The Sword and the Olive Branch

How to deal with liberals.  Part one: Learn to distinguish between open-minded liberals and lost causes. 

Figuring out the difference between which liberals to befriend and which ones to manage will save a lot of valuable resources, notably time.  You wouldn’t date anyone immune to your charms, so why would you talk politics with someone who’s demonstrated no inclination to respect your beliefs?  To keep from speaking in vain, learn how to distinguish liberals who may be receptive to conservatism’s message from those who won’t budge.  At first, we might assume that includes all of them, if only because our personalities are shaped by an extraordinary range of variables.  That may be true, but refusing to recognize the difference between generally tolerant individualists and stubborn idealists will help make real dialogue with the left possible, as opposed to an interpersonal quagmire. 

Weeding through the left’s ranks, we can immediately rule out reaching out to people who are afflicted with psychological disorders, not only to avoid cruel exploitation, but also to protect us from their unpredictability.  I don’t know who Charlie Manson would vote for, but he would make a terrible political acquaintance.  After he carves an elephant into his forehead, the G.O.P. would immediately lose a hundred years of progress. 

Those without a conscience should also be vetted out.  Develop the ability to spot liberals with a reasonable capacity for empathy.  For example, when talking to potential liberal subjects, see if their eyes light up when someone artfully explains what “neo-conservatism” actually is.  If they respond by yawning or turning away, they’ve probably made up their minds about “neo-cons,” which makes political conversations with them pretty much useless.  But if you suspect curiosity on their part, you may be sensing an opportunity to delight them. 

Through example (I’ll expand on this in the future) Ann Coulter teaches a lesson about peering into the hearts of liberals.  Because so many Americans are polite, middle-class, and conventional (right down to their political activism, which is manufactured by movies such as An Inconvenient Truth) it can be difficult to tell whether or not the liberal you are talking to is an everyday Joe or a deep blue activist.  We can test them by saying something ambiguous, something which can be read in several ways.  Float a bland opinion towards your target.  Say that Ronald Reagan was a wonderful President.  Moderates will either politely disagree or not care.  Left-wing activists, on the other hand, will spout off about Reagan’s alleged assault on school lunch menus, Iran-Contra, and even AIDS.  We know we’re talking to an unmovable object if they include snide remarks about Alzheimer’s disease. 

If the historian Robert Greene is correct when he says “a perfectly satisfied person cannot be seduced,” then the third group of liberals to forget about includes those whose comfortable lives make change seem threatening.  Professors who make six figures a year, committed family men, and rich entertainers are stubborn precisely because they don’t want to risk challenging their comfortable status quo.  One reason leftist radicals hate happy, traditional families is because someone whose ultimate obligation is to their family likely won’t leap at the opportunity to be obligated to an ideology instead.  This cuts both ways.  If your anti-conservative subject has established a day to day routine, consider another target.  They have no incentive open themselves to us.  Their families, friends, and occupations compete with politics to fill their emotional voids.  The hard work it would take to reexamine their liberalism could veer them away from the sheltered American life they’re accustomed to.  Better to focus on more vulnerable demographs, such as students, fumbling young adults, and political independents.

When surveying potential mates, remember that what a person says about their beliefs doesn’t necessarily indicate their willingness to accept change.  When given a strict choice between the two, look your target’s capacity to consider your viewpoint, rather than their demeanor.  The most polite liberals in the world can also be the most hardened.  The civil PBS crowd is one of the last places a conservative should expect to receive a fair hearing.  Conversely, loud, demonstrative liberals are not necessarily the most difficult to exchange ideas with.  Ward Churchill has debated David Horowitz in good faith.  Rosie O’Donnell has given a thoughtful interview to Bill O’Reilly.   Bill Mahler is friendly with Ann Coulter (not that way, I think).  In more general terms, someone who shouts through a microphone that they support amnesty for illegal aliens may not have any real justification for their beliefs.  They may even agree with all the reasons people oppose amnesty (such as that it rewards people who hold America’s immigration laws in contempt)!  To put it another way: “No on proposition 19” doesn’t always mean “No on proposition 19.” 

One of my best friends, we’ll call him “Silent Bob,” leans noticeably to the left.  How left?  He enjoys books by Barbara Ehrenreich.  At face value, that alone could make him a lost cause.   Socialist literature doesn’t exactly engender an easy-going attitude. 

The first time we ever hung out, we argued politics for hours.  He would invariably posit the liberal side of issues such as the Iraq War, and I would defend conservatism on whatever front he attacked.  He didn’t hold back, calling G.W. a “f**king idiot” and the like.  At times, he sounded more like Keith Olbermann than a normal person.  Usually these things end like a western marriage—with murder-suicide, but my initial discussion with Silent Bob defied our meaningless philosophical differences. 

