Broad-brush conservatism

Tom Pinney

Without naming any names, there’s a certain columnist who publishes a certain column on a certain day early in the week that seeks to denigrate liberalism absent of understanding it.

The man dedicates his life to waxing superior about how liberalization represents the weaknesses of American society, how liberals have created a generation of pansy snowflakes that need safe spaces because they got participation trophies and had their feelings hurt.

In these pages, he has been known to say that the Democratic Party hates white men, is stuck in the past, and recently, has inundated college campuses with liberal brainwashers known as professors. Simply put, he participates in what I call “broad-brush conservatism.”

Broad-brush conservatism is a seek-and-destroy tactic employed by the far-right in an attempt to demonize the other side, criminalize, compromise, and perpetuate lies introduced by right-wing media strongholds. Like my favorite one, that Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim looking to invite terrorists to destroy America (despite a plethora of evidence to contradict every bit of that statement).

Most recently, this man said that colleges and universities are the last stronghold of liberalism, that they were centers of “cleansing and indoctrination” set up only to put out neoliberal robots hell-bent on social justice. I’m not saying he’s wrong, but he definitely isn’t right.

I personally have been to two colleges in my educational career, one of them located in a county which hasn’t voted Republican since I was a twinkle in my mother’s eye. In four years at Ohio University, my professors taught me to think for myself and draw my own conclusions.

The teachers in the political science department did such an impeccable job of playing both sides of the fence that, if you gave me a test today to guess which professors were Republican or Democrat, I would be guessing the whole way. Because strangely enough, the person responsible for evening me out and bringing me to the middle was a Republican who forgot his roots and betrayed me.

That’s when I became a moderate. It had nothing to do with my professors, it had nothing to do with my friends, it had nothing to do with my speech coach; it had to do with a man who campaigned for governor on the promise that he would reverse the defunding of libraries that his predecessor oversaw, and upon winning proceeded to cut even more funding to public libraries.

Almost simultaneously, I watched as a “Republican” Congress declared that their main priority was to deny Obama a second term instead of listening to their constituents. I watched as this “Republican” Congress gained a reputation worse than that of the infamous “Do-Nothing Congress” which was coincidentally also controlled by Republicans trying to obstruct a Democratic President in the second half of his first term.

The difference back then was that Republicans were taken to task on their decision to obstruct President Truman in 1948. In 2012, however, Republicans benefitted from broad-brush conservatism.

They painted cooperation as betrayal of “American” values which meant they had to be obstructionist, whitewashing themselves as the saviors of those values. And in 2016, they performed their magnum opus in getting a billionaire businessman to look like a man of the people.

The man was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth and a golden one in his other hand, but because of broad-brush conservatism such as what this certain columnist uses works, Donald J. Trump was able to relate to blue-collar workers while hiding his white-collar criminal ties and successfully pull off the single greatest political heist in history.

Now, this isn’t a time for liberals to paint conservatism with a broad brush, which is why I didn’t do that. You will never see me write the word “righties” in reference to conservatives, say that “all (whatever group of people) like/do/think…” or anything like that because broad brushes leave no room for the individual.

Instead, it is our duty as Americans to favor facts over broad-brush punditry. We live in a time where just about any information we could possibly want is so easily accessible that to be uninformed is to be irresponsible.

Information frays broad brushes.

I’m not going to be able to convince the columnist, whoever he might be, that his broad-brush conservatism is actually what’s wrong with this country, nor am I going to be able to convince him to listen to compromise or conflicting ideas with an open mind because it is clearly already closed.

But what I can do is ask you, as readers who choose to inform themselves, to branch out and listen to other points of view. Watch pundits with whom you disagree. Have discussions with people that believe differently than you do without hollering them down. Make an attempt to understand the other side; you won’t just understand yours better, but you’ll have the perspective of where others are coming from, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll stop with all this petty infighting.

It’s time for compromise and cooperation to come back into fashion, to no longer be taboo, and we can’t do that if we spend our days screaming and ridiculing each other to death.

We need to be human to each other again. Because THAT – not broad-brush conservatism, not hardline partisanship, not neoliberal/neoconservative idealism – is what truly makes America great.