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I said previously that my conversion from a (mostly) liberal to a (mostly) conservative state of mind began with the realization that the sources I trusted to tell me the straight story - Huffington Post, MSNBC, and most of all Andrew Sullivan - were so biased that no hint of evenhandedness existed. In my last post, I talked specifically about my disenchantment with the Huffington Post as I realized it committed the very sins it regularly accused the Republicans of: silencing dissent and believing dishonesty was justified as long as HuffPo was “right”.
At the same time I was reading - and becoming disenchanted with - the Huffington Post, I was also watching a little MSNBC and reading a lot of Andrew Sullivan. My gradual awareness that they also were not entirely straightforward completed my alienation from the liberal side of the political process.
I never spent as much time with MSNBC as I did with HuffPo. I was terribly upset about the telecomm immunity in FISA (you remember - that immunity Obama swore he’d filibuster) and I found Keith Olbermann’s views about that right up my alley. Still, though, he always yelled too much and Chris Matthews always seemed awfully sure about topics I felt were more a matter of opinion than fact. In these aspects Olbermann and Matthews also exhibited that unwillingness to believe there could possibly be any “virtue or truth” on the other side I found so distressing in Jean Rohe’s HuffPo post.
At the same time, there was the whole Bush thing. MSNBC loathed Bush and considered him stupid and evil or - in their more sophisticated moments - merely stupid and thus a pawn of the evil Cheney. As I’ve said, I was not - and am not - happy with Bush’s attitude toward the Constitution. Nonetheless, he was the President and some part of me - perhaps those same long-buried attitudes that made me unable to see police officers as the enemy - wasn’t entirely comfortable with the level of vitriol being heaped on him. In particular I cringed every time Olbermann insisted Bush was a fascist. Still all my friends were convinced Bush was a cross between the village idiot and the ultimate evil so my discomfort never really surfaced; it just pricked me a little when the guys at MSNBC would start frothing at the mouth about the President. Between MSNBC’s certainty that all virtue rested on their side and their viciousness toward the President, I could never become a big MSNBC fan but I still thought myself enough in sympathy with many of their positions to feel both horrified and betrayed when they jumped on Obama’s misogyny bandwagon.
Once I’d left HuffPo behind and realized I was not entirely comfortable with MSNBC, my primary blog read was Andrew Sullivan. I suppose this fit with the shifts taking place below the surface of my world view: when I began reading him he presented himself - with some justification - as a conservative. Plus he was already anti-Bush and anti-Iraq War when I first encountered him and I agreed with him there. His admission that he had supported both Bush and the War before realizing his error helped me believe he was someone who would honestly present both sides of an issue regardless of how he felt about it. Stupid of me I know.
It’s not like the signs weren’t there. I figure I agreed with Sullivan about 60% of the time but even when I didn’t agree with him, I found his arguments rational and I could understand why he believed what he did even though I believed differently. Or at least that was the case most of the time. There was always that 10% of his arguments that made no sense. Then it was as if he had a huge blind spot and simply, literally could not see something directly in front of him. The clearest example of this was his attitude toward the Catholic Church’s decision that homosexuals were not to be priests, period. I could certainly understand Sullivan’s distress over this decision but his writing never so much as hinted at the fact that there was an even larger group of people who were banned from the priesthood by inborn characteristics: women. His blindness reached its apex when he posted a letter from a reader whose partner was losing his Church because of its decision that homosexuals could not be priests (emphasis mine):
And so Benedict, supposedly a man of God, pushes away good people from this church. I have no doubt in my mind that what Benedict is doing now is a crime, a crime against God. If this were discrimination against Jews or blacks or any other group, it would be classed as fascist bigotry, and eventually the perpetrator would be brought to task by society in an appropriate way and exiled from their institution. Pope Benedict cannot get away from this crime against humanity. Whatever his or others' personal views against homosexuality, to discriminate against a group in an institutional form is apartheid, is Nazism, is fascism, and nothing less.
Unless, of course, the group being discriminated against is women. So long as we were the group banned from the priesthood this reader’s partner’s “love for his religion [was] great.” And so, apparently, was Sullivan’s.