He passionately presented his beliefs, yet this didn’t keep him from digesting mine, even if he didn’t always like how they tasted.  To this day still don’t agree on a whole lot; he probably still votes for everyone I vote against.  None of that matters.  What’s meaningful is that he doesn’t view conservatives as lesser people than anyone else.  I’m not aiming low; this is a success story: subverting irrational devotion to the left will make us more friends than demanding any kind of allegiance to the right.  On a face-to-face basis, liberal confrontation on the meaning of conservatism is always preferable to liberal indifference. 

In summary, the first step to dealing with liberals involves identifying the open-minded ones.  The best way to do this is to look past how outspoken they are, and instead concentrate on how much they’re willing to listen to conservative discourse.  If someone refuses to empathize with you, despite a good faith attempt on your part to do the same, you have enough of a moral high ground to dismiss them.

Cross-posted at

Tags: liberalism, liberals, seduction
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How to deal with liberals (Introduction)

This begins with a nagging question.  “What can conservatives do to relate to liberals”?  This isn’t a frivolous intellectual exercise.  To paraphrase Dennis Miller, America is turning left like a shopping cart with a bad wheel.  We elected another Jimmy Carter to the White House, the millennial generation is starting to resemble a cornier version of the radical baby boomers, and the natives are clamoring for handouts in lieu of self-sufficiency.  The more I think about it, the more I want to move to Western Canada once it becomes a sovereign nation. 

Conservatives have traditionally been good at approaching this question from a macro perspective.  The first canon of conservative thought is that all political problems are essentially religious and moral problems.  Modern conservatives have added “cultural” to the mix, but the idea is the same: win the culture, and the people will follow.  But the culture wars are just as much a bottom-up struggle as they are a top-down slobber-knocker.  So we can’t escape the annoying truth: we must a find a way to relate to liberals.  If we don’t, we’ll continue to cede an important front in the culture war, and the unique and wonderful ideals of American conservatism will still be threatened by extinction.    

It’s a discouraging prospect.  Even in boom times, conservative philosophy doesn’t lend itself to polite, comforting, dinner party banter.  Ostensibly insensitive notions are what make us conservative.  Ideals such as limited governance and assumption of risk will always seem callous to the young, whom Robert Bork correctly notes are prone to moral absolutism, and they turn off shallow individuals whom are more impressed by the symbols of goodness than the real thing.  Being a right-winger means forever risking scorn by pointing out that throwing money at schools/social programs/housing won’t necessarily improve those things.

Being a heartless conservative can make relating to people difficult, which is depressing—loneliness is misery.   Not “fitting in” to certain circles because of one’s political alignment is silly, but nevertheless stinging.  Let’s assume that you’re having a tough time establishing rapport with some of your more artistic, progressive friends because you don’t like the current President of the United States.  You could change that by wearing an Obama t-shirt and whining about “neocons,” but what if you value the same parts of your identity that keep you from being accepted by the groups you always come in contact with?  What if you enjoy being the kid with the purple hair?

You could just saying “whatever,” and ignore everyone who disagrees with you, but then you would be submitting to mediocre defeatism.  Besides, a capacity to relate to people somewhat different than us distinguishes successful human beings from forty-year old adolescents.  Not a lot of CEO’s write memoirs titled “F**k It.”  Besides, what if the liberals you don’t share anything in common with are related to you; what if they live with you?  Will you simply cut Mom, Dad, your boss or your children out of your life every time you unearth incompatible fragments of their personalities?  What if they’re co-workers you can’t run away from, people you need to build at least a professional level of trust in order to perform your job?   Does it make more sense to quit your job than to find a way to deal with their quirks?  Everyday life requires us to develop a flair for ignoring differences in opinion, even if those opinions are religious or political. 

Imagine a world where conservatives had to preemptively rule out establishing humane connections with liberals: work would become unduly stressful, friendship a rarity, and dating single women would be impossible!  Fortunately, bonding with our ideological counterparts doesn’t need to stress us out.  Most liberals are well-adjusted people whose politics take a back seat to the rest of their lives.  This doesn’t mean that ideology never inhibits friendship; our beliefs are intertwined with our personalities.  Yet in diverse communities (as opposed to, say, multi-ethnic college faculties where everyone votes democrat) politics rarely erect hurdles too high to jump over.  Liberals are as scared of us as we are of them!

