The Radical Movement of Moderate Independent Extremism
Sensible voters are lurking in the shadows of liberty.
I hate talking about politics. I hate listening to people talk about politics. I hate watching political debate on television, and I hope that this will be the only time that I write about it publicly.
The vast majority of political discourse these days seems to come from the far right and left, while moderate, sensible people are stuck in the middle, being spun around in circles and rarely having their voice heard because it’s not extreme enough to make the news.
In popular media culture, accusations of extremism have become the norm, even though it’s mostly untrue and I’m convinced that very few people actually share these views. But what’s left in the wake of this is a people who are less likely to lean liberal or lean conservative, and more likely to become vehemently anti-conservative or anti-liberal in reaction, doing and saying whatever it takes to destroy the opposing viewpoint. This in turn fuels the cycle of more extremist propaganda.
It seems that when it comes to political leanings, many people have developed a sort of fan mentality. They root for their political team the same way they root for their favorite football team, giving their die-hard support even when their team is terrible. And the team they root for is often hereditary. This is a problem on both sides of the aisle.
The problem with this way of thinking is that the game never ends. The team you’re rooting for is never going to win. Harboring this attitude over time only makes people more angry and more vicious in their attacks until it eventually devolves into violence.
My intention here, however, is to present something that I hope will encourage a sense of understanding. I do still believe that most people want the same things, even if they’re not sure how to get there. I’m not so much interested in who is right or wrong because both sides are right and both sides are wrong. I’m only interested in trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, and I’ll try to defend what deserves defending from both sides.
Call me an extremist, but I still believe it’s possible to sympathize with both sides of an argument. Most people have good reasons for believing what they believe, and there is certainly no virtue in ignoring common sense in order to maintain an identity within a particular party or movement.
In Defense of Liberals
In order to give a sense of where I’m coming from, it might be important to say that I grew up in a working-class family of union-democrats. I have a genuine love for others and a desire to see everyone granted the opportunity to pursue happiness. I hate injustice. I love peace. I respect and admire the natural beauty of God’s creation. My values have not changed since my upbringing.
In my experience growing up as a democrat, it seemed to me that conservatives had a habit of simply generalizing all liberals as communists, while refusing to appreciate their hearts and stand alongside them for the basic values that we all agree on.
Liberals are generally good-hearted people who see suffering and injustice around them and want to do what they can to stop it. They don’t want to see people fail. They believe in equality, peace, and often have surprisingly conservative views about sustaining our planet. I’m still trying to figure out why so many conservatives have such an apathetic attitude about conservation. It makes no sense.
I’m not an environmentalist, but I have enough sense to see the effects of our techno-industrialized, commercialized, urbanized, electrified and digitized society that we’ve created over the last century, not only on our landscape, but on our culture and our own bodies and minds as well.
There are a select handful of personal liberties that the republican party makes a point of defending, and they are notably the champions of small government, at least in theory. But much of their efforts are spent defending corporate liberty, which is potentially more destructive and oppressive than any big government.
Though there are certainly rights and privileges that need protecting for all business owners, large corporations often abuse that freedom to pursue selfish interests while exploiting the public, to monopolize markets while smaller local businesses suffer, and to increase profits while overlooking harm to consumers.
By creating a political system that was consciously designed to not allow politicians to have much power, and what little power they do have is not guaranteed for very long, a power vacuum is created. Our founding fathers were not ignorant of this, and it’s why Thomas Jefferson firmly believed that freedom was dependent on our remaining a primarily agricultural nation. In a letter to John Jay he wrote:
“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds… I consider the class of artificers as the panders of vice, and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned.”¹
Many would argue that these words were an exaggeration written simply out of his own bias, but there is a logic to his opinion, and it seems to have been proven over time. In a letter to James Madison, he again voiced his fears of an urbanized, industrial America.
”When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there.”
Perhaps a purely agrarian society is unrealistic, but it’s easy to understand his idealism in light of our current situation. Because of advancements in industry, even agriculture has been conquered by corporate control to the point that the average farmer has a very difficult time making a living. Small businesses in every market struggle to stay afloat.
