Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Why we can’t all get along

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This post originally appeared on Feb. 9. Thought it was worth an encore presentation this election week. —DM

Yesterday my funny, brilliant, musical conservative speechwriter friend Mike Long said on Facebook that he was deeply upset by this Huffington Post piece that basically claims conservatives are dumber than liberals.

As a liberal, I find the article, and its suggestion that there's a physiological difference between liberals and conservatives, less offensive than absurd.

Here's what I think about liberals and conservatives: I think, yes.

Every sane human being has conservative instincts and liberal ones. We each have an inner looker and an inner leaper, a miser and a spendthrift, a lover and a fighter, a hunter and a gatherer. The strict disciplinarian is overcompensating for her permissive side. We've each had experiences that lead us to trust institutions, and we've had experiences that warn us not to. We've been rebels and we've been team players. We've given, and we've taken away.

It's not that there are two kinds of people in the world; there are two kinds of people in ourselves. Tiresome as they are, the liberal and conservative polarity endures because it is psychologically valid and intellectually useful.

It's a complicated world, and none of us has either the stamina or the time to thoroughly think and feel our way through every  issue that comes down the pike. (Think about it: How many issues do you truly feel ownership of because you've put in the man hours studying them from every angle? One or two or three—and I bet you don't favor universally "liberal" or "conservative" solutions to those issues, but some combination of both.)

But unable to wonk out truly independent stances on healthcarereform-defensespendingabortionstemcellresearchglobalwarmingguncontroletaxreform-MiddleEastpolicy, we eventually pick one of the two groups to associate with most of the time, and when in doubt—and we're usually in doubt—we go with the girl what brung us.

How we wind up choosing "liberal" or "conservative" as our default stance is part tribal. It also has to do with the life story we tell ourselves we are living—usually "conservative" or "liberal" is the coat that looks best. And it can have to do with our relationship with a single, searingly important issue that's associated with one of the two general points of view.

Doesn't matter how we come to "conservative" or "liberal": The trouble starts when we forget all of the above and start to think our political postures are truly connected with our inner lives. And everyone is so eager to defend their "core principles" that everybody forgets: Our political stances are mostly just fallback positions.

This isn't an argument for moderate politics. Issue by issue, I believe that radical politics is often correct and I think political conviction can be one of the most beautiful things you'll ever see. Meanwhile, when someone proudly declares she's a moderate, it sounds like someone who likes both the Cubs and the White Sox. Well, fine, I guess. But you're not really a baseball fan, and I don't want to talk to you about baseball.

If I'm gonna talk politics, I want to do it with people who force me to think harder than I normally do—and remind me of the difference between my deep ideas and my assumed stances.

(Or, failing that, people who agree with me all the time.)

Update: Hell yes I'm voting for President Obama. And there's a fair chance I'll be live-blogging the election tomorrow night, from my usual stone-cold sober and objective point of view. Luv ya! —DM

Which side am I on? The one that doesn’t scare me.

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May is going to be a month of radical political talk, especially here in Chicago, where the NATO meeting will be protested by Occupy Chicago and other groups. You will hear some left-wing people say some weird things. (Of course, the only people who will pay any attention to the protests are the police, and nice Democrats like me, who will wonder if they ought to maybe go down there and lend a voice, but who have a tee time at two and to be honest, aren't sure what's so bad about NATO, anyway.)

Me, I like radical political talk. It's fun! But I like some radical messages better than others.

For instance, I think NATO haters have more of a point than do the grown American children who want to reduce to government to military and trash pickup. I'd rather take the excesses of the left with grains of salt—last week I listened to an Occupy person share her suspicion that Occupy might have actually been organized by the one-percenters "to get us all in one place"—than try to find grains of truth in the utterly foreign stuff that comes from the far right.

Like, I'd venture to guess a 9/11 conspiracist had better SAT scores than your average birther.

I see more evidence of big corporations taking over my life than big government. (In fact, I see the corporations taking over the government.)

And I'm less troubled by the people who fund the far left than those who fund the far right—if for no other reason than the latter goons are so much better at it.

But the left is full of foolishment too.

"This Obama presidency has been a brilliant move by our ruling class, for this black, personable decoy has managed to pacify vast swaths of an otherwise restless constituency, while enraging others for the wrong reason."

That's lefty writer Linh Dinh, writing in Counterpunch. He continues, in no uncertain terms: "Although Obama’s blackness is irrelevant, it has become a fixation to both his detractors and supporters, so that it has become a point of honor to defend or depose this man for his blackness alone, when in truth his race does not factor at all in any of his decisions. One should not care that he is black, because Obama does not care that he is black, and not in a good way either. Obama is not here to rectify whatever ails the black or any other community. He is only here to facilitate the wishes of the Military Banking Complex, and he’s willing to trample on you all, black, white, brown or yellow, to achieve their goals.


"

What asinine nonsense! But is it as asinine as the far right's claims that President Obama is a socialist Robinhood? No, it's not.

Dinh concludes with a little anecdote about his recent visit to Chicago: "I was dismayed and disgusted to see an Obama poster as I entered the Heartland Café, a bastion of progressive politics in that city, but my mood was improved, however, at a Trayvon Martin rally downtown, when I encountered a man with this sign, 'OBAMA—IMPERIALIST COMMANDER IN CHIEF.' Of course he was only stating the obvious, because how can a US President be otherwise under this current setup?"

What the Heartland Café really is, is a bastion of dreadful food, studied indifferent service and lots of gray-haired, gray-faced lefties who look pretty darn comfortable, for guilty citizens of a murderous nation.

But in the summertime, I ride my motorcycle up there to work on the Heartland's screened-in porch, which puts me in mind of Key West, a place I haven't been since I was a baby.

I don't hang around lefties because I agree with them all the time. I hang around them because I agree with them some of time—and because I'm afraid of the right-wing people. Imagine the Heartland Café of the Right: The Heartless Bar & Grill, a twisted combination of a country club dining room, truck stop and Wild West saloon, where Pink Slime is the Friday Special, smoking is mandatory and women aren't be allowed.

I'll take the Heartland, please.

And pass the salt.

Employee communicators are more liberal than PR people

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That's the crux of an argument I made a few years ago in a column in Ragan's now-defunct Journal of Employee Communication Management.

Wanting to rerun the column at Ragan.com, Ragan editors asked me if I stood by the sentiment.

Sure, I said.

Actually, I wasn't sure at all.

But I was interested in the debate.

Have a read and weigh in here or there.