Despite that, a significant cultural divide currently keeps conservatives from holding hands with liberals.  Part of the problem is America’s current tendency towards idealism; in our periodic battle to re-shape culture, liberals are discouraged from accepting us for who we are (and vice versa, to a limited extent).  That politically-minded Americans can so easily spend all of their time in isolated ideological communities (especially online) also contributes to the problem, and I haven’t seen much evidence of cross-pollination between red and blue America to offset this.  Whatever the roots of our animosity are, conservatives need to make sober, calculated efforts to bridge the gap between “us” and “them.”   If we truly want liberals to treat us as moral and intellectual equals, we can’t just sit on the couch and expect them to call us out of good will.  We must open up and risk being rejected by our fellow, left-wing Americans. 

In today’s acrimonious age, crawling into the hearts and minds of liberals is the only non-coercive thing which can give them incentive to understand red America.  So how do we achieve the admittedly imprecise goal of persuading liberals to relate to us?  The same way one wriggles into anyone’s heart: seduction.  I’m not suggesting we sleep with liberals to make them like us better (fighting off Bill Clinton joke) but keep the strategies of seduction in mind when dealing with liberals.  Audacity and aggression (ála Ann Coulter) on our part will earn one-night stands from them in the form of meaningless concessions (“Yeah, Bill Clinton was a liar/communism doesn’t work/George W. Bush isn’t stupid, but…”) yet as with any meaningful courtship, connecting with liberals on a deep level takes time, patience, and attention to detail.  With a lot of help from books such as Robert  Greene’s The Art of Seduction, drawing liberals to the right involves, at minimum, focusing on those susceptible to conversion, disrupting their faith by activating their individualistic impulses, entering their spirit, isolating them, and finally, closing the deal.  In the future, I hope to cover all of these bases. 

I think life has granted me some authority to speak on this issue.  I get along with my leftist friends so well some of them insist that I’m not really conservative.  Others tell me I’m not like other conservatives; I’m the exception to the rule.  Whenever I’m told these things, I’m reminded of the phrase “I don’t mind black people, but I hate… (you get the point).”  It’s how they preserve their prejudice against Republicans while simultaneously justifying their friendship with me.  I defy all of their feverish misconceptions about right-wingers.  I don’t tell anyone they’re destined for hell; I don’t want to eliminate minorities as competition, and anxious young women feel shocked that I don’t endeavor to control them.  

I’m not special.  I don’t know any conservatives like the extremist authoritarians liberals make movies about.  I know some who are condescending, too goofy to take seriously, and even a few crazy ones, but within rightist circles, I don’t know any Nazis or even minor-league racists.  All the Christians I know are more or less sensible about their attempts to win people over.  I’m sure somewhere resides a little Eichmann that happens to identify with something under conservatism’s “big tent,” but actual totalitarianism won’t include anyone in the right’s large constituency.  Any one of us can touch liberal hearts and minds, given the correct approach is used.

So where should we start?  By observing our prey.

Cross-posted at

Tags: liberalism, liberals, seduction
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Last Friday I put together a list of the top six most annoying conservative subgroups, which didn’t sit well with some of my peers.  That’s o.k.; I didn’t start blogging to make people feel good about themselves.  Case in point: the following list of annoying liberal groups:  

#5 9/11 Truthers

I know not all conspiracy theories are leftist, but come on.  Has anyone witnessed a large anti-Iraq war protest that didn’t have a contingent of truthers waving more poster board than an arena full of pro wrestling fans?  Their major arguments are based on ambiguous photography, a half-educated grasp of engineering, and the government’s initial difficulty explaining exactly how two huge planes flying into two massive buildings caused a smaller building right beside them to collapse.   Yet the boring, somewhat complex reality of tragic events isn’t as satisfying to truthers as their own dramatic narrative.  The endurance and intelligence that goes into supporting these theories would be commendable if it wasn’t coupled with paranoid contrarianism. 

The truthers are not only annoying, but offensive.  Truthers, not “neocons,” politicized the most horrible tragedy in recent American history.  Instead of respecting the memory of 9/11’s victims, they use it as a springboard for self-indulgent activism.  I can barely tolerate the prospect of “investigating” what caused 9/11, but it would be hypocritical of me to deny the importance of dispassionate inquiry in the midst of emotional events.  Yet thoughtful curiosity isn’t what has leftist college students marching behind Republican crank Alex Jones (although after perusing his site, I’m more comfortable calling him  the kind of libertarian whose adolescent conspiracy fetish keeps sensible libertarians form becoming a viable third option).  9/11 truthers are simply in it for the attention, using the tragedy as a proxy to act out. 

