Mudita Journal

An Open Letter to Leftist Role Models

November 9, 2004 · Filed under: Politics
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I had never heard of Dean Esmay before I read his open letter to John Perry Barlow (who wrote songs with the Grateful Dead for many years and is sometimes referred to as “The Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace”). But his letter is so poignant and honest and relevant to my feelings about the election, that I’m reprinting the opening paragraphs here.

I hope you’ll read the entire letter. It starts:

John Perry Barlow, author of one of my favorite documents on the Internet (“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”) and perhaps my favorite Grateful Dead song (“Cassidy,”) recently penned a lengthy piece entitled “Magnanimous Defeat.” I found myself, as a Bush supporter, alternately bemused by the stereotypes that Mr. Barlow seems to embody, and yet moved by his effort to overcome at least some of them. A passionate Bush hater, Barlow seems to want to try now to understand his Bush-supporting fellow Americans better. He seems quite sincere, and I’m moved by that.

I don’t know that he’ll read this, but since he seems sincere, and there may be others like him who are sincere, I’ll try to explain what the cultural divide has looked like from my end these last couple of years.

For the last two and a half years I have been writing this weblog. Through no intention of my own I eventually became what some call a “warblogger,” although it’s never a label I’ve embraced all that strongly. Is this because I’m a Republican? No more than Mr. Barlow. I’ll vote Republican when it suits my purposes and I’ll vote for a Democrat when it suits my purposes and if I don’t like any candidate I won’t vote at all. The Democratic Party here in Michigan a couple of years ago did a damnfool thing and locked voters out of its candidate selection process so I can’t be a registered Democrat here but if they didn’t have such idiot rules I’d have no hesitation about registering Democratic.

Am I a conservative, a “right winger?” Sure, I guess so, if you count someone who’s pro-choice on abortion, is flabbergasted at the nastiness and selfishness and mean-spiritedness of anyone who would put someone in jail for smoking pot, favors gay marriage, supports human rights organizations, and would love to see a world united in democratic governments a “conservative right-winger.”

I think what bemused me most when reading your missive, Mr. Barlow, was your description of the young man who was probably popular and on the football team and supported Bush, while you the nerdy outsider supported Kerry, and you saw the whole thing through some sort of 50s-vs.-60s lens. Nothing could show me just how insular so many on the left have become than that. Few of the war supporters I know fit such stereotypes at all. “Think for yourself, question authority” is something a lot of us sucked in with our mothers’ milk–and by the way, you know we kids who were born in the 1960s are now in our 30s and 40s and parents ourselves, right? A lot of us grew up being told to question authority, and a lot of that authority we now question is the left-wing orthodoxy of your generation, an orthodoxy many of us bought into as it was taught to us in school, in the books we read, and especially in the universities, not to mention in a lot of what we see out of Hollywood today.

We came to reject a lot of that orthodoxy as we got older and learned to think better for ourselves–not because we “embraced the establishment,” but because we were questioning the establishment. You may laugh, but a whole lot of what’s “questioning the establishment” to you seems like the establishment itself to a hell of a lot of people like myself. Culturally, at least.

That being the case, there are are some things I don’t see how we can ever agree on. For example, you seem to unquestioningly accept the left-wing orthodoxy that the war in Iraq has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Where you get such an idea I don’t know, but from where I sit, having talked to both Iraqis and to soldiers fighting over there, that is, not to put too fine a point on it, A STEAMING CROCK OF HATE-MONGERING SHIT.

You also, in your missive, speak of watching “Fahrenheit 9/11.” I hope you’re aware that that movie uses all the same propaganda techniques as those of the great Fascist and Stalinist film makers such as Goebbels and Eisenstein. Indeed, I must tell you that after I finally watched that film, my hands were literally shaking. Not because of my great love and devotion to Bush (which I’m sure the left-wing stereotypers would love to believe) but because I had not seen such concentrated hatred and dishonest propaganda put to film in my lifetime. By comparison, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will seemed tame. (Yes, yes, parts of it were funny. Leni Riefenstahl had funny bits in her movies too. So what?)

None of this is because I don’t think for myself and question authority, John. None of it’s because I just want to obey and faithfully believe whatever Bush tells me. It’s because I do think for myself and I question “authorities” who make and distribute disingenuous hate-propaganda, making themselves hundreds of millions of dollars throwing raw meat to rage-filled leftists, telling them what they want to hear regardless of whether there’s any real honesty behind it. I also question university professors, Hollywood celebrities, and opportunistic politicians who want to tell me that “Bush lied” simply because it will help them win an election.

Calling someone a liar when you know that maybe he was just wrong is a form of lie too, by the way.

There’s more, so please keep reading.

PS. I found this note from a commenter to be pretty profound, as well:

First, excellent post Dean, truely excellent. Thanks.

I have another bit of life experience that may help to illustrate why the extreme left has such a hard time listening to the right.

As I have mentioned I’ve been a political activist on and off for the last 10 years. I raised money, organized rallies, created ads, bumper stickers, and signs. But for any number of reasons I was not the “face” of any particular group or movement. I didn’t hide it, nor did I flaunt it. As a result the left really had no idea who I was nor my political leanings. So in 2000 I was invited to spend election night watching the returns at the local democrat post election party.

Here is what I learned. The activists on the left HATE the people on the right with a venom that I found profoundly distrubing. As the returns came in, each Republican defeat was cheered and evoked invective that most would reserve for child molesters. Wishes for future personal disasters of the most vile kind filled the room to the agreement and deep satisfaction of those present. For the people in that room, largely adults in their 30′s and 40′s, mostly parents with children, their opposite numbers on the right were the personification of evil on this earth.

I’ve often thought about that night. Trying to understand it. After watching this election cycle, I’ve come to believe that the left believe we hate them as much as they hate us. Thus our attempts reach them with reason and discounted and distrusted and anything they do to defeat us is justified.

There is another component to consider. I doubt very much that the nonactivists in the democrat party are aware of this. So they attempt to weigh the message from the left and the right. Many of them probably say something like, “either my party is run by a bunch of lunatics, or the right has really screwed things up”. The reasonable assumption is that the right has messed up.

I wish I had answers for this, but I do not. I find it very very sad. What a mess.

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  • James Heaps-Nelson

    I ended up voting for Bush on Nov. 2, but only because, incredibly, he came across as the less statist, less spineless candidate in this election. We will see whether Bush is really a lover of freedom or a purveyor of big deficits, prescription drug giveaways, making sure gay people don’t get married, steel tariffs, less H1B visas, the Patriot act, foreign aid to Africa, defender of the rights of embryos etc. There is a mid-term election in two years and I will be watching. Jim Heaps-Nelson

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