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Liberals live for the idea that they're saving the world from the racial, religious, and sexual bigotry of conservatives. Yet, looking at the conservative web, I am continually amazed at the fellowship across all of these potential divides. I grew up as liberal Jew, worried about the anti-Semitism of American conservatives. Yet today, evangelical Protestants and orthodox Catholics rush to the side of Israel. I myself have become something of a crusader for the rights of conservative Catholics, who seem to me to have been unfairly maligned and marginalized within the academy. No issue is more difficult and divisive than homosexuality, and I myself have written repeatedly in opposition to gay marriage. Yet despite deep differences on this explosive issue, nearly every conservative I know (myself included) is a huge fan of conservative gay writers like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch. I am still enormously proud of the fact that National Review Online hosted "The Gay-Marriage Debate," a far more substantive and respectful exchange on that issue than anything that's appeared in the mainstream media. And, of course, we barely give a thought anymore to the many black pundits and intellectuals whose work makes an essential contribution to American conservatism (Cornell West can't hold a candle to the likes of Shelby Steele or Thomas Sowell). In the eyes of America's liberals, though, black conservative intellectuals (not to mention judges and policymakers like Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice) just don't count. A glance at Thursday's New York Times shows that the myth of conservative bigotry is still alive and well. It's the subtext of half of the op-eds. Tom Wicker's remembrance of LBJ features a story about Johnson's reaction to passage of the historic civil-rights bill: "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." Wicker follows the story by mournfully noting that Democrats have been locked out of the South far longer than even Lyndon Johnson expected — as if the reason for Republican dominance in today's south is nothing but frustrated segregation. More than slander, this is comfortable self-deception for Democrats who simply can't acknowledge how far their program on race, and so much else, has strayed from the old ideals of integration and individual rights. Just below Wicker's op-ed, anthropologist David Kertzer does his best to blame Arab anti-Semitism on the Catholic Church, as if America's conservative Catholics weren't among the strongest friends of Israel. Of course, it's all part of the Times's campaign to reform the Catholic Church out of existence. The Times has done its level best since last September to spin the war on terror as a battle against domestic social conservatism, with little to show for its efforts. The entire strategy depends on painting America's conservatives as the Taliban. Silly as this proposition is, I think the folks at the New York Times really believe it. The belief in conservative bigotry is more than a misunderstanding. It is liberalism's indispensable drug — the opium of the elites. Are there some bigoted conservatives? Sure. But conservative bias can't hold a candle to the thunderous bigotry of the Left toward conservatives. From the shameful attempts to portray Judge Pickering as a racist, to David Brock's misrepresentations about the supposed anti-gay bigotry of David Horowitz, to the press's refusal to treat Pim Fortuyn as anything other than a neo-Nazi, the goal of the Left is to somehow shove all conservatives into the same bigoted and dismissible little box. Yet isn't it funny how even those conservatives most opposed to Pim Fortuyn's views on homosexuality have rushed to defend him from the Left's misrepresentation of his political character. The reason why these ceaseless defamations of conservatives will not go away (as I explained in "The Church of the Left") is that liberals can't feel good about themselves unless they are fighting someone else's bigotry. Liberalism has stopped being a mere set of political principles for managing conflict and has turned instead into the religion of the secular elites. That religion can supply a purpose to life, only if it is felt to be a crusade against radical evil. However clever all these accusations of conservative bigotry are as a political tactic, they are not mere manipulation, but are sincerely felt. Last year, liberal political theorist Cass Sunstein put out a ridiculous little book about the dangers of the Internet called Republic.com. His argument was that the web is allowing people to isolate themselves from contrary opinions. The places Sunstein held up as dangerous examples were all conservative sites like townhall.com and Free Republic. If Professor Sunstein had actually read the conservative web, he'd have seen that conservative sites are preoccupied — even obsessed — with the liberal media, a media they know intimately. Sunstein's absurd and tyrannical solution to the nonexistent problem of conservatives who've never encountered a liberal opinion was to have the government force websites from one political side of the fence to link to sites on the other. NRO readers, in other words, would be provided by government fiat with copious links to The Nation and The American Prospect. Actually, I go to The Nation and The American Prospect myself, and often write about the liberal press for NRO. Can you imagine the nightmare of a government bureaucracy dedicated to forcing political balance on websites? Who would make the decisions? Who would be in charge of the political classifications, and on what basis could it all be decided? We'd have another civil war on our hands in short order if Professor Sunstein were running things. In any case, the truth is exactly the reverse of Sunstein's thesis. Denizens of the conservative web know exactly how both sides think. It's the folks at the New York Times op-ed page who haven't got a clue. — Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. |
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hen it comes to contemporary
conservatism, liberals don't have a clue. Yet thanks to the Left's dominance
of mainstream-news outlets, conservatives have an excellent understanding
of how liberals think. Half of what we do at National Review Online, after
all, is argue with the liberal media. We read them, but they don't read
us — and it shows.