The sad thing is half the truthers I meet cannot possibly believe 9/11 was an inside job, if only because they’re informed.  It seems to be something they say just to needle conservatives.  There is no “truth” behind the 9/11 Truther’s words, just a deep commitment to positing themselves on the opposite side of conventional wisdom.  Even Al Franken , whose political career has consisted primarily of calling Republicans liars, doesn’t buy into the conspiracy.  The fact that’s it’s impossible to tell the insincere sophists form the imbalanced true believers makes them especially irritating, earning them a spot on this list. 

Telling Phrase: “Selected, not elected!” (This doesn’t have anything to do with 9-11?  Well, neither does 9-11 trutherism).

Say something nice:  As a whole, they’re interesting people. 

#4 Europeans

Picture a vast group of people whose fundamental understanding of America comes from a half-educated knowledge of the young nation’s most damning history, coupled with western pop culture.  Despite their limited perspective, they’re certain of their opinions about America, and as a consequence have no ability to relate to American conservatives, whose worldview rests on an entirely different foundation.  Nothing about their approach to politics suggests that this will change in the foreseeable future.  No, it’s not college freshmen.  It’s not the entertainment industry.  It’s not 9/11 conspiracy theorists, I just did them.  It’s not even Detroit’s citizens (God help them).  It’s Europeans. 

Europeans think Americans are lazy, uncouth, easily lead dullards, and when the candidate who doesn’t reflect European sensibilities wins an election that has nothing to do with them, they publish snooty headlines asking “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”  They’re right to say our media plays to the lowest common denominator, but this is coming from a continent where less than two-thirds of the population acknowledges that Al-Qaeda was behind 9/11.  While 9/11 truthers are a vocal but rightly marginalized minority here, in Europe they’re prevalent enough to form their own party!

Even though the American right owes much to Europeans such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, Europe seems to have forgotten its libertarian heritage.  Elections on the other side of the Atlantic are usually choices between varied big-government nationalists and big-government internationalists.  To put it in American terms, modern Europe’s political spectrum spans from Joe Biden to Barack Obama.  Their phobia of successful businesses such as Wal-mart makes our most committed environmentalists anti-capitalists look sensible by comparison.  A British jury once acquitted six Greenpeace activists for the vandalism of a coal power plant, which cost 35,000 British pounds to clean up, because the threat of global warming gave them a “lawful excuse.”  We should expect no less from the continent that gave the world fascism, Nazism, and a generation of “youths” who apparently think rioting is a legitimate form of dissent. 

Europeans are on this list because all of the politically active Europeans I’ve met are leftist tits.

Telling phrase: “Americans are stupid. ” 

Say something nice:  Europe produces a lot of great Metal and techno music.  Henrik Zetterberg is my favorite active hockey player. 

#3 Aging feminist baby boomers

Stubborn, moralizing, and unteachable, old liberal women may be the hardest people in the world to engage in constructive dialogue.  It’s not that they’re incapable of it; it’s just that they don’t want to.  They’ve spent decades marinating in their self-absorbed liberal revolution, and all the charm and logical force in the world could not convince them of anything but what they want to believe.  As their lives are ending and their influence has been waning, the second wave of liberal feminism is collectively clinging to their perceived victimhood (which is paradoxically the foundation of their influence) despite evidence that women are doing all right in America. 

At its worst, feminism is a microcosm of liberalism’s biggest flaws.  It’s preoccupied with victimhood, it’s statist, and it’s emotive, rather than contemplative.   The corny chanting and curious affection for mostly redundant legislation that comes and goes among mainstream Democrats has always been prominent in the feminist movement. 

What earns old, liberal feminists a spot on this list is a personal as it is political.  In a country infested by a fair amount of terrorist sympathizers, eco-terrorists, and race baiters, I can’t think of a crowd more unpleasant than defensive, over-intellectualized suburbanites such as Maureen Dowd and Gloria Steinem.  If I were the list the ten most unpleasant experiences I’ve ever had, most of them would involve feminists.

Telling Phrase:  “That’s not funny.”

Say something nice:   Legal equality for women is a worthy ideal.  Americans should keep living up to it. 

#2 Teachers for social justice

There, I said it.  Teaching for social justice is the practice of conflating education with politicization.  It’s not good enough for some educators to raise self-sufficient, intelligent students; they have to be left-wing activists too.  Whether they’re teaching in middle schools or graduate seminars, anyone who “teaches for social justice” falls into this category.  Just to be safe, include those who administrate for social justice as well.  While a good education is an irreplaceable component of progress, not all educators are praise-worthy. 

Why I am being so hard on a certain segment of teachers, especially granted the fantastic job many of them do?  For starters, teachers for social justice insist that their trendy educational approach isn’t ideological, just a way to make students “ask questions” and “challenge their own assumptions.”  Take my word for it, they will ask you for an apology if you suggest otherwise.  Many of those in charge of informing an entire generation won’t even acknowledge that their own paradigm of race, sex, and class is firmly rooted in leftist political tradition.  To be fair, they probably never learned that in graduate school.      

