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• Wednesday, November 7, 2007 06:09 AM

  Left of the Dial

  I don't buy Sunstein's thesis; sure, the political atmosphere has become more polarized, but whose fault is that, truly? Time and again, the mainstream media decries "partisanship" when really it's the Right who pursue a "my way or the highway" road to what they call compromise, and if the "Left" (since we have no actual Left represented in power in this country) resists, it's howled that they're playing politics and being partisan. Sunstein even admits that the Right does it better than the Left. No, the Right is waging culture war on democracy, certainly not the "Left." It's been what they've been doing.

  Do so-called leftists troll as aggressively on conservative sites as conservatives and reactionaries troll on liberal sites? It seems to me that liberals hunker down defensively in their various online enclaves and conservative trolls run in and bang their clubs, trying to derail discussion and shout down thought. Any liberal site out there will be beset by right wingdings, so who is doing the polarizing? The Right are convinced that they are right, and that's that -- the only thing is to destroy the enemy, and their political language is all about that, and has been for many decades. While liberals navelgaze and play devil's advocate and wonder why we can't all get along, the Right puts the boot in, again and again.

  There's a difference between forming a gang and forming a tribe, I think -- the tribe kind of wants to be left alone, while the gang wants to punish anybody not in the gang; the tribe accepts what they have in common, while the gang opposes those outside of the gang. Since the "turf" is politics, the Right aggressively goes after what they see as "wrongthink" while the "Left" just wants to be able to think and talk in peace.

  The Right found a winning formula in that aggressive "You are wrong, end of story." approach, and their rank-and-file haven't abandoned it, to say nothing of most of their leaders. The "Left" responded by tacking rightward, so now the majority of "leftist" American opinion is actually politically centrist, with a tiny few actually left of center, and marginalized.

  But even that's too much for the Right, who'll go after anybody who isn't part of the gang. If we had an actual Left in this country, there'd probably be street fights, instead of simpering flamewars. But then our government worked very hard to kill nascent left-wing movements in this country, so maybe we're just seeing a toxic bloom in the hothouse of American politics, because of the lack of diversity in political opinion among those with actual power.

  I'd be happy if so-called conservatives in this country were actually conservative, because I think they'd have a stake in a stable society; the trouble is, they're not, and we're paying for it as a country.

  —Slackie Onassis Read Slackie Onassis's other letters
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