However feasible his ideals may or may not have been, he envisioned a nation free of the madness created by industry, and free of the “voluntary slavery” of citizens to it. And he certainly opposed any power, government or otherwise, that wished to manipulate and enslave the minds of individuals.
“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
With commercial industry, in all of its wretchedness of greed and power struggle, now coupled with the invasive, mind-controlling potential of computer technology and the groupthink/mobthink collective consciousness of the internet which has the power itself to destroy people, enslaving us all to a thought-policing political correctness, the ultimate tyranny of mind, our forefathers are certainly rolling in their graves.
Big business is not only threatening our planet, but our health, our culture, our dignity, and our humanity. It’s not just about industries eating each other and piping their excrement into our rivers. It’s food producers feeding us virtual poison. It’s massive distribution companies who have actually managed to make it seem inconvenient to shop locally. It’s manufacturing companies doing away with human labor or moving their operations in search of cheaper labor. It’s tech companies, or any company, organization or group that employs invasive computer and media technologies, having the ability to enslave, oppress, and control people’s minds with more power than any tyrannical dictator.
Our political system, fortunately, is designed in such a way that we do not need to fear politicians in this way in America. I only fear individuals in government when they succumb to fear, and are willing to sacrifice our freedom in response to it. But generally, it’s not individuals in government who I’m afraid of. I am afraid of the powers who exploit the freedoms that our government protects.
In Defense of Conservatives
I want to spend a bit more time defending the conservative mindset which I believe is even more severely misunderstood and shamefully misrepresented in the media. Most conservatives do appreciate the same values that motivate liberals. They may disagree with the policies they employ, but they are not in opposition with their motives.
When conservatives vote against policies designed to help people, it’s not because they don’t want people to be helped, they simply have a different idea of whose responsibility it is to help them. Charging the federal government with the responsibility of benevolence is like trimming your fingernails with an axe.
Instead of taxing citizens to support an all-encompassing government system of benevolence and control, conservatives prefer to see a distribution of our dollars and service into local efforts that deal directly with the specific issues of each community in which the federal government would never be able to address properly, and in many cases would cause more harm than good.
Conservatives hold this to be true in most facets of life. Education, health, our livelihoods; these are not the responsibility of the federal government. It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that these opportunities are able to exist, but it is not their responsibility to provide them or enforce them. Employing the government to oversee these issues would not only make them extremely inefficient, as all government run programs are, but it’s also a road toward authoritarianism and the loss of freedom. This has been proven throughout history.
There are many individuals who are very generous with their wealth. May God bless them for it. If wealthy people choose to redistribute their wealth, they are certainly free to do so. But forcing a redistribution of wealth at the discretion of a government and trusting them to do what they believe is best for everyone is dangerously contrary to the fundamentals of American liberty, and is continually nudging us in the direction of tyranny.
Many liberal minded people have a perception of conservatives that they are heartless, hateful, greedy, or ignorant. I used to think the same thing. But to really appreciate what conservative people value, we have to look back at what our forefathers valued, and be able to see how it relates to our current situation.
In 18th century Europe, there was a rigid social hierarchy established by heredity. The common people were at the mercy of the government for their well-being, and dependent on the benevolence of the wealthy for their livelihood.
Our ancestors, however, had the idea that common people should have the freedom and the right to depend on themselves, and most certainly to never allow themselves to become dependent on a government.
Our forefathers also understood that freedom and security are in a balance with each other. So, this was the question that they grappled with at the birth of our nation, and the question that conservatives still grapple with. How much of our freedom are we willing to sacrifice in the name of security?
Many thought none of it should be bartered. We often refer to the Pennsylvania Assembly’s Reply To The Governor from November 11, 1755. Although Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues were actually arguing in favor of a tax to provide weapons to private citizens so they could defend themselves, they described the sentiment of the people this way:
“…we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
The fact remains that freedom is still in a balance with security. The more we depend on government, and the more individual power we relinquish in favor of government control, the less free we become. This is the reason we have always resisted communism and socialism. And until recently, this was the common principle that defined the American way of life.
