The Dilemma of Honorable Liberals

There are many honorable liberals.  Indeed there are many, many honorable liberals.  Actually, more than a few of them are in my own family. Nonetheless, these folks are in a terrible bind.  How do they retain their decency when so many partisans on their side of the political aisle have jumped the shark?

Honorable people are truth tellers.  They care about other human beings, not  just in the abstract, but in everyday life.  Honorable people avoid being gratuitously mean.  They do not seek to hurt those with whom they disagree. To the contrary, they keep an open mind.

Nowadays this does not describe the left-leaning liberals who have taken center stage.  The zealots we see on TV or shouting at Trump officials in restaurants are not nice people. They may think of themselves as compassionate intellectuals, but they are neither kindhearted individuals nor penetrating thinkers.

To begin with, they are serial liars.  Almost every other vitriolic accusation coming out of their mouths is an egregious misstatement of the truth.  It has gotten to the point that they are not even embarrassed by their mendacity.  When caught in a whooper, they immediately move on to a bigger and brasher one.

Take the canard that the Donald Trump ripped a small crying girl from her immigrant mother’s arms.  Timemagazine even had the temerity to juxtapose the heartless president towering over his alleged victim.  “See,” this doctored cover picture shouted, “what a vile wretch our chief executive is!”

Except that the child had not been separated from her mother and was crying because it was late at night and she was tired.  But did the Timeeditors apologize?  No, they did not.  Their attitude was essentially that their contrived picture might not be literally accurate, but it depicted a deeper reality.

The same cavalier attitude was on display with widely circulated photos of immigrant children sleeping in what were described as “cages.”  When it came out that these images were from the Obama era, it made no difference to the disseminators of this purported horror. Trump still got blamed.

In other words, liberals intent on pillorying our current president were indifferent to easily verified facts.  What mattered to them is whether they could arouse indignation in poorly informed voters.

Equally appalling has been the slide into unremitting vulgarity. Obscenities have become the norm. The F-bomb is bounced around as if it were as neutral as mashed potatoes.  Many practitioners of this verbal assassination game seem to believe it is a charming exercise in candor.

This is an unprecedented level of vitriol.  It has coarsened the public arena and made it more difficult for people to hold civil conversations.  But perhaps this is the intent.  Perhaps the idea is to silence anyone who disagrees with the radicals.

Which brings me back to the dilemma of honorable liberals.  Are they to join this chorus of rude deception or are they to stand up against it?  They know that if they criticize their progressive brethren, they will be drummed out of the fraternity.  Liberals are a jealous company.  They do not suffer apostates lightly. 

So are decent people to remain equally vulgar and as oblivious to facts or are they to risk ostracism?  Will they have the courage to deal with uncongenial realities or will they retreat into a crowded bunker of comparably distressed liberals?

Because liberalism is a God that has failed, many of its ideological loyalists cannot see through the curtain of lies protecting it.  They are consequently blind to what does not fit their preconceptions.  That is why they are unable to recognize obvious instances of duplicity.

Their inability to acknowledge the crudeness of their tactics essentially stems from a hysterical desire to deny egregious mistakes.  If they are loud enough and despicable enough they can perhaps deflect attention away from their follies.  This way they can salvage their critically endangered self-esteem.

 The problem with this approach is that the more successes Trump has the more passionate they must become.  Unfortunately there may be a breaking point.  The cognitive dissonance between their view of themselves as unusually nice and thoughtful and the reality of their boorishness will be difficult to sustain.

So, as I say, honorable liberals are in a bind.  Whatever they choose to do, discomfort awaits them. If they continue to defend the indefensible, their unconscious will torture them.  But if they face the loss of their illusions, confusion and a moral crisis loom on the horizon.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University