“… a decent respect to the opinions of mankind…”
— Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of
Independence.
“Like the Founders, the Conservative also recognizes… rules
of cooperation that have developed through generations of human
experience and collective reasoning that promote the betterment
of the individual and society. This is characterized as ordered
liberty, the social contract, or the civil society…. The
individual in the civil society strives, albeit imperfectly, to
be virtuous — that is, restrained, ethical, and honorable…. In
the civil society, the individual has a duty to respect the
unalienable rights of others and the values, customs, and
traditions, tried and tested over time and passed from one
generation to the next, that establish society’s cultural
identity.”
— Mark Levin, Liberty and
Tyranny.
Item: When Henry Louis Gates had his conniption fit a
few weeks ago, most conservatives rightly sided with the
policeman. Granted, the policeman perhaps ought to have ignored
Gates’ rantings and walked away, but to take Gates into custody
certainly was not entirely unwarranted and clearly wasn’t stupid.
It is not unreasonable to expect that there will be a price to be
paid for disturbing the peace — even if no neighbor’s rights or
expected privileges in a civil society were directly abridged.
Item: If a city council somewhere, or a school board,
has a public comment period marred by repeated shouting
interruptions so that the rest of the audience can’t hear and the
board or council can’t conduct the meeting (I’ve seen this happen
a fair amount of times), and the interrupter just won‘t
calm down after repeated requests, most conservatives would
applaud if security gently but firmly escorted the troublemaker
out of the hall.
Item: Again and again, conservatives rightly complain
when their speakers at college campuses are shouted down by rowdy
radicals. So obnoxious are these rowdies that plenty of
conservative organizations use instances such as these as fodder
for their fundraising appeals. It is a profoundly unconservative
thing to not just deprive the speaker the right to be heard, but
to deny the other audience members the right to listen. It fails
to abide by Jefferson’s decent respect to the opinions of
mankind, and fails to uphold Levin’s civil society.
Item: At the town meeting Tuesday night held by
Virginia’s U.S. Rep. James Moran, D-PMA (Paul Mangliochetti and
Associates) — along with special guest Howard Dean, former
governor of Vermont and world-class crazy screamer — the
behavior of all sides was appalling. The left clearly was
organized through some serious
Astroturf work, and they obviously outnumbered conservatives
in the gymnasium (perhaps 70-30). There is something obnoxious
and robotic about the way they operate. They all clearly have
marching orders. They get their pre-made signs from young women
in absurdly tight-fitting tops, and most of them are in their
pre-fab pro-Obamacare shirts, and they chant and applaud on cue.
The one thing they don’t do, at least not inside the hall, is try
to drown out the speaker — but then again, Messrs. Moran and
Dean are their speakers. Their nationalizing,
legislation-distorting, liberty-destroying speakers.
Even in a reliably liberal district, though, it was a poor
reflection on conservative organizations, especially so close to
D.C. where cable networks were sure to cover the event, that
conservatives were so badly outnumbered and out-organized. Where
were all the D.C.-headquartered national “grassroots” groups?
What was the Republican Party of Virginia doing? Where were the
area College Republicans? Conservatives need not be regimented
into blue-shirt cadres for there to be some sort of phone-banking
or e-mail efforts to get them out to such an important event.
On the other hand, what the conservatives lacked in numbers, many
of them made up in sheer rudeness. I even heard one very
thoughtful-sounding caller to Rush Limbaugh the next day boasting
about how at one point they had effectively shouted down Howard
Dean so he couldn’t speak — and she clearly was proud of
herself. What she doesn’t realize is that she wasn’t merely
infringing on speech rights of a wild-eyed former political
candidate; she was infringing on the rights of everybody else who
actually was at the event to listen and try to learn. And there
were indeed a number of such people. They were turned off by the
rudeness. The rudeness hurt, not helped, the conservatives’
cause. I was there; I saw it; I saw the looks on the faces of
people who clearly were not partisans or ideologues.
There is a time and place for venting. A town hall meeting is
definitely one of those times. Nothing is wrong with loudly
expressing displeasure. Nothing is wrong with giving a little
hell to mendacious politicians. But a little hell can go a long
way in rattling the pols enough that they make fools of
themselves. Too much hell, on the other hand, makes the hellions
look bad. More importantly: Just as conservatives did not abide
Henry Louis Gates, and will not abide those who break up city
council meetings, and will not countenance student radicals who
shout down conservative speakers, so too should we not denigrate
this great republic by failing (as per Mark Levin) to “respect
the unalienable rights of others and the values, customs, and
traditions, tried and tested over time and passed from one
generation to the next, that establish society’s cultural
identity.”