If your profession supposedly calls on you to convince young minorities and women that society is dominated by white males, and bellicose activism is the only way they can experience modern-day emancipation, your profession is demanding that you become a political being.  If your overarching goal is to convince impressionable students that society is stacked against them, you’re only going to codify their worst fears, affirm their anger, and give credence to conspiratorial narratives.  Teaching for social justice doesn’t encourage students to open their minds and understand America as it really is.  No, it trains students to view society through a rigid, left-wing standpoint, inhibiting their understanding of everything that isn’t framed as such.  They’ll grow up and confuse conservative arguments concerning civil rights as racism and critiques of feminism as sexism, because they will have never been given the tools to understand it any other way.  In short, they’re making America more like the rest of this list. 

Don’t even get me started on their sense of entitlement.  For their truly hard work, public school teachers are paid more per hour than mechanical engineers, psychologists, chemists, and they only make 3% less than physicists.  Yet one cannot escape complaints about how they’re underpaid.  Then again, one shouldn’t expect gratitude from people who are put on a pedestal just for working with children.  The only other job as universally praised as education is a career in the military.  But everyone who joins the military is potentially risking their lives.  In addition, military training, in contrast to grad school, isn’t meant to boost soldier’s egos, but to humble them.  Perhaps the Secretary of Education should start running prospective teachers through boot camp. 

Drill sergeant:  “Face forward, Rainbow Brite.”

22-year old:  “Excuse me, but my name is…”

Drill Sergeant: “Your name is Rainbow Brite, and if you don’t like it, you can spend the rest of the day in the cafeteria preparing square pizza!” 

If you don’t believe that there are a core group of teachers who have allowed liberal politics to get in the way of their profession, consider that more than 4200 people, most of them educators, signed a petition in support of Bill Ayers, the self-satisfied domestic terrorist most Americans were introduced to in 2008.    Nothing in the petition they signed denies that he was part of a terrorist group; they just gloss it over because he serves a purpose.  

The most depressing part is that most of these folks are genuinely trying to make the world a better place.  But just because they’ve been professionally trained to irresponsibly collapse personal activism with what is ideally an objective profession doesn’t make them right. 

Telling Phrase:  “I have to teach from a multi-cultural perspective because students can get the white, male, Eurocentric point of view everywhere else.” 

Say something nice:  I have friends who are teachers for social justice, and they’re generally okay people. 

#1 Left-wing Evangelicals

“Not God bless America, but God Damn America.” Few things are more insulting than the premise that you’re not worthy in God’s eyes because you don’t adopt man’s earthly politics.  Everyone knows about the right’s religious elements, but if Americans learned about their own culture in school, they would understand the left’s religious heritage as well.  The reason left-wing evangelicals are #1 on this list isn’t due to their self-righteous ranting, which doesn’t distinguish them from their peers, but because without the Christian left, liberalism wouldn’t have such deep roots in American soil.  According to historian Daniel J. Flynn, the very first communist community on American soil were the pilgrims in Plymouth colony from 1620-1623, who were forced to abolish private property.  They were followed by numerous European imports, including the Shakers, Harmonists, and Owenites.  Long before the 1960’s, the evangelical left would rail against capitalism, “false consciousness,” and the traditional family.  Before the collapse of the U.S.S.R., these communities had already buckled under their economic ignorance and disregard for human nature. 

The control freakishness comedians frequently attribute to the religious right is actually common in all types of moral crusaders; the religious left is no exception.  Early twentieth century prohibition was a product of the puritanical Christian left.  It was the leftist book Bible Communism who insisted that “God the creator has the first and foremost right to all property” in 1848.  Today, multiculturalism and environmental regulation are often framed in religious terms.  The evangelical left is no less prone to cheap, obvious appeals to faith such as “Jesus was a community organizer,” which insults the intelligence of faithful people everywhere. 

For what it’s worth, I believe God’s a libertarian.  He allows us to mess up our own lives and communities without divine interference, knowing full well that we’ll all be judged in the end.  From war to high taxation, any coercion undertaken in God’s name should actually be credited to mankind.  Anything else would be to impose our will on God’s, and I think we can humbly presume he’s not keen on that. 

Telling Phrase: “Who would Jesus bomb?” 

Say something nice:  They have better things to do than sue people because a cross is mounted on a hill on public land. 

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative.

Tags: europeans, feminists, left-wing evangelicals, liberals, social justice, teachers, truthers
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