Still, as maddening as I found Sullivan’s ten percent worth of blind spots I didn’t stop to consider that the rest of his writing, which I believed to be thoughtful and even-handed, might also suffer from blind spots, in those cases blind spots to which I myself was subject. Then came Barack Obama.
I don’t remember becoming suddenly aware that Sullivan was heaping a lot of praise on Obama. Through most of 2007 everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination and I was unhappy enough about that so any slaps Sullivan took at Clinton in favor of Obama would have seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Two things happened at the beginning of 2008 to change my perceptions. First, I was without access to a computer from early January until about mid-March. That meant I was getting my news primarily from a daily newspaper in the South. While the news was much the same, the editorials tended conservative. So I was both removed from Sullivan’s filtering of events and exposed to a slightly different filter. I wasn’t aware of it as it happened but those different filters meant I was getting not just different viewpoints but somewhat different facts.
Second, I began to feel more supportive of Clinton and thus became more sensitized to the way so much of the media was out of line in their depiction of her. And when I returned to my computer and started reading what I’d missed while I was away it became clear that no one was more out of line than Andrew Sullivan. The contrast between my reaction to Clinton crying and his floored me. I knew there were those who claimed her tears were fraudulent but Sullivan’s sheer ugliness was breath-taking.
From that point on, Sullivan became literally unbalanced: everything Clinton did was at least wrong and probably pathological; everything Obama did was right - and if Sullivan couldn’t make it right, he just ignored it. Most distressing to me was Sullivan’s willingness - eagerness - to misrepresent the views of others to further his agenda. This wasn’t just a blind spot; it was deliberate data drop-out.
Some examples of this were small. Sullivan quoted Dave Barry in a way that made it sound like Barry was making fun of Clinton crying. Read Barry’s full article and the picture looks different. Sullivan quoted a snippet of a John Derbyshire article but only as far as the line that reads:
By this standard, this campaign has offered us two inspirational political futures: Barack Obama’s, and Ron Paul’s.
Read Derbyshire himself and you find the next line is:
Obama has nothing for a conservative to like, and the passions he has aroused are inexplicable to me.
On the other hand, some of Sullivan’s judicious editing was not small at all. The most egregious example involves Clinton’s RFK/June comment. On May 25, 2008, Karl Rove appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. When Stephanopoulos referred to Rove as an informal adviser to the McCain campaign, Rove denied that level of involvement but Stephanopoulos insisted “informal adviser” was in fact the correct label. Andrew Sullivan created a post called, “Keeping Them Honest” which thanked Stephanopoulos for making sure Rove was correctly identified. Sullivan’s post contained a brief clip from This Week containing the relevant exchange.
What Sullivan’s post did not mention was that immediately preceding the introduction of Rove, Stephanopoulos was interviewing David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign manager. In that segment, Stephanopoulos hammered Axelrod over the Obama campaign circulating Keith Olbermann’s contemptible Special Comment about Clinton’s RFK/June comment to the press corps at the same time Obama was “forgiving” Clinton for the remark.
It wasn’t just Clinton about whom Sullivan was unbalanced. There was also the way he wrote about Mitt Romney’s Mormonism versus the way he wrote about Obama’s ties to the Reverend Wright. As Ed Morrissey put it:
Let’s make this clear. [According to Sullivan] Romney had a responsibility to explain the racism of the Mormons, which they themselves repudiated in 1978, including “self-criticism” for being a Mormon during that period. However, with Obama belonging to and supporting a church in which his self-described “moral compass” preaches that the US created the HIV virus to commit genocide and calling the nation the “the US of KKK-A”, Obama gets a pass because … he writes so beautifully of the faith he found through Jeremiah Wright?
Uh, sure.
