A Loved Liberal

MPR is in full eulogy mode for Eugene McCarthy. A Minnesotan, a man who ran for president, and one who did much to shape the modern anti military flavor of the Democrat party.

The first point that strikes me is just how much they love and respect the man and what he stood for. There is  nothing at all wrong with that, it is just such a great contrast to how they talked of Reagan during the funeral week in ’04. Their love and respect for McCarthy is palpable, they KNOW he was right, they feel it in their souls, and it is impossible for them to question his legacy … not in a normal “reasonable respect for the dead” way, but because they just don’t have it in them.

For Reagan, they covered the his death because it was a story. They were careful to point out the “things that were claimed” for his legacy, but also wondered about all the time that was spent on remembering him, and felt that it was “important” to dwell just a bit on “deficits”, “Iran Contra”, or maybe that ‘80s had a “darker side”. It was clear that they really didn’t respect him and what they felt in their souls was a return to negative feelings of the era that they really didn’t want to revisit.

It is said that people want to be liked, but I often wonder if it is more true to say that “people want to be liked by the right people”. I suspect that most of us don’t want to be liked by terrorists for example. A good deal of my reading and the events of this past fall have led me back to the thought of the fundamental differences between those that end up on the left and on the right. There exists a vast middle of people to which concerns of world view are of no concern. They have decided to largely ignore politics, and while they may cheer for the winners or follow whatever line is currently popular, they have no real identification with any of the core ideas or values. I’d like to think that one of the objectives of a “good society” would be to have few enough serious problems so it is just fine for a huge majority to be blissfully in that class.

As I re-launch into this mental exercise yet again, I point out what I would assume is the obvious. Any activity like this is a generalization. The set of people that precisely fit any of the labels, thoughts, viewpoints that I assign to “liberal” or “conservative” is probably null. I maintain the thought is still useful though. The average life expectancy for a male may be 78, but the set of males that dies on their 78th birthday at the same time of day they were born is  small … but the generalization still is useful.

A second point that I consider to be equally obvious is that while I may assign some specific thoughts or motives to people of a general class, my guess would be that very very few have such conscious thoughts. Most people don’t think very much of “why they think some way”, the meta-recursion makes their head hurt. One of the books that has driven me to return to this path of thought is “Don’t Even Think of An Elephant” by George Lakoff which I had read last fall, lent out, and have recently been lending around to a number of reading friends.

George is a very intelligent man, and his exact focus is on differences between the ways that liberals think and how conservatives fail to think. He couches it all in “Frames”, and thus the title … the more classic rendition of which would be “don’t even think of a pink elephant”, at which point of course you DO think of a pink elephant. He argues that there are two basic frames in the world, the “stern father frame”, and the “nurturing parent frame”. Dishonesty shows its face immediately. Clearly he means “nurturing MOTHER”, the obvious counterpoint to Father unless you are a lefty I guess.

He is writing it to “progressives”. Note the frame, we don’t even want to say liberal, although that term itself is yet another obfuscation picked up when “National SOCIALIST” (or better known as Nazi) developed some poor connotations in the ‘30s. Since he is writing it to the faithful and assumes that no evil, incurious, set in their ways, unable to take in the other side, conservatives would ever read it, he can be "honest".

At some point I’ll get the book back and comment on it more, but at this point I’ll stop for the night and hope to get a few days of writing on this topic without too much intrusion by world or personal events.