I watched Alexandra Pelosi's HBO documentary last night. Pelosi wants to show that there are two Americas which are incapable of understanding one another. Her film is an attempt from the Liberal side to at least listen sympathetically to what the conservative side has to say, even if some rapprochement is at the end of the day impossible. In a Salon interview she had this to say about her intentions in making the film:
Thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people showed up to see the McCain-Palin ticket. Maybe a dozen people humiliated me — you know, embarrassed me and made me feel really unwanted. I don't want to paint the whole lot of the Republican base as mean-spirited and cruel and unfriendly. To me it's more interesting to focus on the real Christian conservatives who didn't agree with anything I had to say but invited me over for dinner so that we could talk about it.
I would have liked to have seen whether those dinner conversations were a real two-way dialogue. Because despite her intentions, I don't know that her film helps to build understanding, even a little bit. Obama's approval rating is in the 70 percent range at the moment. Many of these approvers are among the 58 million who didn't vote for Obama.
Pelosi, however, interviews the people from the thirty percent who
cannot and likely will not ever approve of him. For some it's about race, but
for most it's about his being a heretic.
If there were any sane, thoughtful people capable of saying anything but formulaic GOP talking points at these rallies, she didn't
find them (except one guy who apologized for the bad behavior of his
rally mates). Or if she did find any, she didn't put them in her film. The people she interviews, even those that seem like normal, decent people, have crazy, ungrounded ideas. They feel misunderstood and that no one listens to them, but they are not interested in listening to the arguments of those who oppose them. In their minds, anybody who supports Obama is an idiot who doesn't fully appreciate
that he will destroy the real America they alone love. That's the message they feel the media doesn't give equal time to. They feel disrespected, but they demand respect for attitudes that are extraordinarily difficult for even the most generous person who disagrees with them to respect.
I do not condemn these people, I condemn the ugly attitudes that have them in their grips. This attitude deludes these people into thinking of themselves as the real America, but they are not–they only represent a third of the country. If you are looking for those among the 35 percent of Americans who think that torture is morally acceptable, you will find most of them in this minority. These are people who, though they think of themselves as the real Americans, have no idea what America stands for, and insofar as these attitudes continue to be taken seriously in the political sphere, they pose a threat to the healthy development of the commonweal.
You can argue, then, that theirs are not mainstream views, but in fact they are. They have far more influence than their numbers warrant because they represent the base that even moderate Republicans must appease if they are to have any hope of getting and staying elected. If the Republican Party is to be taken seriously as a mainstream political party, so must the ugly mentality of the people interviewed in this film be considered mainstream. Congressional Republicans sound a lot more like these people than they sound like Ross Douthat or David Frum, two decent, thoughtful people who quixotically maintain that the GOP is redeemable. So long as the party relies on this third of the electorate, how can anything healthful come from it?
I think it's important for the health of our political culture that there be an opposition party, and one of those parties should be what
we think of as "conservative." But there's a difference between the
kind of conservatism that Douthat, Frum, Bacevich, Deneen, Larison,
and Rick Warren represent and the kind that McConnell, Brownback,
Boehner, and Cantor represent. You can vehemently disagree with the people in the
first group, but you can also debate with them in good faith–they are reasonable, their arguments follow logically and consistently from respectable first principles; they are capable of listening to and understanding the arguments that oppose theirs–but you can't do
that with the people in the second group. They are not interested in debate; they are only interested in winning through demagoguery. Nothing
they stand for contributes to our political health.
The people Pelosi interviewed in her film do not see Liberals as people with whom they have a political disagreement. They see Liberals as infidels and heretics. They are in a mentality that is not that far from the kind of religious malice that drives the Ian Paisley type hatred of papists in Northern Ireland. They feel themselves to be an embattled remnant surrounded by infidels; they are the holy remnant that alone preserves God's saving truth. They are, like the Muslim extremists they hate and fear so much, people who refuse to face the challenges of modernity and postmodernity. You don't have to be an intellectual to do that, just someone who's a mensch–someone who is capable of dealing with other people as human beings just like them rather than as satanic incarnations of heresy.
There is no reasoning with people like this because their identity is invested in this fantasy of a pure America, a real America, and they experience anything that threatens that as a threat to their right to exist. If they are the remnant with the one truth, and if the world seeks to destroy them, then they are within their rights to fight
back with a crusader's fury not only for their own survival, but so
that God's truth might survive in the world.
They are just dug in, and the only hope is that their kids and grandkids will find a way to assimilate into a more pluralist America in a way this generation finds it impossible to do. Maybe twenty years from now they'll represent 10 or 15 percent of the population rather than 30 percent.
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