I had come to Washington, along with 215,000 others, to participate in Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” an event inspired by Glenn Beck’s “Rally to Restore Honor.” The festival reached its height as the spectators were treated to a video montage of fire-breathing pundits from all the major news networks denouncing their political opponents.

The message was clear: Those who tell you there are fundamental differences between Americans that are worth getting emphatically angry about are lying to you.

This divided America — an America that contains people with radically different values and radically different ideas of what a just, moral society looks like — does not exist. If it seems otherwise, it is simply because, as one sign at the rally put it, we fail to use our “inside voices.”

Standing in the crowd, I felt my eyebrows furrow. True, the antics of cable news conflict do nothing to contribute to the national discourse. True, most American citizens are more complex than the buffoons we rightly dismiss as “pundits.” Yet for all their shameless spectacle-making, the talking heads of the national news media do get one thing right: There are substantial, and fundamental, oppositions between Americans.

Yet if mainstream liberal outlets are your major news sources, you would never know it. Stewart himself drove this point home with his final speech, an earnest paean to looking past our differences, built on the assumption that ultimately we all share the same goals, hopes, and dreams.

This conceit — that the fundamental divides creating discord in America are easily corrected by a cool head and an open mind — is perhaps the most central ideological tenet of contemporary liberalism. It’s also a major obstacle to a more egalitarian society.

Of course, the primary target of liberals’ ire is the Tea Party echo chamber of conservative commentary. As Stewart put it, “We have a special place in our hearts for Fox.” Yet ironically, the Right’s willingness to recognize conflict occasionally results in more clarity from them than from liberals.

Take the battle of obituaries that commenced between liberals and the Left after the death of Nelson Mandela. Liberals mostly wrote what they would be expected to write: appreciations of Mandela as a model of non-violent resistance while ignoring the radical dimensions of his political project. The Left responded with the type of corrective history that has become commonplace every year Martin Luther King Day rolls around.

Usually neglected in such commentaries, however, was an acknowledgment that other voices in the political conversation also recognize the radical legacy of figures like Mandela and King — conservatives. Such conservatives did appear, but they were treated by liberals as self-evident examples of the Right’s intellectual bankruptcy, paraded out as more proof of how hysterical their movement has become.

Yet lost in all of these festive roastings of the Tea Party was the fact that the right-wing “crazies” were closer to the truth than the liberals. After all, as many a leftist columnist pointed out and celebrated, Mandela did at one point advocate the use of violence as a means to liberation, did participate in communist politics, and was, at least earlier in his career, a radical.

But in liberal discourse, the erroneousness of the Right is assumed, and the moral of the story again becomes one of the dangers of polarization and ideology. In liberals’ view there is no conflict, so recognizing and naming your enemy is necessarily an act of distortion.

The rest of the article can be read here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/why-im-not-a-liberal/