The primary agenda of the modern left is essentially to make sure that everyone is provided for and taken care of equally. Again, I think we all agree with those values on a personal level, but when we are talking about the role of a government, it becomes a problem with conservatives.
For one, when the government takes care of everyone, no one gets taken care of very well, especially in a country this large. Two, when the government takes care of everyone, it effectively forces people to become dependent on the government.
For many reasons, we are all currently at risk of becoming dependent on the government for our well-being, dependent on the government for our livelihood, dependent on the government for our security, our retirement, our health, our education… This is exactly what our ancestors fought and died to escape.
They firmly believed that it is not the responsibility of the government to take care of people this way, and we as a people should be firmly opposed to any form of government that wishes to assume that responsibility.
Most modern young liberals pride themselves in being forward thinking revolutionaries opposing the American establishment. Conservatives, however, see it the other way around. From the conservative perspective, the American establishment is the revolution. We’ve been living in an ongoing revolution for the last 250 years, and conservatives worry that liberals want to go backward to a kind of government-dependent society reminiscent of pre-revolutionary times.
Of course, our quality of life is drastically more comfortable now than it was in 18th century Europe, and our democratic political system is certainly more fair than it was then, but does that justify returning to pre-freedom principles? This is the question we all need to think about.
Why do we say, “Freedom Isn’t Free?”
We often hear the phrase “freedom isn’t free” and we think of the sacrifices made by our military, but this phrase alludes to an idea that is much more universal than that. There is a price that we all pay to be free.
Knowing that freedom is in a balance with security, our freedom depends on our ability to accept a certain level of insecurity. We have to be able to accept that some people are going to succeed while others fail.
This is why the United States originally became the envy of the world. It wasn’t because of our wealth. It’s because we have the opportunity to control our own destiny. Having that control could lead to wealth or it could lead to poverty, but it’s the opportunity of self-control that leads immigrants to seek refuge here. When we start employing the government to force an even playing field, we will have lost the very thing that made us a refuge.
Conservatives believe that we have to always remain vigilant to make sure we don’t end up back in the same situation that our ancestors fought so hard to escape from. Most modern immigrants would likewise agree that they don’t want to see their new homeland end up under the same dark cloud of dependence as the nations they just escaped from.
Why Do Rural People Lean Right?
In modern times, the American dream means something different to everyone. Originally it was simply the idea that a person could live by the fruit of his own labor. It was the belief that communities had the strength, wisdom, and generosity to be able to take care of each other and not be dependent on the government or the wealthy for their livelihood.
For many, however, it seems to have twisted into a challenge of acquiring wealth. We’ve come to believe that happiness is synonymous with financial success. We have to remember, however, that freedom is not just about success. It’s also about the freedom to fail, or even the freedom to give up or to not even try. Some would prefer the freedom to live autonomously and alone. Just because not everyone is succeeding is no cause for change. That will always be the case in a free society.
People who are wealthy often make the mistake of believing that all poor people wish they were wealthy too, and it’s often the wealthy who fight hardest to intervene in the lives of the poor. They don’t even realize that many of these people don’t want their help.
There are many people, particularly in rural areas, who are very happy with their poor but free and self-sufficient way of life. They prefer to take care of themselves even if it means living without many of the modern luxuries that have come to define our culture. Again, what’s most valuable about the American way of life is not the wealth it affords, but the opportunity it provides to be self-empowered instead of government-dependent.
Many would argue that these modern luxuries have actually destroyed and replaced our culture, especially since the rise of computer and internet technologies. The Amish exemplify this idea better than anyone. There is a common perception of Amish people simply being religious zealots, but we overlook the sense of culture and community combined with an unwavering independence, rebel spirit, and the physical and mental grit that defines their way of life. It’s really quite impressive.
This is the reason why rural areas tend to vote republican. Liberal people tend to think it’s because rural people are ignorant, but that is far from true. It’s because rural people generally have a greater sense of freedom, live with less crime, are usually able to use the surrounding land to grow and hunt their own food, and are generally more comfortable even with relatively little income.
