My Op/Ed Messages to the Conservatives

Every week, starting in 2013, I have been publishing op/ed pieces in newspapers in my very red Congressional District (VA-06). In almost every instance, the audience I am most addressing are the conservatives among the newspapers’ readership. In particular, I am envisioning the conservatives with whom I had a long a fruitful relationship starting in the early 1990s, when we created constructive talk-radio conversations together.

That experience has given me an unusual opportunity to witness how, over time, the right-wing propagandists gradually poisoned their minds by telling them lies and by feeding their hatreds and fears. When I compose my weekly messages to them, I have in my mind the two goals: to bring them back to a better contact with reality, and to the better angels of their nature.

As far as I know, I am the only columnist of a liberal bent who regularly seeks to address the people on the other side of our badly — and deliberately — divided polity.

These are some of those ‘Messages to the Conservatives.’

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• How Did We Lose Our Shared Commitment to the Heritage that Made Us a Free Society?
• The Front-Page NYTimes Obit for My H.S. Classmate—and the Meaning of Celebrity
• The Liberal Side of Our Broken Nation Has Its Craziness, Too
• Owning the Libs
• The Bind that This Supreme Court Puts the Defenders of the Rule of Law
• A Way for Trump-Supporters to Put Their Beliefs to the Test
• The Disturbing Human Truth Behind America’s Political Breakdown
• Is It Asking Too Much?
• What the Generations Do with What They Inherit
• What Do We Have to Agree On?
• By Their Fruits
• This American Crisis Shows How the Force of Brokenness Operates
• Toward a Solution to a Psychological Mystery, Or, How People Can Embrace Evil (and Not Even Know It)
• Plenty of Blame to Go Around
• Trump Should Not Be Allowed to Take the Oath
• The Experiential Realm Defines All That Matters
• Why I Call It a “Catastrophe”
• Realities that Should Alter the Liberal View on Immigration
• Liberal America’s Contribution to this Catastrophic Victory of Fascism
• Three Ways People Come to Their Beliefs
• Some Men Assuming They’ve a Right to Control Women
• Two More Thoughts About Us Humans’ Greater Potential
• The Electoral College: All Costs, No Benefits
• Why We’re Better Than We Think We Are, Better Than We Look
• When “May You Live in Interesting Times” Isn’t Just a Curse
• The Well-Being of Women Requires Men to Keep it to Themselves
• Some Questions for Republicans
• How Kamala Can Best “Earn” the Nomination
• Democracy and the Market Economy: Two Social Evolutionary Breakthroughs
• What If We All Could Be the Best We Could Be?
• Certainties and Uncertainties in Predicting the 2024 Presidential Election
• Asking, on Memorial Day, What Did Our Fallen Soldiers Die For?
• What If Expressing the Rage is the Overriding Priority?
• Reality. It’s What We’ve Got to Deal With
• Why Would a Culture Make Heroes of Destructive Losers?
• Just Look at the #%!@ Evidence!
• What If Expressing the Rage is the Overriding Priority?
• A Most Disturbing Place
• School Names and the Place of the Confederacy in People’s Identity
• The CHEATER: The Takeaway, for Americans, of Trump’s New York Trial
• Our Stories Teach Us, “Don’t Give Up”
• Of At Least Two Minds
• What Men Have Lost in Relation to Women
• America’s Serious Supreme Court Problem
• Wise Use of Substances that Alter Experience
• Will the American Victory in the Cold War Be Reversed?
• How Much Do Human Needs Shape the Human World
• The Remarkable Transformation of an American Political Party
• Sermon on the Mount
• Indirectly, the Constitution Shows Us What It Protects Us From
• The Underappreciated Genius of Donald Trump
• My Deep Interest in Movie Stars
• The Destructiveness of Demonization, On View Now
• How Our Market System Generates a Dangerous Form of Greed
• Newton and Shakespeare, and the Two Dimensions of the Human Good
• The Chosen Species
• What It Means that Culture Builds Upon Itself
• Dark Forces Rising in the World’s Great Religions 
• What Makes People Vulnerable to Lies
• How Are We to Think of Human Nature?
• The Virtues and Vices of Patriotism
• From the More Superficial Battle to the More Fundamental
• Invasives: Upsetting Nature’s Order
• The Pursuit of Happiness: More than a Right
•    The Wreckage that Unbridled Selfishness Wreaks on the World
• Today’s Supreme Court: An American Crisis
• When History Seems Governed by Chance
• Let’s Stop Saying America is “Polarized”
• The Market as a “Power System”
• My Passion for Justice
• “Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Mad”
• Accepting the Reality of Limits
• Why Do We Take Pleasure in BEAUTY?
• How the Debt Ceiling Crisis Reveals the Dynamics of the Larger American Crisis
• Why the Trump Rape Trial Now Looks More IMPORTANT to Me Than It Did
• The Folly of “Those who can’t, teach.”
• Improving Our Democracy—the Electoral College
• How Movies Shaped How I See the World
• The Coming Moral Test for the Republican Base