I wasn’t the only person who was beginning to wonder about Sullivan. During a liveblog of the April 16, 2008, debate, Commentary’s John Podhoretz referred to him as “Andrew ‘Someone Give Me Barack Obama’s Shoe So I Can Lick It’ Sullivan. By August 31 (as the Palin wars began) a reader at The Corner expressed what I had been thinking for quite a while:
at this point I can't see him [Sullivan] as anything other than a total Obama partisan. His blog's purpose has gone from discussing politics from a conservative perspective to simply trying to get Obama elected. I can't see any other explanation for his recent contradictory posts. Conspicuously absent from his blog have been any posts devoted to analyzing Obama's policy proposals - e.g. can we really pay for everything that Obama is promising in domestic entitlements by simply taxing "the rich" a bit more? It's simple questions like this one - and the answers may even be in Obama's favor - that have no place in his posts anymore. Instead, we get vacuous posts praising Obama's rhetoric and oratory skills. It's been sad, actually, because he is a really intelligent guy. I'm amazed he has allowed himself to lose all his credibility as a conservative writer simply to get Obama elected.
I had stopped reading Sullivan before that fateful weekend so I didn’t see firsthand his eagerness to spread the truly hideous rumors about Governor Palin, Bristol, and Trig. For that I am profoundly grateful.
Still, I had hung in there for quite a while. It’s difficult and more than a little embarrassing for me to admit just how very much I wanted Sullivan to come to his senses, start treating Clinton decently, and stop worshipping at the feet of Obama. I don’t think I consciously acknowledged to myself that if Sullivan was as biased and unbalanced as he now appeared then I would have to re-evaluate a lot of what I believed but I’m pretty sure my subconscious was well aware of that. I can remember feeling almost ill when I read Sullivan, hoping each time that he would finally do a post admitting he’d been blind and biased and would now play fair with Clinton and with anyone else who had the misfortune not to be Barack Obama. After one particularly egregious post about Clinton - I think it was one of the ones where he quoted from Animal Farm - he suddenly announced he was taking a vacation, he needed a break. Thank goodness, I thought. His editor or his spouse or his friends have managed to make him see that he’s gone off the deep end. He’ll chill out for a while and come back sane. Needless to say, it didn’t happen.
The last straw for me with regard to Sullivan came in June of 2008. It was a small matter, perhaps hardly worth noting, but it did two things. First, it finally convinced me there was no hope Sullivan would return to his senses. The Andrew Sullivan I had been reading either was gone for good or - more likely - had never really existed. Second, it made me face the fact that the vitriol Sullivan heaped on Clinton was the same vitriol he had heaped on Bush. And if I knew he wasn’t playing fair with Clinton, how could I now believe he had ever played fair with Bush?
Sullivan was talking about Obama’s proposal to jack up Social Security taxes on those making more than $250,000 and concluded:
There's no point in disguising this: Obama will punish those who succeed in order to funnel benefits to those who haven't. Yes: he's a liberal. But Bush never dealt with the fiscal reality - preferring to borrow the money from the Chinese. In that sense, these hikes are Bush's hikes as well.
In other words, the Devil made Obama do it.
I had hit my limit.: Sullivan was now clearly, undeniably, irredeemably irrational. I was going to have to accept that everything I thought I knew about the politics of the last seven years was - if I had learned it from him or MSNBC or HuffPo or anyone who agreed with them (and that’s a lot of anyones) - open to question.
I was adrift on the sea of world views without so much as a compass. I started paddling.
In my first post about my journey from a (mostly) liberal to a (mostly) conservative state of mind, I gave the stream of consciousness version that I emailed to a new friend who asked about my political orientation. In this post I’ll talk more about the mechanism by which I was converted beginning with the realization that the sources I trusted to tell me the straight story - Huffington Post, MSNBC, and most of all Andrew Sullivan - were so biased that no hint of evenhandedness existed. I know this makes me sound stupid: after all, HuffPo and Sullivan never claimed to be unbiased. Nonetheless, I assumed I was getting the whole story from them. I understood that when they wrote a story about how terrible Bush was or how badly the Iraq War was going or how racist the Republicans were, I was getting their interpretation of the facts but I also believed I was getting all the facts.
Realizing differently took place in stages. I began to distrust HuffPo first over their eagerness to conflate immigration and illegal immigration. I started out believing they were simply being sloppy but I kept reading HuffPo articles that could be summed up as:
The United States is a country of immigrants. Immigrants are good. Immigrants are what make this country strong. You are the descendant of immigrants. How can you deny to other immigrants what your ancestors found here?
Therefore if you oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants you are a racist.
