The Left Needs to Own Their Crazies

Here is an example of how the typical true left thinks:  Posted on Daily Kos   I said in a prior post that the left needs someone to demonize and that would be people who dare to call themselves Republican.  Don't just read the post.  Read the comments.  Threats of violence against conservatives  by the kooks at Daily Kos are a daily phenomenon.  But people who call themselves liberal consistently blame Republicans and the Tea Party for this kind  of hate filled screed.  Please don't ask me not to defend myself.  Yes, I know about Jesus and about Gandhi.

But here is the other side.  We need to fight back, not physically, but ideologically.  This is the part of the core constituency of the new Democrat party.  These are the people who carry signs and show up for demonstrations and walk precincts for nothing.  They literally hate anyone who dares to call himself a Republican.  They do that because they need someone to blame for their miserable hate filled lives.

The people who write this kind of thing rarely get elected to office.  But they are used to get people elected to office.

So here is the problem for Christian conservatives.  Yes we must be charitable to people, meaning in this context, still caring for and seeing even really crazy people as human and objects of God's love even if they don't believe in God.  But we also need to call out the people who benefit by the crazy and hateful energy these people transmit into the body politic.  Much of the divisiveness in our culture is a result of a deliberately cultivated envy and concomitant hatred.  It is a vague and ugly anger that attaches itself first to one and then another object.  It is the energy of mob rule and the antithesis of reason.  Like the family members at an intervention, we need, with love, to tell people when they are wrong.  We need to hold up a mirror to the hatred from the left.  And we need to force them to talk about it.  Because, until we do that, we cannot resolve our differences until we at least come to an agreement as to what they are.

So, think of our conversation with an unwilling, name calling left as an intervention with a family member.  We do have to keep talking and we do have to keep being polite, but we don't have to pull our punches or try to gild the lily.  We need to be honest with them and continue to politely disagree.