A farewell to reason, part II

I've been lamenting what I see as the American inability to have a civil, productive political discourse for quite a while. At the ripe old age of 22, I often find myself wondering...has it always been this way?

I consider myself more politically steeped than most people I know, if nothing else than because I started following politics at such a young age, and I can't remember a time when the tone of debate in this country was so regressed and literally pathetic.

I suppose it started with the election in 2000 when the electorate was so evenly divided that one vote on either side could be the difference between a victory and a loss. Then, following 9/11, there was an unprecedented sense of unity -- for about 5 minutes. After that, political civility in this country reached an all time low.

Extreme, scathing rhetoric is evident on both sides, but seems to be more pronounced on the ideological left. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of hatred directed at the President and conservatives in general. It's literally like a contest to see who can spew the most hateful sentiment.

It's quite sad, really. Not just because it's evidence of the uglier side of human nature to waste so much energy on blind, useless hatred, but mostly because it starts a massive downward spiral of rhetoric that usually ends up with both sides with their proverbial fingers stuck in their ears, yelling 'Lalala I can't hear you.'

Hatred is not a platform. Opposition for the sake of opposition is not a platform. Hate Bush, Michael Moore, Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, Liberals, etc. to your heart's content. But if you don't have an alternative vision to offer the American public, odds are you're not going to get anywhere.

That's why John Kerry lost the election. Pretty much the only thing he had going for him was the fact that he wasn't Bush. Liberals would've much rather had Howard Dean on the ticket. His harsh, abrasive rhetoric against the President and his admission that he 'hates Republicans and everything they stand for' made liberals everywhere euphorically gleeful because he validated what they'd been feeling deep down inside since the 60's but had been afraid to say. But then even the liberals bailed on Howard Dean, because even they knew he could never be elected. That doesn't mean, however, that anyone changed their feelings...they just changed the packaging.

Currently, hating Bush, bashing Republicans and saying things like 'No blood for oil' is chic. Liberalism is en vogue. You're not cool unless you think Bush is a war-mongering moron. (Side note: I've always had problems resolving how President Bush can be BOTH a moron AND an evil mass murderer. The two seem to be mutually exclusive. Hitler might have been evil, but you're not going to get an entire country to go along with a plan of world domination and genocide by being a bumbling dumbass. It's one or the other.)

But the more the liberal movement, or any political movement, continues to deny reality, the more isolated they're bound to become. Eventually, they're going to end up like Hollywood at the Oscars. They're just going to get together, pat each other on the back, and make themselves feel important. But no one's really going to care. Most Americans will just ignore them.

George Bush is not a mass murderer. He's not a racist, and he's not to blame for black people being poor. And basing an entire political movement on such ideas and the hatred that goes along with them not only demeans the political process in America, but it demeans the movement itself and anyone who's a part of it.

There's a cheesy old cliche that says something like 'if you're not a part of the solution, you're a part of the problem.' It's at least somewhat applicable in this case. If you're not offering any viable alternatives, your hatred of the President and his party is utterly useless and juvenile. You're not only making an ass of yourself, but you're preventing any meaningful discussion from taking place.

I may well be a conservative, but I'm also a very reasonable person. I'm all in favor of discussing disagreements, but 'I hate Bush, you're a Nazi, and I want to kick you in the face' is not a response to 'what would you do differently?'