The Viciousness of the Left: I Think It Must Be Projection.

SEE HERE I have always been a conservative. In all my years as a conservative I've never heard a conservative advocate violence against the left, yet over those same years I've constantly heard vilification and accusations and calls for violence from the left. The left has done all manner of violent things quite routinely be it the bombings of the Pentagon or the union thuggery or the more recent Black Panther patrolling of polling places intimidating voters. I can only imagine that the urge to violence runs deep in the liberal psyche, so deep that they imagine it must also run as deep on the right and then project their own feelings onto the right.

The more history you know the scarier this kind of activity becomes. Civilization is a fragile thing. It is taught by a culture. It is not a natural thing, but a learned thing. When it begins to break down as ours is clearly beginning to break down, the threat is to move towards greater and greater civic unrest and violence. I've mentioned before that I've been listening to the history of ancient Rome on a Teaching Company Course and I'm in the period of the breakdown of the Roman res publica, the public thing, from which we get our word "republic." Their breakdown took a long time, something like 80 years from the time of the Gracchi brothers to Julius Caesar. Rome saw waves of violence in the center of the city, the seat of government, with people killing each other. The ordinary respect for the traditional Roman institutions of government gradually broke down and were replaced by systematic use of gangs and violence. I can't quite imagine that, but we should not forget the atrocities of the French revolution either.

When the legitimacy of the government begins to be questioned, when citizenship loses its veneer of civility and becomes more a raucous shouting match with calls to arms or violence, and public responsibility is not honored, then we are in great danger. President Obama made a call for unity and civility and much as I don't care for the President's policies, civility is a necessary condition for governance. We need to press forward with a restoration of Constitutional priority and a culture of civility. I went to the movie remake of "True Grit" the other day and was rather impressed with the formal address practiced even by the bad guys. I don't know if this is at all historically accurate, but it was better than the public profanity often seen in the streets today.

The standards of discourse on the internet, on facebook, on twitter, in various blog forums where the letters are nothing more than ranting is disappointing. It does make me look at my own blog which doesn't draw too many comments and makes be ask the question: Am I being fair? I try to always put up the piece that elicited my comments so you can be the judge. I've also adopted some rather sarcastic mantras like the "neuron deprived" or the characterizations/labels "liberal", "left", "progressive", etc. I think that is better than some direct name calling like "idiots" which I've also been known to do. I'm always up for an argument. I was brought up that way. The way to truth is through argument. It is one of the problems in our society that arguments are often no longer searches for the truth, but just exchanges in name calling. I could swamp you with examples from all the news story comment threads. I won't bother. I'm sure you know.

The question that looms in my mind is how do you restore civility? One could argue that it would be by example. But I think that's likely not so. If only one side is civil and the society is prone to lean towards the side that sounds the most offended, then the angry rhetoric of the left is seen as justified simply because it is angry. The presumption is that anger must be motivated by something that legitimately made you angry. So the advantage tends to go to the professionally angry because the citizenry doesn't bother to evaluate the rationale for the anger. The recent attacks on Sarah Palin are a case in point. I tend to think that Ann Coulter has a point when she turns the tools of the left against them. That's what she does and the left doesn't like it at all. Perhaps we can do that with humor rather than vilification. Rush Limbaugh, when I listened to talk radio, used to do that often enough with humorous satire at the expense of the left. There is probably no stronger medicine than laughing at them if you can get the citizenry to laugh with you. So taking the humor up a notch may help do the trick.