I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
So as I said yesterday on the podcast, a couple of the more controversial folks who've suddenly seen their JournoList contributions hit the news --- Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor who mused about having the FCC yank Fox News' license; and Sarah Spitz, a colleague at the NPR station in Los Angeles where I'm a weekly commentator, who described the joy she'd feel watching Rush Limbaugh die of a heart attack -- are friends of mine.
Jonathan is a smart, thoughtful person. So is Sarah. You'll just have to trust me on that.
But I honestly think that my liberal friends -- and trust me on this, too: it's not like I haven't debated both of them, often -- don't quite get how corrosive their bubble is. Look, we conservatives complain all the time about the reflexively left-wing culture in academia (and Jonathan Zasloff, of all people, has often complained of that, too! And you'll have to trust me on that....) and we complain about the 80% of the other news outlets (everything non-Fox, essentially) that are reflexively liberal. But that just makes us less likely to engage in JournoList-style groupthink, in line-of-the-day coordination, and in silly suggestions that Fox News doesn't deserve its license, and in pretty cruel suggestions that a person you disagree with should be allowed to die while you laugh.
Maybe it's because I live in a left-wing part of a left-wing state and work in an extremely left-wing industry that I'm not totally shocked by what's in the JournoList archives. I've heard all of that stuff before. But I guess that with me around, a lot of what they really feel -- Rush Limbaugh should DIE! Fox News should be OUT OF BUSINESS! -- is attenuated by my being there, listening. Left alone, they all revert back to groupthink. Put it this way: aside from the Rush Limbaugh stuff, most of what I've read on JournoList is the kind of thing (with the politics flipped) that Ann Coulter might say. But she says it in public. In books and appearances and newspaper columns. She stands behind it. (And they, predictably, would cluck-cluck at her on JournoList, calling her "hateful" and "incendiary" and then they'd move on to fantasizing about Rush Limbaugh's death.)
The solution to this, of course, is diversity training. Everyone on the JournoList should be forced to spend a day a week and a couple of weekends in some kind of intensive workshop experience, learning that there are others and that the others have feelings and that the others have points of view that are wonderful and rich and just as valuable as theirs. There will be tears and hugs and emotional breakthroughs. They'll make bead jewelry and write free verse. Hannity will come and address them, and they'll realize that, Gee, Sean Hannity is sort of like us! JournoList members will be given soft pillows and allowed to swat a giant plush-toy version of Rush Limbaugh, until they collapse, sobbing, and realize that it's not Rush they hate, but themselves. At the end of the workshop, they'll all get a big, hurting hug from Roger Ailes.
Diversity training is the only solution. You heard it here first.
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Jun '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
I can recall a snippet from National Review a few years back about an ocean cruise attended exclusively by liberals. The keynote speaker was crowing about what nice people liberals are, and then wondered out loud where the conservatives were. The NR editor's response: "At the masthead, madame, flogging the help." My sentiments exactly.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
Just about any conservative with a college degree has passed through a liberal institution. It is very possible for a liberal to pass through this life never having encountered conservatives except in HBO documentaries and re-reuns of M*A*S*H. My sister, now in her 50s passed from an apolitical childhood into an academiic cloister. She is dreadfully insular.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
Rob, I'd be interested to hear how Jonathan and Sarah feel about being outed on the JournoList. Are they embarrassed that the private conversations have come to light and impugn their analytical integrity or do they dig in and defend their statements as justified and correct?
I would assume Jonathan, being a law professor, and Sarah, being a journalist, would have different feelings about the story.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
Perhaps diversity training "camps"? The left should see the irony in that as they are hauled off until reformed.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
Yes. Yes. Exactly. And when conservatives come to the end of the day, they sit down in front of their TVs to watch shows written, produced, and acted of, by, and for coastal lefties--and thus, stay very well educated about the lefty POV. Meanwhile, how often do folks living in Manhattan and Hollywood watch shows produced in Peoria or Terre Haute?
