Now is not the Time to Play Nice

“It was a sickness of the mind, and where sickness thrives, bad things will follow.”        

~ From the movie The Hobbit

There’s something about movie theatres that puts me to sleep.  I don’t know if it’s the darkness or if perhaps it’s self-defense against the explosion of deafening noise spewing forth at me, but it never fails that, despite my iron resolve to stay awake for the entire movie, I find myself quickly descending into unconsciousness shortly after the beginning credits are done.  I was on the path of my descent during the movie The Hobbit when the semi-conscious blogger in me heard the sage voice of the narrator uttering the words quoted at the top of this post.  Temporarily roused from my sleepy state, I reached down and began furiously fishing through my purse in the dark, searching for a scrap of paper and pen to write it down before I could forget (that’s about a ten-second window for me).  Eventually I found what I needed and, under the wary glare of my husband, I quickly scribbled it down before proceeding on to my nap. 

“It was a sickness of the mind, and where sickness thrives, bad things will follow.”       

There is nothing I love more than to hear a little gem of truth and wisdom all neatly contained within one simple little sentence.  This is the DNA of argumentation.  It is inarguable, or as my teenage son would put it, “Boom!”

 “...where sickness thrives, bad things will follow.”   2 + 2 = 4.

Now, the sickness he was referring to was greed, and the reason it was a problem is because it was the king who was consumed with greed.  That’s why, conservatives understand, it behooves society not to vest power in kings (duh!) or in governments where people can make themselves king-like (double duh!).  No, what occurred to me when I heard “sickness of the mind” was liberalism.  I guess I have thought of it this way for so long now that I assume it to be an accepted fact among all conservatives, but recently I learned that I am sadly mistaken. 

Not long ago a conservative blogger friend of mine wrote a post urging republicans not to villainize the Left, but to instead accept liberalism as just a different political philosophy.  A wrong-headed philosophy, perhaps, but still one that is generally rooted in good intentions.  Believing that it is the nasty tone adopted by the “Angry Right” that’s scaring liberals away, he suggested we embrace a strategy of polite persuasion instead. 

I don’t mean to pick on my friend.  He’s not alone in his thinking; in fact his feelings are probably shared by a majority of republicans.  But I could not disagree more on either his view of liberalism or his suggested strategy for dealing with it.  A true understanding of liberalism would make clear why polite persuasion not only will never succeed, but has failed to succeed for the better part of a century now.  It is not our bad manners but our collective failure to expose liberalism for what it really is – a sickness of the mind – that has brought us to the current state.

If you want to understand the difference between conservatism and liberalism, skip the political section at your library and head to the psychology department.  Liberalism and conservatism have to do with state of mind, and it is the state of mind that leads to the choice of politics, not the other way around.  There is a reason that, despite the enormous odds against it, liberals and conservatives are at odds on virtually everything:  social policy, gun control, the role of government, entitlements, the environment, national security, immigration, etc., etc., etc.  This fact alone is evidence that something is amiss.  Why?  Because 2 + 2 is not adding up to 4, that’s why.  It simply is not possible that people with the same ultimate motives would adopt such polar opposite attitudes to everything that is of importance to this nation.  Find the explanation for that and you will understand the real difference between liberals and conservatives. 

Here’s where the discussion gets a little complicated, as I try to compress into one paragraph an explanation of what should easily take an entire series of books. The driving force behind all classes of liberalism is psychological immaturity.  Among other things this manifests itself in the push towards socialism as people either look to be taken care of at the expense of others, they seek power over others, they wish to see themselves as the benefactors of others, or some combination of the three.  Regardless of which it is, the motivating forces are the same:  there’s either the wish to be taken care of or the desire to gratify one’s own ego through power and/or self-congratulation.  And yes, there are always those who simply have chosen their “team” (democrat), but who could argue that this isn’t immature as well?

And that is the sickness:  the absence of a properly developed maturity of mind.  The traits that we frequently see in liberals are ones that we often associate with children.  They are often habitually dishonest and hypocritical, they cheat, they bully others to get their way, they engage in tantrums (i.e. riots), they seek adulation and they engage in childish idealism.  Liberals, particularly those in the elitist ranks like Barack Obama, exhibit an absence of conscience that enables them to engage in behaviors that conservatives generally would not.  And therein lies the key to understanding why a strategy of polite persuasion will never succeed.  We have vastly different motivations.  Trying to win them over with persuasion would be analogous to an air traffic controller on 9-11shouting advice to the hijackers on how to avoid crashing.  The ATC wants to save the plane and passengers.  The hijackers want to be martyrs.  They are not going to be persuaded by the ATC’s advice.

 As I watched The Hobbit (yes I did eventually wake up) I was struck by how easy it was to tell who the good guys were and who the bad guys were.  Cute little Hobbits with big, hairy feet – good.  Nasty looking Orcs with open sores and rotting teeth – bad.  It’s easy to recognize danger on the silver screen.  In real life, however, the danger we face is hidden in the faces of people who look pretty much like us.  Such handy camouflage often makes it difficult to see others as a danger and to confront them.  Conservatives’ homage to the rules of civility and polite debate have made us unwitting accomplices to the advance of liberalism, as playing along with the charade of liberalism as a noble pursuit only emboldens them. 

As we wrestle with our demoralization from recent defeats, now is not the time to play nice.  In fact, the time to play nice with those who would destroy this nation, whether intentionally or unintentionally, was never.  No, I’m not suggesting we grab our swords and axes and go after liberals the way the hobbits fought back against the Orcs.  But it is time to pull aside the smiling masks of people like Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and others, and reveal the snarling, hideous Orcs underneath.  And the way this is done is to lay bare the true motives behind liberalism – the search for ego gratification, the quest for superiority, the pursuit of power and control, and the desire to take what belongs to someone else.  That is the only path to success, in my humble opinion.

~CW