Can This Divide Be Repaired?

The Left-Right Divide Is About Reality Itself

Dennis Prager

|

Posted: Nov 05, 2019 12:01 AM

  Share   Tweet

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.

Source: Janet Van Ham/HBO via AP

  

Trending

• 
  Derek Hunter
  A Rude Awakening Awaits The ‘Woke’
• 
  Dennis Prager
  The Left-Right Divide Is About Reality Itself
• 
  Kimberly Guilfoyle
  In 365 Days, It’s Weeks Like This One That Voters Will Remember

The left-right divide in America is, unfortunately, unbridgeable.

There are three reasons.

First, we are divided by our vision of what we want America to be.

The right believes the founders' vision was brilliant and moral, that bourgeois middle-class values are superior to alternative value systems; that rights come from God, not man; and that the state must be as small as possible. The left (not liberals) shares none of those values.

Second, we are divided by the means we use to achieve our vision. Given their different ends, left and right obviously differ on what means to use to achieve their ends.

Third, and perhaps most troubling, there is a reality-perception divide.

Left and right have different perceptions of reality.

I have been aware of this for many years, but it was dramatically brought home last week when I was a guest on "Real Time With Bill Maher." Given that the other two guests on the panel and more or less the entire studio audience were on the left, their reactions to what I said proved my point.

For example, I said that though there are, of course, racists in the United States, America is the least racist multiethnic and multiracial country in the world.

I was booed.

I said the United States military has brought so much liberty to the world it deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

I was booed.

Clearly, there is an unbridgeable divide in the way we perceive the reality of the American military's role in the world.

CARTOONS | 

VIEW CARTOON

I said that it turned out the Russia-Trump campaign collusion never happened.

I was booed.

There is an unbridgeable divide in the way left and right perceive this reality.

I said the Trump-Ukrainian president phone transcript did not show a quid pro quo.

I was booed, and one of the other panelists said it actually showed "extortion."

This, too, constitutes an unbridgeable divide between the way left and right view reality.

I said John Brennan, the former CIA director, has voted communist. (He has admitted that he voted for the Communist Party USA presidential candidate Gus Hall in 1976.) I was dismissed as having made something up. Bill Maher sarcastically responded that he didn't recall Mao having been on any ballot.

And I said that people on the left say men can menstruate.

For that, I was not merely booed; I was laughed at by the panel, Maher and the audience.

Anyone can Google this and learn that I was entirely right. Just type "can men menstruate." One of the first results will be from the popular left-wing website The Daily Beast: "Yes, Men Can Have Periods and We Need to Talk About Them," reads one of its headlines. "How is this possible?" you might ask. Well, if a woman declares herself to be a man, then "a man" can have a period. In fact, last month, Procter & Gamble announced that it will remove the female Venus symbol from its Always line of menstrual products. After all, not only women menstruate.

The irony is that as soon as most progressives become aware that LGBTQ groups say that men menstruate, they will say that men menstruate. And that will be another differing perception of reality.

On each of these issues -- all the issues for which I was booed -- right and left have different perceptions of reality. That -- even more so than differing values -- makes the left-right divide unbridgeable. When you cannot agree on what is real, there is no possible bridging of the gulf.

Recommended

A Rude Awakening Awaits The ‘Woke’

Derek Hunter

The left believes the president colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. The reality is that there was no collusion. This is the conclusion of the Mueller report, but still, the left doesn't accept it.

The left is certain President Trump said the neo-Nazis are "very fine people" when referring to the protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. The right is certain the president didn't say there are good neo-Nazis any more than he said there are good "antifa" members. When he said there were "very fine people on both sides," he was referring to those demonstrating on behalf of keeping Confederate statues and those opposed. See "The Charlottesville Lie" by CNN analyst Steve Cortes.

The left believes socialism is economically superior to capitalism. But the reality is that only capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty. This is, therefore, not an opinion divide -- "You prefer capitalism. I prefer socialism" -- but a reality divide.

The reason this is so frightening is that it means one side has lost its grip on reality. If half of this country cannot distinguish truth from falsehood, that is not a good sign for the nation's future. On that point, ironically, left and right can agree.

When Human Behavior Is Abhorrent It Should Be Called Out And If The Term Of Choice Is Beastly Or Animalistic, So Be It!

Why the Left Won’t Call Anyone ‘Animals’

Dennis Prager / @DennisPrager / May 22, 2018 / 23 Comments

President Donald Trump recently referred to MS-13 gang members as "animals." (Photo: Ron Sachs - CNP/Sipa USA/Newscom)

COMMENTARY BY

Dennis Prager@DennisPrager

Dennis Prager is a columnist for The Daily Signal, nationally syndicated radio host, and creator of PragerU.

If you want to understand the moral sickness at the heart of leftism, read the first paragraph of the most recent column by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne:

It’s never right to call other human beings ‘animals.’ It’s not something we should even have to debate. No matter how debased the behavior of a given individual or group, no matter how much legitimate anger that genuinely evil actions might inspire, dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path.

Let’s begin with the first sentence: “It’s never right to call other human beings ‘animals.'”

This is so self-evident to Dionne that he adds, “It’s not something we should even have to debate.”

The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>

Only someone who has never debated the issue could make such a claim.

So allow me to debate the assertion.

My view is the antithesis of Dionne’s. As I see it, it is not right to never call another human being an “animal.”

Calling the cruelest among us names such as “animal” or any other “dehumanizing” epithet actually protects humans. The word “beastly” exists for a reason and is frequently applied to human beings. By rhetorically reading certain despicable people out of the human race, we elevate the human race. We have declared certain behaviors out of line with being human.

Biologically, of course, we are all human. But if “human” is to mean anything moral—anything beyond the purely biological—then some people who have committed particularly heinous acts of evil against other human beings are not to be considered human. Otherwise “human” has no moral being. We should then not retain the word “inhumane.” What is the difference between “he is inhumane” and “he is an animal”? Both imply actions that render the person no longer human.

Dionne provides his answer at the end of the paragraph: “dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path.”

He provides not a single argument or illustration for this truly absurd comment.

Anyone who refuses to “dehumanize” the Nazi physicians—who, with no anesthesia, froze naked people for hours and then dropped them in boiling water to rewarm them; put people in depressurized rooms where their eardrums burst, driving them out of their minds from pain; rubbed wood shavings and ground glass into infected wounds, etc.—is, to put it very gently, profoundly morally confused.

What would Dionne have us call those Nazi physicians—”not nice,” “badly flawed,” “evil”? Why is rhetorically ostracizing them from the human race “a dangerous path”? He doesn’t have an answer because he lives in the left’s world of moral-sounding platitudes.

Leftism consists almost entirely of moral-sounding platitudes—statements meant to make the person making them feel morally sophisticated. But based on their relative reactions to the sadists of the MS-13 gangs, I trust President Donald Trump’s moral compass more than Dionne’s.

It is ever dangerous to use dehumanizing rhetoric on people? Of course—when it is directed at people based on their race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or any other immutable physical characteristic.

The Nazis did what they did to Jews and others because they dehumanized them based on their religious/ethnic/racial identity. That’s why racism is evil. But why is it dangerous to use such rhetoric on people based on their behavior? By equating labeling the cruelest among us “animals” with labeling Jews “animals,” Dionne cheapens the fight against real evil.

I once asked Rabbi Leon Radzik, a Holocaust survivor who had been in Auschwitz, what word he would use to characterize the sadistic guards in the camp. I will never forget his response: “They were monsters with a human face.”

Incredibly, Dionne would not agree with him.

The Sad State Of Free Speech In America

Could The Left Be Over-wishing A 2018 Victory

Getty Images

2018

The Left’s Year of Magical Thinking

Fantasies about the Second Amendment, the Mueller investigation and Stormy Daniels threaten to sabotage the Democrats in November.

By JEFF GREENFIELD

 

April 05, 2018

•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  Google +

•  Email
•  Comment
•  Print

 

It’s Wednesday, November 7, 2018, and the Democrats have awakened to the taste of ashes in their mouths. Despite the poll numbers and the pattern of history, Republicans have somehow managed to keep their losses small enough to retain control of the House. They’ve even picked up a seat or two in the Senate.

How could this have happened? Was it the gerrymandered House districts, the flood of dark money from the Mercers and the Kochs, the suppression of voters in key states?

Maybe. But should that Democratic disaster come to pass, a good deal of the explanation would lie in an aphorism often misattributed to Voltaire: “I can take care of my enemies, but Lord protect me from my friends.” Some of the most damaging blows to Democratic hopes this year are friendly fire.

The most recent—and most harmful—came from John Paul Stevens, the retired Supreme Court Justice, who wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he called for an outright repeal of the Second Amendment. Stevens, who wrote a powerful dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller, the case that established an individual right to bear arms under the Constitution, wrote in the Times: “Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option. … It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States—unlike every other market in the world.”

It is hard to overstate just how off-kilter Stevens’ argument is. In the first place, repealing the Second Amendment is “simple” in the same way that ending submarine warfare by heating the oceans to the boiling point is “simple.” There may be an alternate universe where there are 191 House members, 67 senators and 38 state legislatures ready to vote for the amendment’s repeal, but back here on Planet Earth? Not so much. (The only proposal less likely to succeed is the idea of depriving smaller states of the same clout in the Senate as the bigger ones. Why? Because Article V of the Constitution specifically says that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate” and that this rule cannot be amended.)

Second, as Justice Stevens knows, the Heller decision did not rule out a wide range of limits on the individual right to bear arms. The decision specifically did not hold that individuals have a “right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” We can, for example, prohibit firearm possession by felons and the mentally ill. Likewise, the Court majority more or less pre-emptively sanctioned bans on firearms in schools and government buildings, and bans on high-powered weapons like assault rifles.

• 
  

  
  

These kinds of limits are at the heart of every plausible effort to come to grips with the gun violence that plagues the United States. The key to any chance of enacting useful laws is to argue that they can co-exist within the current understanding of the Second Amendment and that they are not a backdoor effort to confiscate weapons. Justice Stevens, by contrast, seems to validate the central message of the NRA and its acolytes: “Don’t believe the sweet words; they are out to get your weapons!”

ADVERTISING

If you are a senator like Joe Donnelly, or Heidi Heitkamp, or Jon Tester, or Joe Manchin, or if you are a Democrat looking to unseat a Republican House member in a rural district, your opponent has now been given a powerful weapon to argue that “no matter what my opponent says, their heart is with one of their liberal-hero judges.” At best, you have just been given a 20-pound weight to carry on your shoulders.

The recent tweet that came from a Planned Parenthood chapter in Pennsylvania is the same kind self-sabotage. No organization has been more targeted by the right than Planned Parenthood. It has survived the joint efforts of Republican leaders and President Donald Trump to defund it, largely because its noncontroversial work—birth control, cancer screenings, breast exams—has won it the approval of a significant majority of Americans, despite its role as an abortion provider. So what did this Pennsylvania chapter offer during this precarious moment? In talking about Disney princesses, it tweeted: “We need a princess who’s had an abortion … who’s pro-choice … who’s an undocumented immigrant … who’s actually a union worker … who’s trans.” The tweet was deleted, but not before Fox News and other conservative voices had a field day with it.

Yes, it’s just a tweet by a local chapter, probably written by a young staffer, but what made it so inexplicable was that, whatever the author’s intent, it read like a provocation by a voice who assumed that every American embraced these hotly contested ideas. To someone at all uneasy about the cultural upheavals of the past decade, the tweet was evidence that their opinions are considered illegitimate, unreasonable, beyond the pale. And for Democrats in red districts who have to navigate these cultural minefields, the tweet made their journeys even harder. (As it happens, Disney princesses have already been retailored for the 21st century. They no longer passively wait for rescue from a prince, and they possess their own athletic skills and other strengths).

Finally, I’d add to this list what I call “magical cable news thinking.” My anecdotal sense is that countless liberals are drawn to the never-ending, numbing procession of TV panel after TV panel, all focused on the Mueller investigations and what they might yield. (Stormy Daniels has now become the second obsessive subject.) Whenever I click on CNN during prime time, it feels like Groundhog Day. Each hour seems to promise that any minute now, federal marshals will parade down Pennsylvania Avenue with warrants and cuffs. And for many Democrats, the promise of a House takeover in 2019 is that impeachment hearings will begin roughly 30 minutes after Paul Ryan hands the gavel over to Nancy Pelosi (or her successor).

Maybe one or both of these events will transpire, although it’s hard to divine much from the reported communication from Mueller to Trump’s lawyers that the president is a “subject” but not a “target” of the special counsel’s investigations. But if Democrats should have learned anything from 2016, it is that the low regard in which most Americans hold Donald Trump does not necessarily translate into votes for Democrats.

What matters—and what is overshadowed by the cable news coverage and in too many Democratic messages—is what the Trump administration is actually doing. For instance, the budget reluctantly signed by the president includes $540 million for the Gateway tunnel, to provide new rail service between New York and New Jersey. If the administration, out of presidential pique with Chuck Schumer, reneges on that commitment, it would deal a blow to the economy of the Northeast on a par with a series of major hurricanes. The impact would strike everyone from commuters to factory workers in Republican-held congressional districts from New York to New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Or take the administration’s decision to weaken the fuel-efficiency standards that car companies were supposed to meet, which would make the air we breathe less healthy. Or the way that the administration has diluted the ability of Medicaid to provide health care for working-class Americans.

These are the kinds of stories that a 24-hour news network ought to be covering extensively. They should also form the arguments that a party seeking a return to political power ought to be hitting, repeatedly and forcefully. They do not depend on what Robert Mueller concludes, nor on whether the public learns all the details of the Stormy Daniels affair. They do not lose their power if the fervent dreams of Democrats that Trump will be exposed in all his mendacious obstructionism do not come true.

The sweep of history, the public’s low regard for the president and the results of special elections all suggest a “blue wave” is forming for November. But magical thinking has the power to prevent the Democrats from surfing that wave to victory.

One Cannot Have A Reasonable Conversation Without The Left Going Politically Correct

Harvard Professor Steven Pinker Points Out How Political Correctness Drives The Alt-Right. The Idiot Left Responds By Using Political Correctness To Rip Him.

Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

ByBEN SHAPIRO

@benshapiro

January 11, 2018

Famed Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker is under fire from the Left for making some obvious statements regarding the nature of political correctness. On January 2, 2018, a conversation with Pinker was posted from Spiked Magazine’s “Unsafe Space Tour” panel at Harvard. During that panel, Pinker explained that attempts to quash statements of fact led people to embrace radical interpretations of those facts, leading to political extremism — political correctness, in other words, fueled the fire of the alt-right. Here’s what Pinker had to say:

In relevant part, Pinker explains:

The other way in which I do agree with my fellow panelists that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be, I wouldn't want to say persuadable, but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right, internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way, who swallow the red pill, as the saying goes, the allusion from The Matrix. When they are exposed the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in The New York Times or in respectable media, that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they're immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions.

Lest it be argued otherwise, Pinker is condemning the alt-right. He’s saying that if you refuse to allow people to speak facts, they will think that not only are the facts being censored, the truest explanations are being censored as well. He gives a few examples:

Here is a fact that's gonna sound ragingly controversial but is not, and that is that capitalist societies are better than communist ones. If you doubt it, then just ask yourself the question, would I rather live in South Korea or North Korea. Would I rather live in West Germany in the 1970s or East Germany or in the 1960s? I submit that this is actually not a controversial statement, but in university campuses, it would be considered flamingly radical.

Here's another one. Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests. This is not controversial to anyone who has even glanced at the data. The kind of vocational interest tests of the kind that your high school guidance counselor gave you were given to millions of people, and men and women give different answers as to what they wanna do for a living and how much time they wanna allocate to family versus career and so on. But you can't say it. A very famous person on this campus did say it, and we all know what happened to him. He's no longer, well, he is on this campus, but no longer in the same office.