Finally I read enough of those to realize HuffPo’s confusing immigration and illegal immigration must be deliberate - and deliberately dishonest. That left a bad taste in my mouth and made me uneasy about HuffPo’s world view. Still it was just one issue and so I persevered with HuffPo.
Then came Jean Rohe’s HuffPo post about her “preemptive strike” against John McCain at the New School graduation. At first I found Rohe’s post merely that strange combination of puerileness and arrogance that seems common among the young who have worked themselves up into a righteous lather. Once I had actually read McCain’s speech, however, I realized Rohe was either unable to hear what McCain was saying - which made her stupid - or unwilling to do so - which made her terrifying. How could Rohe in her speech and in her post totally miss - or totally ignore - the very core of McCain’s speech:
Americans should argue about this war. ... I believe the benefits of success will justify the costs and risks we have incurred. But if an American feels the decision was unwise, then they should state their opposition, and argue for another course. It is your right and your obligation. I respect you for it. I would not respect you if you chose to ignore such an important responsibility. But I ask that you consider the possibility that I, too, am trying to meet my responsibilities, to follow my conscience, to do my duty as best as I can, as God has given me light to see that duty.
Americans deserve more than tolerance from one another, we deserve each other's respect ...
In one installment of her compelling “change story”, neo-neocon is speaking of changes that occurred during the Vietnam War. She focuses on changes to the media and says (emphasis mine):
during this time, the press turned from government associate to government adversary, and questioned not only tactics, theory, and judgment, but even the goodwill and motives of those in charge of decisions.
That change by the media, that willingness to attribute bad will and worse motives to government has now spread through our political discourse and in far too many people has mutated into a willingness to believe the worst about all those who do not think as they do. Jean Rohe’s “strike” on John McCain was the embodiment of this disastrous turn of events. In her speech and even more in her HuffPo piece she consistently assumed the worst of McCain, crediting him with only bad will and bad motives. McCain asked that she “consider the possibility that I, too, am trying to meet my responsibilities, to follow my conscience, to do my duty as best as I can, as God has given me light to see that duty.” Yet in her arrogance that is the very thing Rohe will not do.
For all my distress over Rohe’s blindness, she was young and - as McCain himself said in his speech - the young believe they are always right. Far more jarring to me than Rohe was the response to her: HuffPo chose to showcase her as a heroine and the vast majority of the commenters* hailed her for “speaking truth to power”. Rohe insulted a man who was a war hero, sitting Senator, and - most important - an invited guest and did so in perfect safety. Yet, through some alchemy beyond my understanding, she was magically equated with the iconic student who faced a tank in Tiananmen Square. Yeah, right.
This may have been the first significant crack in my political view. I realized that it was McCain whose speech and reaction sounded moderate, reasonable, compassionate, intelligent, and healing while it was Rohe and her supporters in the comments who sounded like the vicious, divisive partisans the left always accused Republicans of being. In my comment to her post, I quoted Joseph Addison: “A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.” In this go-round, it was pretty clear it was Rohe and her supporters who were both stupid and uncharitable - not the dreaded Republican.
Hard on the heels of the Rohe post came the comment moderation disasters. First was the news that a HuffPo techie was posting comments in a possibly less than straightforward way; I found that disconcerting. Then came the confusion about HuffPo’s comment policy. Although the policy claimed comments were not edited or deleted based on political or ideological point of view, it became clear that individual posters were, in fact, deleting comments they didn’t like. Furthermore, one of the HuffPo co-founders - in a post that attempted to lay to rest the techie controversy - stated that (emphasis mine):
From a technical standpoint, it is challenging to process literally thousands of comments a day in a way that features the best comments and eliminates postings from spammers and trolls.
That sure sounded like editing for content.
This may sound trivial but it reinforced my earlier realization: by censoring those who disagreed, the very liberal Huffington Post was exhibiting the type of dissent-silencing behavior it regularly accused the Republicans of. Similarly, the techie’s forays into commenting and the co-founder’s first ignoring and later defending his behavior made it clear that at HuffPo the passionate conviction that one was right was sufficient to excuse unprincipled behavior - just like being “right” about amnesty for illegal immigrants excused deliberate dishonesty about the topic. But surely the idea that being on the side of the angels meant dishonesty was okay was the sort of bad belief the left claimed was the exclusive property of Republicans.