Item: At the same town hall meeting, Moran was an
embarrassment. He didn’t know what he was talking about. He read
off Democratic Committee-sponsored slides like ones Obama
supporters were emailed weeks ago. He disingenuously said, or
read, for instance, that abortions would not be “mandated” by
Obamacare, ignoring the entire point that the issue isn’t
mandates; the issue is whether government money (coerced from
taxpayers or fee-payers) will be used to pay for abortions. Among
many others, Factcheck.org
and the Associated
Press, neither of them a conservative organ by any means,
both agree that Obamacare uses federal funds to pay for
abortions. This is important. Pro-life or pro-choice, the broad
middle of the American public consistently has agreed for three
decades that allowing abortion is one thing, but using
government’s power to make people finance abortions for others is
completely beyond the pale.
The abortion distortion was one of many examples of Moran just
being dead wrong on substance. Worse than that, he hid behind
Dean’s skirts. Again and again, when his own constituents asked
him questions, he let Dean answer for him. It was offensive. But
it was par for the course: So many of our congressmen (of both
parties) these days aren’t really “legislators” in the sense that
they don’t see their main duty as crafting good legislation;
instead, they are favor distributors, pork procurers, party
automatons, and constant campaign fund-raisers. They don’t read
the bills they pass, and don’t think it is important to give the
public time to read them, because they don’t really care if they
get the bills right; that’s what bureaucracies are for: to clean
up their lawmaking messes by issuing regulations that make sense
out of laws cobbled together hodgepodge by staffs working with
language provided by outside interests.
This is not how republican government is supposed to operate.
The meeting’s greatest moment came when Dean, again answering for
Moran, responded to a question about lawsuit reform’s absence
from Obamacare by saying that “The reason that tort reform is not
in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to
take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were
taking on, and that is the plain and simple truth.” Then Moran
emerged to pronounce both the question and the answer “very
good.”
In short, they both admitted that their plaintiffs’ attorney
masters kept them from including reforms that actually could keep
costs down and expand access to care. It was eerily reminiscent
of when Moran told a Washington Examiner editorial
meeting that
he couldn’t really defend the “card check” bill (depriving
workers the right to a secret ballot in union organizing
elections) because he couldn’t afford to anger the union bosses
or Nancy Pelosi. Hey, at least the man is candid about his
motives. But it is political hackery such as this that makes
conservatives rightly so angry that they wrongly deny speech and
listening rights to others. But if we behave like radical
liberals, what exactly have we conserved?
Item: One of the only good things about Ted Kennedy is
that he truly was a legislator in the right sense of the word,
meaning that he actually learned and took time crafting the
details of most legislation. Jim Moran is one of many who should
learn from Kennedy’s example in that one regard. On the other
hand, Kennedy did more than probably any other human being to
poison this nation’s level of political discourse. It wasn’t just
his obscene attack
on Robert Bork; it was vicious speech after nasty attack after
character-assassinating interview — about numerous judicial
nominees, about President George W. Bush, even about Supreme
Court nominee David Souter. Conservatives would not do well to
sink to Kennedy’s level of public maliciousness toward his
adversaries.
Item: So much in American culture has become so crass.
People walk through airports in sheer, pajama-like outfits.
People casually throw around F-bombs in the course of ordinary
conversations at work. Our children are sexualized outrageously,
often with parental approval. Prime-time TV is so raunchy that
the admirable Parents
Television Council never lacks for material to
complain about. And so on, ad infinitum. Yet
conservatives seem to complain only when our own oxen are gored.
If a show like South
Park, with extremely offensive language and gratuitous
sexual and anti-religious messages, can spark an entire faddish
movement called “South
Park Conservatives” that is applauded even by Cornerites at
National Review, then conservatives are no longer
conserving our culture or a society that is civil. If a
conservative criticizes Henry Louis Gates but then acts even
worse than Gates did, that conservative is turning people off
rather than attracting them to our cause.
The nihilistic tactics of the student radicals, the Alinskyites,
and the ACORN agitators are never ennobling.
Conservatives must not fall into the equivalent of the reputed
old Army absurdity that one must “destroy the village in order to
save it.” We cannot destroy our culture, especially our political
culture, in order to save it. We cannot save free speech by
abusing it. And we cannot uphold civil society through
incivility.
