The nail in the coffin of discourse

Driving north on 90/94 yesterday, I saw the following billboard at the Junction. It was for 560 AM, WIND, which claims to be "news talk." Besides that information, there was only one other thing on the billboard: a slogan that read, in whole, as follows:

"Liberals hate it!"

How can this country ever come together again with things like this out there? Conservatives no longer seem to take pride in their own opinions; all they care about is making sure they don't have the same opinions as so-called "liberals." Well, that and disagreeing with those liberals as loudly as possible. Outlets like Fox News - and, apparently, WIND - exist not to provide news but opinions, and only a specific set of opinions at that, culled in many cases directly from Republican talking points. There is no such thing as dissent in Conserva-World - you're either for the president or against him. There is no room for a shade of gray. I firmly believe that many people who voted for Bush disagreed with him on any number of issues, but voted for him anyway because the conservative hive mind decreed it.

Conservatives are scary for this reason, and this reason alone: they care more. Liberals aren't invested in this war. It took us years just to get a liberal-slanted talk radio station on the air, and its best-known pundit is a comedian by trade. Conservatives are so invested in bashing the left that they still spend their time harping on the perceived faults of a man who hasn't been president in four and a half years.

And conservatives care more about toeing the party line. Left-wing candidates struggle not because this country is overwhelmingly conservative, but because the left wing is capable of critical analysis, and incapable of turning itself into a single mentality. That's what happened in 2004. Everyone on the left knew that four more years of Bush wasn't something they wanted to happen, but some people just couldn't bring themselves to vote for Kerry.

Ultimately, though, I hope that the conservative tendency to scream at the left will be their downfall. Sooner or later, someone has to see through the vicious, frequently lie-filled rhetoric and understand that liberal-bashing is a smokescreen put up to hide the real issues. People saw through Joe McCarthy eventually, and I think even most conservatives don't take Ann Coulter seriously (idolator of McCarthy as she is). The trick is getting them to take a hard look at their own people and see if they honestly believe that they agree with them on everything. If they do, that's fine, there must be people like that out there. But there are people who vote for Bush apparently unaware that his economic strategies (strategies is a word I use loosely when it comes to Bush) won't help them, now or ever. They need to learn to read more sources, look more critically at information, and not just tune in to a radio station because they're promised that "liberals hate it" - in other words, that they're never going to risk hearing something they might disagree with. It might be comforting to live your life like that, but it's also cowardly. I just hope that someday, some of them figure that out.