Moderation, respect and humility: How Conservatives and Liberals

Ask my age and I'll tell you that I'm old enough to remember an age of relatively peaceful - and even constructive - coexistence among Americans, whether they self-identified as "conservative" or "liberal." 

I say "relatively peaceful" because I don't mean to imply that people didn't have strong feelings about issues, or that there weren't passionate disagreements.

But there wasn't the raw, nasty, unreasoning hatred that I see today.

Ask my age, and I'll tell you that I'm old enough to realize that this nation needs vibrant conservatism and liberalism - BOTH - in order to realize the full potential of our possibilities and opportunities. 

Sometimes the bus needs to turn right, and sometimes left.

HUMILITY:  "We" (whichever side) don't have all the answers, or even the best answers, to each and every social issue or problem.  "We" can be wrong...even dead wrong.

RESPECT:  That someone holds a different view from yours is NEVER a valid reason to question their integrity, their patriotism or their character.

MODERATION:  Any philosophy - political or otherwise - is capable of being taken to extremes, and in any camp there will be extremists.  When those extremists take over the camp, they threaten the very survival of the camp and must be deposed and expelled from the body politic.

...and this is where the liberal camp finds itself today.  Not to deny that there is some housecleaning and expulsion to be done on the conservative side, but the recent election results must be properly understood, and I see no evidence that liberals have grasped the import of the calamity that fell upon them on November 8th.

It was not a tactical problem.

It was not a money problem.

It was not an organizational problem.

It was a rejection of liberal extremism.  Not a rejection of liberalism per se, but of the extremists who have taken over the liberal camp.

It's happened on the conservative side too, believe me.

Whether or not we can return to a healthy yin-yang relationship between conservatives and liberals will depend, in no small part, on whether the signal that was sent on 11/8 will be properly understood, and on whether, then, the liberals purge themselves of the poisonous extremists who have taken over the party.

I'm very much afraid that I don't see that happening.  A moderate challenged Pelosi for her position, and he lost.  Other liberal insiders are proposing the most shameful radicals for positions of leadership in the party. 

I don't think they learned anything.  If they don't grasp what really has happened to them and correct course, they'll likely lose even more seats in the next midterm.

Conservatives need liberals, and liberals need conservatives, engaged in lively exchange of ideas, and each one constraining the possible excesses of the other.  Either one without the other is not a healthy situation.

The truth very often lies somewhere in the middle, in the boundary region between opposing points of view, and it's in this region that we can come together, hammer out solutions, and move forward. 

I'm old enough to be convinced of that.