We live in a topsy-turvy world where the country mouse has a much broader understanding of the world than the city mouse. You can call this urban dweller's isolation the cocoon, the buble, or reverse provincialism.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
It seems the right time to resurrect this chestnut. An oldie but a goodie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAlrSRVdKZY
It's so much more creepy than it was two years ago!
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
You're absolutely right about the corrosive bubble many liberals live in. Many of my closest friends are liberals - not just "hey, how ya doin'" friends, but real honest-to-goodness "dude, I just woke up in a room full of bodies with a knife in my hand; come pick me up now" kinds of friends. Despite all that, when I talk politics they look at me the same way anthropologists regard a pygmy. "Do you really believe that stuff?" they marvel. Yeah, just me and half the freakin' country. It's weird; however, friendships are extremely rewarding when you can argue politics until you're blue in the face yet stop on a dime and share the same pew at church. Thankfully, that's part of my life. If anyone here has allowed politics to get in the way of a good friendship, you've done yourself no favors.
Jun '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
An important difference is how liberals and conservatives see the nature of Man, see good and evil. Conservatives believe that evil (along with good) is everywhere, including inside your own heart--the first place to look. But liberals KNOW that they're good, their intentions are absolutely impeccable, so evil must be whatever opposes them (i.e. conservatism.)
Jun '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
Most of the diversity training I've been exposed to was seemingly designed according to select multicultural and political correct standards, the purpose of which is to demonize and devalue the conservative into an evil, misguided bag of beastly bigotry. Would not diversity training merely stoke a liberal's ego and views even more?
A conservative's "diversity training" might be summed up thusly: Everyone has value. Everyone should have equal opportunity under the law to fulfill their own potential, according to their gifts and their labor. Everyone is endowed with natural rights given them by the Creator, which government cannot and should not infringe upon.
Maybe that's it: Diversity training for liberals should be infused with remedial training in the difference between natural and legal rights. Locke, Hobbes, Paine, and others.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
I'm still working on the "I is less than three" part of your headline. But that's not important...
It's probably worth pondering what animates the Angry Left and the Angry Right. The Ottoman Umpire's Unified Theory: when people become unglued like that, it's usually because you're attacking something core to their identity. In the case of the Angry Left, I think they've set up a worldview where the people with the best degrees and the most Academy Awards should basically be running the show. Not officially, because that would be gauche, but they nonetheless expect the common people to bow down before them in recognition of the exceptionally high SAT scores that swept them to the top of the meritocratic heap.
And it ticks them off royally when someone of lesser credentials ends up making more money or, worse, starts laying this morality stuff on them. Let me get this straight... my vote doesn't count more than that of some hick with no teeth and an education like that of Jethro Bodine? And we're both of equal worth in the eyes of God? You kidding me?
(out of words. continued...)
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
(continued from above.)
Meanwhile, the Angry Right seethes about the Left's seeming disregard, even contempt, for the eternal values that make sense of this life and the next. So they juice up the opprobrium, and this finds its way to the Left, which makes them even more ballistic. And you end up with stuff like the Sister of Perpetual Indulgence picketing San Francisco's largest cathedral on Easter Sunday, handing out condoms as communion wafers. And worse.
This all gets reduced, like shorthand, to tribalism. Just like in some football rivalries, the most extreme members of the Red Tribe wish the entire Blue Tribe would be swallowed up by a volcano, and vice versa. It's not until some Deep Gray Tribe starts threatening the actual safety, not just the social standing, of both the Red and the Blue tribes that you have any hope of kumbaya coming from their combined ranks (think the weeks after 9/11).
Note that most of the country, while they may gravitate to Left or Right, are not situated at its Angry ends, possibly because they work, live, and worship with members of the other team, and know they're not so bad.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
Rob Long:they'll realize that, Gee, Sean Hannity is sort of like us! JournoList members will be given soft pillows and allowed to swat a giant plush-toy version of Rush Limbaugh, until they collapse, sobbing, and realize that it's not Rush they hate, but themselves. At the end of the workshop, they'll all get a big, hurting hug from Roger Ailes.
