Can Progressives and Conservatives Speak Each Other's Language?

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Sat, 01/30/2010 - 10:44am.

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By Winslow Myers

There is big money in polarization, as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and
other media kingpins understand all too well. But one of the many
tragic by-products of our polarized political culture is the
demonization of conservatives by progressives. Left-leaners are often
convinced that those on the right are all greedy, fearful militarists
without consciousness or conscience—a grotesque and insulting
distortion.

My late father was a lifelong Republican who delighted in undermining
the conservative stereotype. He once returned from a trip to Nicaragua
and scandalized his Rotary group by asserting that he hadn’t met a
single communist down there, just a lot of farmers who wanted some
land to cultivate peacefully.

As a self-defined progressive, I am mightily tired of preaching to the
choir, my small circle of all-too-like-minded liberal friends. I am
eager for dialogue with thoughtful people who still carry the same
torch my father did for fiscal prudence, smaller government,
incremental change—and caution in our international adventures.

As Kevin Zeese writes in his article “The Anti-War Peace Movement
Needs a Restart”: “There is a long history of
opposition to war among traditional conservatives. Their philosophy
goes back to President Washington's Farewell Address where he urged
America to avoid ‘foreign entanglements.’ It has showed itself
throughout American history. The Anti-Imperialist League opposed the
colonialism of the Philippines in the 1890s. The largest antiwar
movement in history, the America First Committee, opposed World War II
and had a strong Middle America conservative foundation in its makeup.
The strongest speech of an American president against militarism was
President Eisenhower's 1961 final speech from the White House warning
America against the growing military-industrial complex.”

For twenty-five years I have volunteered for an organization called
Beyond War, which began with the assumption that preventing the world
from blowing up just might be an issue of equal interest across the
political spectrum. Some of us were Democrats and some were
Republicans. In 1988 we even gave our annual Beyond War Award to
Ronald Reagan (and Mikhail Gorbachev)—not because we assented to
everything Reagan did, but because Reagan had bravely taken the
political risk of changing his mind about the “evil empire,”
responding positively to Gorbachev’s ”new thinking.”

Liberal members of our organization peeled away in droves after that
award, demonstrating among other things that they hadn’t
understood—stood under, or stood behind—what the organization stood
for: thinking big enough to transcend polarization.

The opportunity is to cut through the foggy distraction of polarized
stereotyping to a common vision of enlightened self-interest. One
conservative thinker who has done this effectively is Andrew Bacevich,
an ex-marine and Professor of International Relations at Boston
University. His book “The Limits of Power: The End of American
Exceptionalism,” should be required reading for left- and
right-leaners alike. Bacevich argues that American military adventures
are directly related to our domestic culture of over-extension, our
desire to have it all and put off paying the economic and military and
environmental bills that inevitably come due.

Progressives have an opportunity to get off their high horses and
reach out to mainstream Americans who are perfectly capable of seeing
that it is hardly in their interest to saddle their children with
trillion dollar deficits caused by dubious wars without end—wars which
create more terrorists than they kill.

Winslow Myers, the author of “Living Beyond War, A Citizen’s Guide,”
lives in Boston and serves on the Board of Beyond War, a non-profit
educational foundation.

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