By now most of us who pay any attention to American politics know that the nation is dominated by two opposing ideological camps, the liberals and the conservatives, whose ardent adherents have pretty much reduced all discussion of the nation’s issues to doctrinaire simplicities.
The ferocity with which they band together and hold their positions is rivaled only by that of packs of feral dogs.
In this contest of snarling mutts, the conservatives have clearly been winning. Like hyper-vigilant junkyard dogs, they bark the loudest and almost incessantly.
And, when it comes to sheer irrational viciousness, especially when attacking President Barack Obama, whom they detest with a mouth-foaming rage, conservatives are simply rabid.
They are so unhinged by the Obama presidency that they believe the routine U.S. military exercises in Texas are Obama’s secret plan to impose martial law on that state. Even the Republican governor of Texas succumbed to this wacky conspiracy fantasy and put the state’s National Guard on alert.
Given such blatant ideological buffoonery and the implacable policy positions of obsessive conservatives, it is easy to blame them for the nation’s political gridlock and dysfunctional government. But, they are not the only ones dispossessed of rationality by seething political passion.
Liberals can display the same rigid ideological absurdity — ignoring facts and dismissing common sense to support their self-convictions.
One of those convictions is racial victimhood that presumes any unfavorable conditions suffered by racial minorities are mostly, if not entirely, due to “economic injustice” and to limited opportunity perpetuated by lingering, latent racism. Racism is to modern America what witchcraft was to Medieval Europe, and is used the same way to discredit and condemn those targeted by the self-righteous.
The issue of illegal immigration is approached by liberals as part of their crusade against racism. That approach was on full display recently when newspapers ran a front page story about Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), a nonprofit conservationist organization. CAPS stated the obvious mathematical reality that California’s current severe drought would not be so critical if the state had fewer people residing in it.
CAPS dared mention such facts as each additional resident increases demand of scarce water by 140 gallons per day, and that nearly all of California’s whopping 25 percent increase in population over the past 20 years is from foreign immigrants and their children. It happens that most of those foreign immigrants are from Mexico and entered the United States illegally.
But just as the growling dogs on the right ignore science and the facts to deny climate change, the smugly self-certain canines on the left ignore the fact that foreign immigration is the major factor in California’s burgeoning population and its concomitant consequences, choosing instead to reduce the issue to a matter of racism.
Making that calumnious indictment deflects attention away from the data while vilifying those who present it. CAPS was quickly labeled as racist by those offended, or perhaps frightened, by the fact-based rationale for CAPS’ position on population growth exacerbating the drought.
As a past board member of CAPS, I know that the folks there are not concerned about where people come from or who they are. They are concerned about keeping human population at levels that do not exceed the biosphere’s capacity to comfortably and safely sustain all life.
CAPS is concerned about all immigration — legal and illegal, from anywhere. It does not matter if excessive population is European, Asian, Hispanic or Martian. Too many is too many. Mexicans or Swedes, each takes up space and sucks up finite resources.
But in the heat of liberal passion, those unavoidable realities evaporate like water from California’s vanishing reservoirs.
So, is California doomed to desert-ification because liberal sensibilities cannot refuse admission to hordes of Hispanics because, well, they are Hispanics and turning them away would be racist? Is this anymore destructively asinine than devout conservatives opposing birth-control and abortion because they believe life begins at ejaculation?
Neither pack of ideological mad dogs is capable of objective thought or of finding rational solutions to real problems. Neither is more interested in truth than in doctrine, and neither should be allowed to dominate the nation’s politics and government as they have been doing.
California’s drought is serious and potentially catastrophic. To allow ideological mad dogs to discredit objective analysis that factually identifies all causes of drought, and that impedes logical approaches to addressing it, will eventually bite all of us.
— Randy Alcorn is a Santa Barbara political observer. Contact him at randyalcorn@cox.net, or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.