Common ground always slopes left

Areader emailed me recently to complain about a pro-Trump conservative columnist I had published. She believed his “farfetched” column was “pathetic,” and that “more moderate less polarized opinions” were necessary to save my paper from disgrace.

Interestingly, that day I ran a column by the Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page — a liberal writer I like using because he is more thoughtful and level-headed than most hysterics out there. Plus, he’s from Chicago, and that makes his perspective more valuable than the bubble-wrapped thinkers trapped in the Boston-Washington corridor or on the left coast.

In this column, Page, too, was complaining about polarization, per a new book by Ezra Klein of Vox. Citing Klein, Page attributed our polarization to a fragmented media climate, “identity” or “tribal” politics, and campaign finance laws.

In part, Page notes, “It’s hard to believe that, as Klein points out, the American Political Science Association in the 1950s complained that the two parties weren’t more polarized, so voters would have more ideological choices. Today in Washington, Congress and the White House have been gridlocked by too much polarization.”

Ever the contrarian, I say the Eisenhower-era poli sci-types got it right.

Many of us see the chasm in Washington and think our system is broken, dysfunctional, ripe for overhaul.

Before you believe that, you must understand what my reader, or Page, or Klein, or other liberals mean when they complain about polarization.

What they really want is for Republican politicians, thought leaders and, eventually, voters to think and behave like them, to abandon conservative ideas and principles, and reject President Donald Trump.

I hesitate to use the word arrogance, but I cannot think of another that better describes how liberals are routinely perplexed that half the country disagrees with them.

Take guns, for example. We hear ad nauseam from them about the need for “common sense” gun laws, even though the data show that America has gotten much safer as gun sales have exploded and as we’ve loosened the reins on our citizens’ ability to own and carry them.

But those liberals do know that they can embrace Republicans who swing left.

In 1992 Tom Bethell, a columnist with The American Spectator, a conservative magazine, captured this phenomenon by coining the term “strange new respect.”

Bethell was commenting on a New York Times editorial that chastised freshman Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for not exhibiting the same “pattern of growth” as his colleague Justice David Souter.

Souter, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, was considered a reliable establishment conservative, a product, much like Bush, of New England’s pragmatic Old Yankee culture. Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, lauded Souter as “a home run for conservatives.”

But on the court, Souter voted increasingly with its liberal bloc. For example, a couple of days before the Times took its editorial swipe at Thomas, its news staff noted in an article how Souter was “growing,” in part by casting a critical vote to uphold abortion.

In a 2018 Politico piece, veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield noted Souter followed a long line of GOP-backed justices who looked right on paper — and then voted left. “The blowback from Souter,” Greenfield wrote, “made the Supreme Court a key — if not the key — issue for conservatives when judging candidates for high office.”

But it’s not just the court. Circling back to Bethell, as Souter demonstrated, so-called conservatives earn that “strange new respect” from Democrats and the mainstream media once they start siding with liberals and bashing their own side. In a contemporary context, think Sen. Mitt Romney.

Thus, the “strange new respect” only flows one way. Most liberals either see nothing on the conservative side to agree with, or know that saying anything positive about, say, Trump, pro-life activists, gun owners or ICE agents, invites the progressive mob to eat them alive.

Yet this attitude also creates a blind spot, in that many liberals, while reflexively opposing conservative ideas, and Trump specifically, cannot see how they contribute to the polarization they decry. They, like the “strange new respect” conservatives who despise Trump, prefer instead to only bemoan the tens of millions of right-wing proles who embrace the president out of fatigue with the Souterization of their own pols.

Keep two things in mind. First, our system is built on and for competing, if not warring, ideologies. And secondly, sharper contrasts make a more vibrant picture.

I’m all in on seeking common ground. But why must the common ground always slope to the left?

Bill Thompson (bill.thompson@theledger.com) is the editorial page editor of The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla.