Why I wish I were a liberal – Chicago Tribune

I would love to be a liberal. As it is, in order to defend my conservatism, I have to lay out my worldview like a spread sheet. My beliefs begin with the logic of the ancient Greeks and the medieval scholastics. Informing this philosophy is my Christian faith. In the matter of politics, I tend to base my arguments on theses propounded in the Federalist Papers and in the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Hayek, and Ann Coulter.

It has become tedious, carrying all these books in my head. If I were a liberal, I could make do with just five words in my intellectual arsenal, sufficient to address any contemporary issue.

Russia, climate change, and Koch brothers are all a liberal needs to say in order to assert his ideas. What accounts for President Donald Trumps actions? In foreign affairs, Russia. On domestic policy, the Koch brothers.

The Syrian civil war, the drought in California, the extinction of this or that amphibian: all caused by climate change.

Read the pages of The Economist or National Geographic. Listen to cable news. The lead-in or the bottom-line, in sum, will be one of these three incantations.

There are other slogans, of course, to which liberals resort in a pinch, everything from black lives mattering to carbon-neutral hoo-ha. Failing to make their point by chanting, they riot, burning their own safe places as a show of forceful inarticulation.

The Red Guards of Chinas Cultural Revolution had their own catchphrases, default responses to anything disagreeable bourgeois, Yankee imperialists, class enemy. Our 21st century snowflakes, emulating their fellow Marxists, have conjured their own demonology. This is what seven years of college will do to a person train him or her to use a dozen different words for coffee, while allowing for just three answers to all of lifes questions.

Alexander Lee, West Chicago

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Why I wish I were a liberal - Chicago Tribune