any time that a ‘good’ student got an answer incorrect, he marked it correct, arguing: “They know better than that.” Any time a ‘bad’ student got a right answer, he marked it wrong, reasoning: “They couldn’t have meant that.”

I don’t need to draw a map to show the allusion that the left and the right both have when it comes to their politics. When someone on their side makes an argument that is illogical or flawed, they will contort their own reasoning to say: “What they really meant was…” When the opposition makes a lucid and coherent argument, they will argue: “Those people don’t know what they’re talking about so we shouldn’t take them seriously.” Both sides are guilty of this hypocrisy more often than not, no question. What makes the left’s level of hypocrisy particularly glaring is that they spend so much of their time arguing for inclusion, freedom of speech, equality and then have no problem denying any of those things to people on the right. They will spend so much time and energy arguing that the right is in an impenetrable bubble and whenever someone makes an argument to penetrate their own, even if uses their own words and logic, they find a way to denounce both the message and the messenger. This became clear yet again when conservative columnist David Brooks penned his latest op-ed in the New York Times.

It is worth remembering that most progressives don’t believe in free speech for conservatives anyway. They don’t want them to have their own news networks or publications and they get indignant whenever any publication dares to let them have space in a ‘reputable source’.  They will forever bemoan the demise of the Fairness Doctrine as the end of civilization but the truth is the last thing any of them ever want is to give conservatives ‘equal time’ or dignify their networks with their own arguments. They can’t say they’re in favor of censorship because that’s what they say the right is doing; they just take every single opportunity to say that the right has nothing worth saying. Therefore whenever a publication like the Times or the Post dares to give even one or two pages to allow a conservative to write a few hundred words most of them will bemoan that the times is ‘legitimizing’ a side they don’t want to read anyway.  That is always incredibly hypocritical and perhaps never more so when it came to Brooks’ latest article titled “What if We’re The Bad Guys Here?”

To be clear that title alone (which Brooks probably didn’t write) would have been enough for most progressives to dismiss it out right. Most of them are convinced in their utter infallibility and they probably don’t want to be part of the same ‘We’ as Brooks said.  I imagine most of them just ignored it anyway.

Brooks’ argument was, to be clear, an argument for tolerance and empathy. He argued that people who lived in certain areas of the country, who came from different economic and racial backgrounds, might not have the same point of view as the so-called coastal elites. He wrote that if you divided geographically into 3000 regions  in the last election Trump carried 2500 of them.

All of these arguments are clear pleas for understanding and empathy. So naturally the left, which hates David Brooks with a passion, tore him apart. There was a column written as a response to this in Salon with the sub-headline: “Liberal elites are too mean to their fellow MAGA Citizens, argues David Brooks. Geez, not that argument again.” In it like so many leftists the writers takes the valid point of Brooks’ article and assures his audience that it’s just fine to dehumanize your fellow American. It’s yet another example of how the left can argue the right dehumanizes everybody so its okay to dehumanize them. In other words an eye for an eye may leave the whole world blind, but as long as the people you hate are blind too, who cares? They didn’t want universal health care, anyway.

The author then dismisses the numbers Brooks saying by arguing that the 2500 regions he says went for Trump were areas with low population and the 500 regions with high population went for Biden.. Now I’m pretty sure that the population of those 2500 sections Trump carried have roughly the same population as the 500 that Biden carried. I’d also argue that since none of those 2500 regions that Trump carried went for him by a margin for 100 percent, that there were quite a few Biden voters there – probably as many who voted for Trump in those 500 regions that Biden carried.  But of course the author doesn’t care about that argument so much as the implying the old talking points: Electoral college is broken, the Senate gives unfair representation, Blue States Good, Red States Bad. He does not say this directly, of course, because this would be making Brooks’ argument for him but he implies that the good readers of my column will understand that same point.

This is, of course, introduced by the usual liberal talking points: that this was a nice, decent country where we all got along until those meddlers Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and conservative media ruined it for everybody and then of course Donald Trump came and just spoiled the whole thing.  This, to be clear, has nothing to do with anything Brooks said or wrote; in fact, it’s a total canard because Brooks was trying to talk about Republican voters rather than the Republican politicians. But since the left’s major talking point is that most Republican voters are at best, empty vessels who are willing to let themselves be filled by endless hours of Sean Hannity – if they think about them at all – it’s just another excuse to pillory their favorite ghosts.

And of course they play the sympathy card – how families have been torn apart by this because they listen to Alex Jones or have become devoted Trump voters. Do I need to tell you that for the better part of at least a decade the left has been arguing that party must be your north star even if it means discarding your loved ones? To be clear, it’s not the red state, rural families they’re concerned about here: it’s those blue state families who had a relative or friend who lived in a red state or listened to too much Tucker Carlson. And as a reminder, it’s not the family members left behind who are the victims, not the ones they lose. I’ve read enough articles to know that most progressives probably say things like to themselves such as: “They’re better off without them.”

Every Thanksgiving Maureen Dowd, who is one of the most progressive columnists writing today, invites her brother, a life-long Republican, to write a column for the Times. I sometimes wonder how much hate mail she gets during that period. The kindest probably has messages like: “Why do you let one of them write for your paper?” I imagine the nastier ones argue that she’s a traitor because she hasn’t publicly disowned him in her column  yet.

I’m pretty sure that if any ‘good, liberal person’ learned that one of their closest friends happened to be a conservative or worse had voted for Trump, that friend would become the victim of the same ostracism among that friends inner circle that the LGBTQ+ had to overcome for decades and still does in some places.  Hell, I can imagine if a teenager in California or New York or any other blue state were to tell his parents that they’d been struggling to tell them something and came out to them, I imagine a lot of them would say later: “Thank God. I thought you were going to tell me you were a Republican!”  These ‘good people’ will argue with every fiber of their being that hatred and prejudice are wrong  - but then say in the same breath it is absolutely right to hate anyone who identifies as a Republican.

The Salon author titles his article: “Can’t We All Get Along? Hell, No!” Articles like this are just as bad for the future of our country as anything we might find in The National Review or the Washington Examiner. The left will argue that the right is trying to take away the rights of the majority of Americans. But if the only reason you want majority rule is so that you ignore the people you disagree with, if you feel that it’s fine to call half the nation deplorable without a second thought, if you think that conservatives don’t deserve space not only on your networks but any at all, then honestly, I don’t want to live in your America either.

You have to be a hundred percent for the 1^st Amendment. You have to believe in equality for everybody, including the very people you hate with a passion. You have to believe that the two party system is there for more than your party to just have someone beat in every election.  And if you can’t say without hesitation you believe in any of those things – well, then, like the professor who I mentioned in the first paragraph, you’re just another one of those bad students and your answers deserved to be considered wrong.