Diversity training is the only solution. You heard it here first. ·
I can't imagine any galaxy in which Sean Hannity is like any of them. Or me.
But at some point in the encounter group, they will get "It". (Semi-Tough reference, for you young folks)
The issue of Journolist, amy I remind folks, is not private communications shared on an insecure server with 400 of their closest friends, it is that these discussions were conspiratorial in nature, directed toward electing political candidates in violation of several laws and all historic media ethical standards.
I don't care, nor am I surprised by, what Sarah thinks of Mr. Limbaugh. I do care that she uses her taxpayer-funded perch to elect lefties who will increase her funding.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
Rob is starting to sound more and more like a politician.... trust me.
Intense diversity training is not the answer. They need shock therapy. You take away their cell phones, Crackberries and credit cards and you drop them off in rural Oklahoma. Just make them live outside their cloister for a month.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
When my little sister came back from college spouting all the usual nonsense, I simply advised her that anyone who undergoes such a rapid and dramatic change should pause to wonder how and why that change occurred. That apparently had an effect on her, though I don't know how much. Sometimes, the best challenge is a question.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
I haven't read much of the Jourolist stuff. But, I did just hear on the radio that Daniel Schorr passed away, and I said "Yeah!" Do I need diversity training? I'm not really happy he's dead - I'm just happy that he's not going to be on the air anymore. I wouldn't defend to the death his right to say "Hello." So, I'm not too bugged that people are wishing Rush's death or Bush's death etc etc, not if it's just a curse in passing.
It's worse than sinister, it's juvenile.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
I don't know, dead's dead, and I find myself immediately sympathetic to the newly departed. If Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky or some other pundit of the odious persuasion were to kick the bucket, I can imagine a twinge of sadness for them and their friends. Osama bin Laden would be the one person whose passing would prompt, in me, immediate jubilation.
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
Just weighing in to note my appreciation for the humor that infuses Rob Long's posts. If your job included wide Internet reading about politics, the bulk of it utterly humorless, you'd understand why it's such a relief.
Also, a question for commenters. In the parts of the country where you live, is there a healthy mix of liberals and conservatives, or an overwhelming majority one way or another like us Southern Californians?
May '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
I live in a "Bellwether" state in a "Bellwether" county. The NY Times does stories on us every election cycle.
Its an old, dying steel town that has a solid Democratic base in the city and disappearing Republican suburbs. They have a dream that the empty factories can be used to lure new employers so they can unionize them, or they want to make trendy apartments and shopping malls out of them. They keep publishing artist concepts in the paper and announcing new projects even though there's no one in town with enough money to take advantage of their concept of "trendy."
I say disappearing Republican suburbs because so many of us have left to find work elsewhere.
Jun '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
As far as national politics, Alabama is about as redstate as you can get (60%+ voted for McCain). State politics is considerably more complicated, and folks tend to vote Democrat because that's what they've always done, although I'd hesitate to equate those with a coastal brand of liberalism. Liberal concentrations can be found in Birmingham and Montgomery proper. If I get what you mean by "healthy mix," the Huntsville area might apply ... some liberal sensitivies mixed in with a defense-oriented business and technology base.
Jun '10
Re: I <3 My Liberal Friends, But They Need Diversity Training
Conor: "Also, a question for commenters. In the parts of the country where you live, is there a healthy mix of liberals and conservatives, or an overwhelming majority one way or another like us Southern Californians?"
Santa Fe is moonbat central: peacenik, vegetarian, bunny-hugging, hippy, dippy, trippy, latte & birkenstock, yadda, yadda, yadda. We conservatives, we happy few, are the ones who keep things going, but the populace is too stoned to notice.