As I write all this down for the first time, I realize the incidents that bothered me so much at HuffPo arose out of issues I already had opinions about, opinions that conflicted with HuffPo’s stands. I opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants because I believe the law should be obeyed. If I had not, then HuffPo’s dishonest conflation of immigration with illegal immigration might never have registered with me. Similarly, I thought well of John McCain so Rohe’s attack on him made me want to read his speech for myself to see if what he said was really so awful. Had Rohe attacked someone I did not think well of, like George W. Bush, I would probably have accepted her interpretation of his remarks without further investigation. I would not have noticed that she did not include a link to his speech and I would certainly not have bothered to track it down on my own. Likewise for the comment imbroglio. Big on rules, I disliked the fact that a HuffPo techie was bending them. Since I commented rarely and then usually when I disagreed with a post, I had firsthand experience of my comments being stuck in moderation. Thus I was sensitive to the issue of how dissent was handled. If I had commented when I agreed with posts and had those comments been moderated promptly, I might never have thought twice about how HuffPo reacted to dissenting views.
These incidents weren’t enough to make me re-evaluate my self-identification as a liberal but they were enough to make me decide HuffPo was not a trustworthy source of information and they helped prepare the ground for the disillusionment I would suffer when the left turned misogynist - once again exhibiting a bad behavior it had always insisted was the sole province of Republicans.
At the same time I was reading - and becoming disenchanted with - the Huffington Post, I was also watching a little MSNBC and reading a lot of Andrew Sullivan. My disillusionment with them took longer but that’s a story for another day.
*****
* You’ll have to take my word about the comments to Rohe’s post. Those comments are no longer available; instead the foot of her post says, “Comments for this entry are currently under maintenance but will be restored soon.” This message has been up since at least June 4, 2008. The same message is up on a number of older posts at HuffPo, perhaps on all HuffPo posts before a certain date.
I’ve been thinking for a while about doing a post documenting my journey from a (mostly) liberal to a (mostly) conservative state of mind. I figured my narrative would be logical, structured, insightful, and so on. Then a relatively new and totally apolitical friend mentioned in an email that she'd been reading the Jezebel website. I replied that I’d pretend not to have heard that given Jezebel’s ugliness toward Sarah Palin. My friend replied that she only read the non-political stuff on Jezebel. As she put it, “if I had to choose between a headline that said ‘Migration habits of slugs’ and 'Latest from the campaign trail', it would be slugs all the way.” She then went on to ask:
But -- does this mean you are a Republican??? I would have thought you were a Democrat.
I explained myself to her and realized I had just written the short version of my journey post. Here’s what I wrote (cleaned up a little for spelling and grammar and with links added):
I'm in transition. A year ago I would have described myself as a Democrat and I pretty much would have described myself that way for my entire adult life. There were always cracks in the facade. I never quite bought the whole "police are the enemy" idea that liberals liked so much in the 60s and 70s. The bumper sticker "The next time you need help call a hippie" really resonated. I've always thought a strong military was a Very Good Thing and most Democrats are ambivalent about that. I just never bought the idea that really, really bad countries would love to have peace if only we'd stop spending so much money on weapons. I hated the Vietnam War but never felt really good about abandoning the South Vietnamese to the tender mercies of the North. And so on. So, a Democrat, but with Republican tendencies.
Then, for a very long time, feminism became virtually synonymous with being liberal and therefore Democratic. So that was another thing that made me think of myself as a Democrat/liberal and that identification stuck with me even as I thought less and less about feminism on a regular basis. And although I am not convinced the Iraq War was necessarily a bad idea, I do think torture and listening to phone calls without warrants and stuff like that is incredibly dangerous to the Constitution. And since I think the Constitution IS the United States, I didn't much care for George W. Bush.
