Liberals have a distorted view of tolerance
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Mary Katharine Ham
November 25, 2004
Once, about four years ago, I found myself being tailed late at night by a car I didn’t recognize. I was by myself, it was around 11 p.m. in my hometown, a city with enough violent crime to make a person more than a bit wary.
I saw the guy’s headlights in my rearview mirror, noticed he was fairly close to me and had been for a few miles. I was on my way to shoot some pool with friends, and decided to turn off the main road, mostly to convince myself he wasn’t really following me. He followed.
I took a few more turns, trying to get back to the bluish streetlamp glow of the main road. He turned with me every time. My brain swerved from panic to reason and back again, he and I the only two cars on the road. I was almost to the pool hall and he was still with me. I could hear the blood beating in my ears. I was contemplating driving all the way to my parents’ house, pulling right onto the grass in the backyard and dashing in the door to avoid attack when I looked back and realized the car was gone.
Deep breaths. I drove around for a few minutes, still no one behind me. Deep breaths. So, I headed back to the pool hall to meet my friends. When I walked in, I was still a little shaky, sat down to have a Coke and watch some friends play 9-ball. A couple acquaintances came up to my table, started telling a story that had them both in stitches.
“Did you guys hear?” one of them laughed. “John tailed some idiot with a Bush-Cheney sticker on his car all the way here.”
The story got a hearty laugh from my whole group of acquaintances, all liberal. It was a good joke, played on some abstract conservative, retold in the utter certainty that there were no such abstract creatures in the room.
I glared straight at John and said something along the lines of “Yeah, that was me, and that was real liberal and accepting of you,” adding a few sailor-approved flourishes worthy of a man who would threaten a young woman with physical harm because of her political beliefs.
At first there was more laughter, then nervous smiles, then looks and comments of utter bewilderment—not at the fact that someone they knew had just been physically threatened for her political beliefs, but at the fact that she held those particular beliefs. There were apologies from John, but all with a smile on his face. The whole incident was quickly excused.
Four years later, these are the same people to whom eye-rolling warrants a lawsuit and distributing insensitive Band-Aids is beyond the pale. They belong to a party that prides itself on fighting against political intimidation and laments the sharp political division in this country—both commendable positions.
But they didn’t fight against intimidation that night and they didn’t lament the division it might cause between themselves and the only conservative in the room. Why not? I’m pretty sure it’s because they think I deserved it. It wasn’t the first time I got that feeling from liberal acquaintances.
In fact, I would bet there are plenty of liberals who will stumble across this column and truly believe that I deserved to be scared out of my wits that night, that a little intimidation is the least of the karmic retribution I had coming for the sins of my conservative forbears.
Why did I deserve it? Because I’m conservative, and to my liberal acquaintances, “conservative” is interchangeable with any number of fun words, like racist, homophobe, warmonger, and bigot. Even my best liberal friends have refuse to let go of these one-dimensional definitions despite the fact that a three-dimensional specimen has been disproving all of them throughout our friendship. So much for nuance.
In short, I deserved it because I’m a conservative (wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) And when you’re dealing with people as dastardly as conservatives, anything goes.
This same rationale allowed liberal acquaintances to giggle when Ann Coulter was attacked by two young men with pies and shrug as former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris was almost run over. NOW and NARAL would be holding weekly violence-against-women awareness marches if the same had happened to Maureen Dowd and Hillary Clinton.
The prevailing feeling among the rank-and-file liberals I know seems to be an ill-concealed amusement at all this. But perhaps I shouldn’t judge my liberal friends for letting off a little steam during a rough political season. So, what about the liberal pundits and commentators? Turns out they just do away with any pretense of concealment.
There was the New York Times’ dreams of an assassination attempt on President Bush and Ted Rall’s double whammy hit on the mentally handicapped and Bush voters. But then came Condi Rice’s appointment to Secretary of State. What a goldmine that was!
Suddenly, racism was an acceptable political tool. Jokes about Mammies and big-lipped caricatures were en vogue. Most of us got the memo that our culture deems these kind of attacks to be about as reprehensible as they get. Liberal cartoonists and commentators got that memo too. But there was no retraction from them, and not a peep from the NAACP or NOW.
Why no outrage? Because Condi deserved it. She’s a conservative, you know.
Calling Condi “Brown Sugar” becomes a reasonable criticism because she is a member of the Bush administration. A physical attack on Coulter is a laughing matter because she is a hawk. Tailing a female acquaintance on a dark night becomes a funny joke because she’s conservative.
It seems to me that this is not the path to a civil political climate or national healing, both of which my liberal friends want. To me, my liberal friends and acquaintances are folks who are a little too soft on national defense and a little too heavy on the government programs for my taste. They do not deserve physical or racist attacks for that, and I do not laugh when they happen. I wish they felt the same way about me.
This week, I’m going home for Thanksgiving to a blue city. Maybe the healing will start there.
But if things go as they generally do, I’ll end up having to explain to folks who excuse Mammy jokes that I am not a racist.
I will try to tell people who look at me like a rare zoo exhibit missing its explanatory plaque that I am not insulated from other opinions.
And I will undoubtedly have to convince the young man who once tailed me on a dark night because he didn’t like my political bumper sticker that mine are not the politics of fear and intimidation.
But here’s hoping that this year will be different. I think we all deserve better.
Mary Katharine Ham is editor of the The Heritage Foundation's Insider magazine and www.InsiderOnline.org, which features a blog about new studies from all over the conservative movement, and a searchable database of years of conservative research.
©2004 Mary Katharine Ham
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