As always, the cuckservatives continue to dishonestly point to ideological differences when the real problem is one of identity and immigration.
Today, flying back from New York, I ran into someone in the Charlotte airport, a Christian pastor I’d met at an event last year. We spent about an hour talking about the rancor and distrust in our country. He’s involved in reconciliation ministry, which is to say, bringing people together across boundaries of distrust, and teaching them how to talk to each other.
I mentioned to him that I’d have conversations over the past few months with friends who broadly share my worldview and demographic characteristics (white, conservative, Christian, middle-aged), and I was surprised by how many of them say that they have deliberately chosen to socialize only with people like themselves. It’s not at all because they don’t want to talk to anybody who disagrees. It’s because they are afraid.
Afraid of what? They’re afraid that if they say something that offends a liberal, there will be hell to pay. Whether it was something genuinely offensive that they said thoughtlessly, and are willing to apologize for, or whether it was something harmless that nevertheless caused offense to the liberal, they are afraid that they will be condemned as a hater. They are afraid that the aggrieved liberal will spread a tale of their wickedness on social media, and they will be left to defend themselves in a world in which their demographic qualities (race, religion, politics, social class, etc.) will be taken as dispositive evidence of their guilt. They are afraid that in the best-case scenario, the sort of thing that in earlier times would have been something people could discuss, even argue over, while remaining friends would now cause a social conflagration that would cost people friendships — and in the worst-case scenario, one error, real or imagined, could bring everything in their lives crashing down.
I said to the pastor that I don’t know how we escape this, given that social media is never going away. Somebody’s reputation can be destroyed with remarkable ease.
Liberals? Really? I don’t know ANYONE who is afraid of offending liberals for their liberalism. What white Americans of all ideological stripes are afraid of is being accused of offending blacks, Jews, gays, women, Muslims, Asians, Hispanics, and non-European immigrants, in that order.
American liberals have been around for over a century. While they can, and should, be held responsible for a panoply of social and political ills, they obviously cannot be responsible for a current state of being that is observably new and different from before. What has changed, and the reason for the state of fear on the part of conservatives, cuckservatives, and moderates alike is the fact that the nation has been invaded and adulterated over the last 50 years, and the identity demographics have consequently changed.
Intellectual cowards like Rod Dreher lament the end of a trusting society, but they are too dishonest, and too frightened, to even address the reason it happened. And if you’re afraid to speak your mind freely and fearlessly in front of your friends and family, then you would be well-advised to eject them from your life without hesitation or remorse.