Somewhere along the line, probably about two years ago, a very anti-Bush blog I read (Andrew Sullivan; nope, not linking) linked to a story from a pro-Bush blog (The Anchoress). It was on a non-political topic, probably something to do with religion. I read the story on the pro-Bush blog and then poked around a little and read some of her political stuff and, holy Toledo, it actually made sense. It didn't make me think that the damage Bush was doing to the Constitution was acceptable by a long shot but it did make me stop and think about stuff like, "How would I react if I was President and the US was subjected to a vicious sneak attack? Would I, for example, inter all Japanese-Americans in desert camps?"
Then Obama and his minions started treating Hillary Clinton like "a vicious lying bitch who ought to be killed" and my feminist radar, forged in the heat of the 70s, sprang to attention. This was misogyny of a kind and intensity not openly displayed in 30 years. The more the ”Boyz” attacked Hillary with sexist rhetoric, the more I hated Obama and his lying, skanky friends. And the more I realized this type of vicious sexism was becoming the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. My side, the side that was supposed to be synonymous with feminism.
So I started taking a closer look at some of the links in the pro-Bush blog and found all kinds of interesting bloggers. First I got referred to some blogs with military connections. Not the real milblogs - I simply can't understand them - but a wonderful blog written by a woman whose husband is career Marine but blogs little about the military and lots about social issues and what America means (Villainous Company). She did a blog on Hillary Clinton and sexism that literally made me cry. From her I got to a blog written by a guy who writes for the milblogs but also has his own more accessible blog (Grim’s Hall). From there to Rachel Lucas who is filthy-mouthed and hysterical; then TigerHawk who warns you if he is going to use bad language in a post and is very smart and very financial; then neo-neocon whom I adore (she's a therapist who writes a political blog with side trips into ballet); then The Corner at National Review Online, the veritable bastion of mainstream conservative writing, founded by William F. Buckley himself. For variety, I also read two super-liberal blogs both written by women who loathe Obama's misogyny and both of whom are far more liberal than I am and probably than I ever was (Anglachel’s Journal and Reclusive Leftist). And I worship at the feet of Greg Mankiw's economic blog.
Then Sarah Palin happened and virtually all of the Democratic/liberal feminists treated her like dirt. It's not that they hated her politics or thought she was too inexperienced; they went after her on sexist grounds. That was it. My one litmus test for being a feminist is that you don't attack other women in sexist terms. Almost the entire female membership of the Democratic Party failed that test. And the Obama machine just cranked up the misogynist weaponry it had used against Hillary Clinton - including the media - and aimed it at Sarah Palin. By the time the Democrats and the media got through with Palin, I'd have voted for her if she swore on a stack of Bibles that she thought Sacramento was a small country in Africa.
All of which is probably more than you want to know and a terribly roundabout way of saying what I started out with: I'm in transition. Republicans believe in free-market capitalism (me, too); in a strong military (me,too); in doing away with racial, ethnic, sexual, etc preferences (me, too, but I kind of like Title IX); in free trade (I'm really waffley on this one). They also generally oppose abortion (I'm for it but not unrestricted and never in the 3rd trimester) and gay marriage (I have real problems with forbidding some type of gay civil union partly because it becomes an economic burden for gays not to be able to marry). So economically I'm a Republican; socially I'm not a Republican but I'm certainly not a Democrat, at least not where the Democrats are now on abortion - ugh!
On the other hand, I'm all for protecting our national security but torture, warrant-less wiretapping, over-extension of Executive power? Nope. Too much of that and we'll save the country physically while destroying it ideologically. At the same time, I have no problem with ethnic profiling and while I think non-US citizens should have clearly defined rights in our legal system I don't insist they have the same rights US citizens do. I oppose illegal immigration (neither Presidential candidate did); I think English should be the official language and see no reason ballots need to be printed in any other language while also believing that in legal proceedings and medical situations interpreters are essential. I don't believe in Apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming but even if I did Obama's cap-and-trade policies would scare the bejeesus out of me. Somehow freezing in the dark doesn't seem to me to be a good way to save civilization.
So not only am I in transition, I also don't fit neatly anywhere.
What’s not in that stream of consciousness explanation is the exact mechanism by which I was converted: the realization that the sources I trusted to tell me the straight story were so biased that no hint of even-handedness existed; how that realization freed me to think about everything differently; and what I began to believe once I did that different thinking. But those parts of my journey are for another post - or posts.
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