There are a lot of people, not just the Amish, who are offended by the idea of a government that provides for them. Our forefathers were certainly offended by it. And as someone who has at times lived below the poverty line and working class at best, I can say that I would still rather stay poor and die young living free by the small fruits of my own labor, than to live a long and undignified life at the mercy of my government. I think liberals severely underestimate how many people feel this way.
Self-Security
There is an argument, as Thomas Jefferson believed, that self-reliance is actually a more secure way of living. Speaking from my own family’s history, my grandparents often said that the great depression was just another story in the news to them.
My grandfather even went as far as to say that he actually felt a lot better off than most during that time. This is coming from a guy who dropped out of school after 8th grade because he didn’t have any shoes. But he said that while the folks in town were standing in line for a loaf of bread, he and his family were staying fat on pork, fresh milk, and vegetables that they raised themselves. By being self-reliant and not depending on the government or a corporation for their livelihood, their lives remained stable. Poor for sure, but stable.
This is also a testament to how backward our priorities are in modern culture and an argument for Jefferson’s ideal of an agrarian society. Our modern culture compels us to find jobs in the city, then waste half of our pay check on cell phones, internet service, satellite T.V., or shoes. My grandpa didn’t have shoes, but he had everything he needed right there at home.
As he was talking about his situation back then compared to his situation now, he said “We didn’t even realize how good we had it back then.”
The point is not that we should return to a pre-industrial way of life, but simply that people are capable of providing their own security much more effectively than the government can. Particularly since the industrial revolution, and this is why I think the Amish may have done well by avoiding it, and Jefferson may have been right in warning us against it, we’ve returned to a situation not unlike 18th century Europe. I say that not only because a small percentage of the population controls all of the wealth, but also because the rest of us have become dependent on them to give us jobs.
All the while, those same companies that many of our grandparents gave up their farms to serve are betraying us, replacing human labor with robots and computers whenever possible, or moving their operations overseas whenever profitable.
A Reasonable Expectation of Government
Most of the national political debate is carried on by people with axes to grind on issues that really belong in state or local debates. This country is way too big with way too many cultures to expect everyone to come to an agreement on issues that affect people very differently depending on where they’re from and what they value. This is why we have state and local governments. We’re doing a poor job of taking advantage of this system. I really believe that so much of our political stress would be alleviated if we stopped allowing the federal government so much authority.
We can’t force the entire country to submit to policies that are only beneficial to those who live in particular areas. Whether it’s urban areas demanding a progressive government or rural areas demanding a conservative government, we need to let state and local governments do what they need to do to represent their residents, and keep the federal government out of it.
In a country this large with so many different cultures, values, and religious beliefs, a federal government that works for everyone is not possible. And anyone who says they have a plan for a government that works for everyone is either extremely naïve, or a sensational liar. Therefore, the best-case scenario is a federal government that does only what it absolutely has to, leaving most matters to the state and local governments, or preferably to no government at all. This is the kind of system that our founding fathers envisioned, and it is our best chance of preserving American liberty.
Liberals are not all communists. They are simply concerned people who see how republican policies have allowed society to be dominated by the interests of only the wealthiest individuals and by the interests of large corporations, while common people work the hardest and struggle the most.
Conservatives, likewise, are not just greedy or ignorant. In fact, the majority of them are quite the opposite. They are intelligent, humble, and simple people who value the ideals of freedom that our ancestors fought and died for. They believe in the church’s and the people’s ability and responsibility to serve our communities in such a way that the government shouldn’t have to, and quite frankly shouldn’t be allowed to.
I realize that some people might value a government-provided security more than freedom, and government-forced economic equality more than opportunity, and those people will scoff at my devotion to my principles. I have to accept that. I just hope that those people can likewise appreciate that many others value freedom at all cost, and most of us fall somewhere in between.
[1]: Jefferson, Thomas. Thomas Jefferson on Democracy. Edited by Saul K. Padover, Mentor Books, 1939.