Here's a third fact that is just not controversial, although it sounds controversial, and that is that different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates. You can go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Look it up on their website. The homicide rate among African Americans is about seven or eight times higher than it is among European Americans. And terrorism, go to the Global Terrorist Database, and you find that worldwide the overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist acts are committed by Islamist extremist groups.

If you've never heard these facts before and you stumble across them or someone mentions them, it is possible to come to some extreme conclusions, such as that women are inferior, that African Americans are naturally violent, that we all ought to be Anarcho-capitalists and do away with all regulation and social safety nets, that most terrorism in this country is the fault of Muslims. These are unwarranted conclusions because for each one of these facts there are very powerful counterarguments for why they don't license racism and sexism and Anarcho-capitalism and so on. …

Now let's say that you have never even heard anyone mention these facts. The first time you hear them, you're apt to say, number one, the truth has been withheld from me by universities, by mainstream media, and, moreover, you will be vindicated when people who voice these truths are suppressed, shouted down, assaulted, all the more reason to believe that the Left, that the mainstream media, that universities can't handle the truth. So, you get vindicated over and over again, but, worst of all, you're never exposed to the ways of putting these facts into context so that they don't lead to racism and sexism and extreme forms of Anarcho-Libertarianism. So, the politically correct Left is doing itself an enormous disservice when it renders certain topics undiscussable, especially when the facts are clearly behind them because they leave people defenseless the first time they hear them against the most extreme and indefensible conclusions possible. If they were exposed, then the rationale for putting them into proper political and moral context could also be articulated, and I don't think you would have quite the extreme backlash.

The fact that Pinker had the guts to say this led the Left to attack him wholesale, proving his point. For example, PZ Myers of FreeThoughtBlogs.com wrote that Pinker’s sympathies “lie with the alt-right,” an absolute slander. He states, “I am shocked that a Harvard professor would promote such ignorance and falsehoods.” But, of course, none of the facts Pinker states are rebuttable, and Myers makes no attempt to do so — so he’s schoolmarming Pinker for repeating those facts and then distinguishing them from the opinions people wrongly draw from them. Professor Joshua Loftus of New York University said that Pinker’s ideas were “worse than the edited clip … just amazing.” Jamelle Bouie of Slate suggested that Pinker had claimed that “blacks cause crime … jews control the world.” Professor Jesse Daniels of Hunter College stated, “If one were, say, writing a book about the mainstreaming of white nationalism, one would certainly consider featuring this as supporting evidence for one’s main point.” Here are just a few of the people who bought the lie about Pinker’s statements:

10 Jan

Christoph@Halalcoholism

Replying to @Halalcoholism

Alt-Right: “The SJWs are always calling everyone Nazis, they’re so full of shit.”

*An SJW selectively edits a clip to make it seem, falsely, like Stephen Pinker is sympathetic to the Alt-Right*

Alt-Right: “Hey look, Stephen Pinker likes us!” pic.twitter.com/NMnAzQoygU

Christoph@Halalcoholism

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on." pic.twitter.com/uJ11M7TQUg

8:14 AM - Jan 10, 2018

•  2222 Replies
 
•  148148 Retweets
 
•  409409 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

But as Jesse Singal of New York Magazine tweeted:

 YouTube ‎@YouTube

Jesse Singal

✔@jessesingal

1/ If you watch the full Steven Pinker clip -- just eight minutes! -- there is simply no way you can come away with the conclusion that his point is to praise alt-righters for being smart and savvy. Rather, he's making a psychological argument that ifhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiRnbNT5uE&feature=youtu.be …

7:25 PM - Jan 10, 2018

•  3030 Replies
 
•  182182 Retweets
 
•  538538 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

It’s demonstrative of how true Pinker’s argument is that he was shellacked even for making it. But the Left can’t be bothered to think about their own role in provoking the rise of the despicable and atrocious alt-right movement with their identity politics and intellectual censoriousness.