Rusted Sky

At last, someone on the left opens up his eyes and actually LOOKS at what he's been seeing all along.

OpinionJournal - Extra

My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.

This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing--in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against "communists and their fellow travelers." The word "McCarthyism" became a red flag for liberals, signifying the far right's fascistic tactics of labeling anyone a "communist" or "socialist" who favored an active federal government to help the middle class and the poor, and to level the playing field.

I came to believe that we liberals couldn't possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years--with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage--I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony.

Realistically, though, it's hard to look objectively on something and label it bigotry or hatred when all your friends and acquaintances are saying pretty much the same thing. For instance, take a look at the DU or Kos community. By my standards, there's a lot of bigotry and hatred on display there, for (to my mind) very little reason. But to them, it's all normal - everyone's on the same wavelength and there's nothing to be at all concerned about. They've normed out their behavior, and on the ammeter they're sitting nicely at zero. They're neither left or right, they're smack-dab in the center as far as they're concerned. Anyone who doesn't agree with them is wrong. And since they're right, anyone bringing up facts that show them to be mistaken is just plain wrong from the start and any premise they bring up can be safely ignored.

You might also say the same thing about sites like LGF, Instapundit or other 'rightward' blogs. However, what I see there aren't opinions that are cast in solid steel. Give evidence (and the standard of evidence is significantly higher than "I think that...") and opinions and ideas change accordingly.

Hate? Yeah, you'll see hate there. But it's not a generalized hate, it's extremely focused. There's no general hatred of Muslims as a group, only those who want to see us either converted to their specific sect or dead. And frankly, I fall into that category. You want to live your life worshiping Bucky the Sacred Beaver and his Twelve Logs of Righteous Living? Go right ahead, it's no skin off my nose. Where I get ticked off is when YOU insist I've got to memorize the Twelve Logs and worship Bucky, or you'll kill me.

At that point, you go from friendly and amusing neighbor to downright threat. I don't like that. I'm more than willing to let you live your life how you want. But when you insist on turning me into your enemy, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise when I start acting like it.

The funny thing is, I see myself as being in the middle. There's a lot of folks to the left of me, there's a lot of folks to the right. And that's pretty much a constant of our politicial viewpoints - no matter where you are on an objective scale, from frothing left to frothing right, YOU are in the center.

And at some point you look around and go 'I'm in the center of THIS?" Then you move along and establish a center elsewhere...

In the next few months, with the Lieberman loss and the NetRoots crowd bouncing around in triumph, I think a lot of the moderate Democrats are going to be looking at the party they've loved for a long time and finding it unrecognizeable. The Democratic Party that Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman were once proud members of may be no more, replaced by a changling that looks like the DNC, but really isn't. And they owe the country more alleigance than the party that left them a long time ago...

J.