Extremism - Yours? Mine?
Mark Greathouse
(10/2022) I am an extremist. Yep. In the flesh. Surely there’s someone or some organization out there that categorizes me as an extremist. I’ve already been labelled a gun-toting, bible-clinging, flag waving, deplorable, or whatever without half trying. It’s just because I’m a…oh my…a conservative Republican.
But wait! What is an extremist? Why, the dictionary says an extremist is an advocate of extreme measures or views; a radical. Whoa! Y’all don’t get off so easy. Who decides what is extreme? You? Me? Politicians? New media? Social media? Some cloistered academic? A big-tech algorithm? Such a dilemma! In its simplest form, extremes sit on opposite ends of a continuum of core beliefs. Where on that continuum might we be?
Was Patrick Henry extreme when he shouted the famed, "Give me liberty or give me death!" For that matter, were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the other founding fathers extremists? Was Abraham Lincoln extreme? Despite accomplishments like the Homestead Act, Land Grant Act, Emancipation Proclamation, and getting the intercontinental railroad started, Lincoln dared suspend to habeus corpus (right of a citizen to obtain a writ as a protection against illegal imprisonment) and approved General Sherman’s scorched-earth strategy, thus garnering enough extremists to be assassinated. William McKinley was assassinated by a hate-filled extremist anarchist, John F. Kennedy was felled by ambush in Texas, and attempts have been made on other presidents. Were they all extreme?
Shucks, in the old west, it was often far too easy to stir up extreme views over things ranging from water rights to fences to rustling to sodbusters to politics. The southern Democrats in the 1870s spawned the Ku Klux Klan to suppress black folks and their sympathizers. The KKK was generally regarded as pretty extreme. Antifa radicals took to the streets of several cities and burned and looted properties. That just might be considered extreme. A bunch of far-right "white supremacists and skinheads" wrought deadly havoc in Charlottsville. The woke cancel culture tear down statues they find "offensive" and stop invited lecturers seeking to share ideas on college campuses. Extreme? Oh, how about climate!? If you disagree with the supposedly "settled science" of global warming, you are extreme. Were the unarmed, disorganized idiots that stormed the Capitol on January 6 extreme? Well, extremely stupid for sure, though my heart goes out to the
woman who was accidentally shot and killed.
Have y’all noticed one particular common thread here? Extremism seems to invariably spawn violence or threats thereof. But the common problem with violence spawned by extremes is that it makes for a very unsatisfying, very morally sparse meal. And those who use it leverage it to drown out legitimate well-reasoned concerns. Frankly, it makes for a downright uninformed stupid culture wherein differing viewpoints are snuffed out.
Who decides what’s extreme? Seems social media, academics, news media, tech oligarchs, and politicians have that honor sewn up and tied in a neat bow. Who made Mark Zuckerberg or Ilhan Omar or Jeff Bezos or Maxine Waters or some podcaster or some campus radical our arbiters of truths? By some measure, George Soros, Al Gore, Donald Trump, and plenty more are extremists in some way, shape, or fashion.
Voters rational thinking has been so clouded that they would vote for pretty much anyone promising relief from that extremist President Trump. What did they vote into office in 2020? A feckless, morally-bereft president surrounded by a cabal of extremists seemingly hell bent on casting our nation into economic and cultural oblivion. We have gone from thriving economy to economic horror show, from a time of community healing to intense divisiveness, from a stable world order to utter global chaos, and this happened in a mere 20 months. Extreme? Many would say so.
Now, I can say there’s plenty I don’t like about former President Trump. He ran on a populist platform of serving "everyman" but seemed to lose that along the way to focus far too much on himself. Pity that he failed to stay above the fray. Trump’s "fake news" grew as tiresome as the unfounded media and political assaults. His tone of voice often grated on me, but I strove to look past that to focus on underlying good intentions and great results like energy independence, lower taxes, secure borders, profitable trade agreements, more jobs, and higher wages. I guess some folks considered those successes extreme given who claimed responsibility for accomplishing them.
So, where are we extremism-wise today? Well, we have extreme inflation driven by flagrant government spending solutions morphing us into a full-fledged "technical" recession; crime has become extremely bad in many cities, as police are fiscally and legally handcuffed and thugs run free; our unsecured southern border is an extreme "humanitarian crisis," leaking like a sieve as it overwhelms border communities with millions of illegal immigrants; we are enduring extreme culturally divisiveness agendas, especially as concerns race and gender; our public education system is under extreme duress as leftist indoctrination runs rampant; illegal drugs are an extreme problem, especially fentanyl made in China and imported via Mexican cartels that is annually killing tens of thousands of our children (more than 100,000 last year); labor force participation is at an extreme 40-year low as 11 million jobs go wanting; and there’s much much more
depending on what you, me, or they consider extreme. Bottom line, one set of extremists’ overreactions to another set of extremists is leading our nation down an ugly path.
Extremism has become an existential threat to the United States. Extremists desperately yearn for something…anything…to achieve what they view as their norm. Is there a utopia; a perfect world. Not so long as we have human beings populating it, especially folks with their own sets of beliefs and values. Is there a middle ground? Emphatically no! Folks will not compromise their core principles, though they may be persuaded to be more tolerant of each other and be open to rational debate. We certainly do not want one point of view dominating to the level of drowning out opposing views. America would be no better than Communist China or Stalinist Russia were we to succumb to a one-party government run by executive and bureaucratic fiat. It’s called a dictatorship and it sucks away all our life motivations, steals our freedoms, and places us in an amorphous, mind-numbing world where as T.R. Roosevelt said, "poor spirits neither enjoy nor suffer
much because they live in the gray twilight that knows no victory nor defeat." I should think we’d all agree that such an extreme outcome would entail the demolition of the Constitution that has served us exceptionally well for more than two centuries.
Perhaps, we should heed the warning of the "extremist" James Madison in 1787 in Federalist No. 10, "To secure the public good, and private rights, against the danger of…faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and form of popular government, is then the great object to which our iniquities are directed." Oh, that we all should take to heart Madison’s words as warning against the factionalized extremists we face today and fight against those extremists bringing down arguably the best, most-productive, most freedom supporting government ever on planet Earth.
Come final accounting as to our life’s legacy will we have travelled blithely along in Roosevelt’s gray twilight or fought to preserve Madison’s spirit and form of popular government? Dare we call that extreme?
Just sayin.’
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