A conservative and two liberals walk into a bar...
Admittedly, my own background as a full-time worker in George McGovern´s presidential bid (heaven help me!) and other Democratic campaigns in my ill-spent youth, together with my Republican dad's somewhat paradoxical union activism, lubricated the conversation a bit, as did the fact that my utter conviction that the well-being of the Republic demands the removal of Donald Fredovich Trump from the White House puts me in the Biden camp, too, however uncomfortably.
I haven't supported a Democrat for the White House since Michael Dukakis. The Democrats' position on abortion is one reason. Its ready and uncritical embrace of identity politics and every zany movement implausibly claiming to stand for social justice is another. The increasingly militant secularism (as in the sense of open hostility to religion, not the separation of church and state, which I don't believe is actually threatened by the concerns of reasonable Christian conservatives) of many in the Democratic Party is still another.
But the unfitness of Donald Fredovich for the office he holds, the catastrophic damage I'm convinced he's doing to the country and my conviction that the survival of the Republican Party as a viable alternative to the Bernie Sanders- Elizabeth Warren brand of left-wing craziness which seems on the brink of taking over the Democratic Party demands that by hook or by crook the GOP be reclaimed from the authoritarian and bigotted nationalist populism, the xenophobia, and the corrupt kleptocracy that has hijacked it. Donald Fredovich has to go down so hard that the Republican Party rejects him and all his works. Failure to burn out the malignancy will probably mean that the disease is terminal, And we can no longer afford a president who puts the interests of an unfriendly nation whose authoritarian approach to government he prefers to ours and to which his own financial interests are so deeply linked before those of America, even if his responsibility is mitigated by his own limited grasp of what he's doing.
Maybe especially then.
Odd that I should find it so much easier to not only discuss issues on which we profoundly disagree with such men than to discuss anything at all with the people with whom I agree about them. Odder still that we should do so in such a friendly way, make such marked progress in understanding each other, and part as friends, with a warm handshake, a sincere wish to converse further, and a satisfying sense of having been heard even if not agreed with.
But thatś what tends to happen when centrists discuss their differences. Maybe the scotch helped a bit. But I can help but reflect that until fairly recently the kind of conversation the three of us had at The Royal Mile the other night was how laws were passed, disputes settled, philosophical differences accommodated, and the nation governed.
It's the way democracies- or, if you're disposed to be pedantic, republics- are governed, and when they cease to be governed that way, they cease to be democracies or republics. They become oligarchies- governments by the few, even when their rhetoric is the rhetoric of populism.
The only question is from which end of the political spectrum the oligarchs come- of which side is going to "win," and which side is going to be suppressed.
Centrists somehow seldom have trouble having the kind of conversation the three of us had over Guinness and Laphroig at the Mile the other night, and we all agreed that centrists still constitute the large majority of Americans, I really don't think that there is a lack of a willingness to listen on the part of most Americans. It's just that we're letting the fanatics who don't listen do all the talking- and they don't listen.
Time to end the oligarchy of the fanatics, both left and right, who want to silence not only each other but any "traitor" who does listen to the other side.
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