• Why Is Human Sexuality Beset by Complications?
• Still Passionately Pro-Democracy
• The Blessings and the Curses of Breakthrough Technologies
• Why Has Democracy Recently Been in Retreat Worldwide?
• What Makes People Vulnerable to Lies?
• How Would Christians Want Their Children Taught Their History?
• What Was the Confederacy About?
• The Right of Secession
• The Vital Importance of the Coming Showdown
• Who’d Kill for Money?
• Blown with the Wind
• Not Seeing the Danger Rising
• A View at the Spiritual Level
• Abortion and the Constitution
• “Which is Worse, Ignorance or Apathy?”
• Why Liberal America Has Been Weak in Protecting the Nation
• What is the Power of the Truth?
• The Battle Between Democracy and Fascism
• Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls
• Our Samenesses, and Our Differences
• Radio Shows that Would Be Impossible Now
• Who Will Wield Power?
• By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them: The Saga of the Big Lie
• How Did the Republican Party Come to This?
• The Role of Changing “Moral Orders” in America’s Crisis
• Symptoms of the Disease
• The Deeper Meaning of the Facebook Scandal
• The GOP: False “Friend” of Anti-Abortion Americans
• The Correlation Between Race and Party in the South
• Before You Fist-Bump about that Texas Abortion Ban
• The Absurd – and Ugly — Denial of Racism
• When Events Dispel Our Illusions
• Signs of a Need to Hate
• The Next Battlefield in the War Over Democracy’s Survival
• One Could See this Test Was Coming
• The Lie as a Tool in the Toolbox of Evil
• Will American Democracy Survive the Election of 2020 (from Aug. 2020, looks prescient now)
• Ugly Truth Laid Bare
• A Kind of Craziness
• The Republicans’ Dangerous Delegitimization of Democratic Presidents
• Surprised by History
• Troubled and Troubling Notions of “Liberty”
• Brothers’ Keeper, Revisited
• Pandemic and Climate Change: Two of a Kind
• Good Leadership on the Pandemic Should Have Been Easy
• Nostalgia for the World We Knew
• Unrequited Hate Across Our Political Divide
• Integrity vs. Brokenness in the American Electorate
• “Love Thine Enemies” Marks a Powerful Path
• On Impeachment, Who are the Partisans and Who the Patriots?
• “Love Thine Enemies” Marks a Powerful Path
• How We Come to Our Beliefs
• Monster-in-Chief
• America’s “Hate Thine Enemies” Moment
• The Mystery of Republican Loyalty
• When Evil Rises Among a People
• Through the Prism of World War II (Can America Rise to This Occasion?)
• In Praise of Escapism
• Is the Spirit of Enmity the Solution to the Mystery?
• To the Conservatives Who Hate Me
• When The Most “Religious” Align with the Least Moral: A Tale of Two Nations
• If Betraying the Nation Won’t Do It, Nothing Will
• There’s No Escaping the Need for Good Judgment
• What If an Asteroid Were Bearing Down on Earth?
• Is Rational Argument Worthless?
• Wanting to Love the Broken in a Broken Time
• Persisting in a Mistake is No Virtue
• The View from Trump World
• Mistaking Things for Their Opposites
• Rural Areas Are Red, Cities Are Blue—Why Is That?
• The Republicans’ Relationship with the Future
• How Can People Believe the Unbelievable?
• What Happened to Those Conservative Patriots?
• Don’t Choose Hatred
• “Freedom of Religion” Can’t Mean Imposing One’s Religion on Others
• A Party of Cheaters
• That Which Unites/Divides Us
• Talk One Way, Walk the Other: The Epidemic of Hypocrisy in Conservative America
• Deep Divisions Among the American People
• The Cult of Personality and the Danger to America
• Dangerous Steps Backward for Humankind
• How Far Would Trump Go If He Could?
• The Gulf in the GOP between the Leadership and the Base
• Obstacles to the Sacred Space of Lovers
• People Who Are Different from ‘Us’ (My Latest Challenge to the Conservatives)
• Clues Today’s Republicans Somehow Ignore (My Latest Challenge to the Conservatives)
• When Good People Support Bad Politics
• Wrong About the Power of the Truth? (My Latest Challenge to the Conservatives)
• Who Cares About Justice? (My Latest Challenge to My Republican Neighbors)
• The Best of Times, the Worst of Times
• Response to a Right-Wing Troll: My Challenge to the Republicans
• What Does It Take to Get It About Climate Change?
• How Will People Handle the Truth?
• Questions for Republican Voters
• Our Inherent Uncertainty About the Future
• America Must Address Its Problem with the Trump 37%
• The Rising Up of the American People
• Why Is Our Commander-in-Chief AWOL On Russia? (Message to Trump Supporters)
• Democracy on the Ropes?
• Trying to Understand My Countrymen
• America’s Role in International Order and, Now, Disorder
• Serving the Few, Conning the Many (The M.O. of the G.O.P.)
• If You’d Believe That….! (A message to conservatives about their credulity)
• My Nostalgia (talking to conservatives about what’s happened to America)
• How Hate Poisons the Political Well (3rd message to the conservatives about their enmity)
• “We’re Right, Everyone Else is Wrong” (2nd Part of Message to Conservatives about Their Enmity)
• If You’re Closed-Minded, Don’t Read This (first in a series challenging conservative enmity toward liberals)
• The TV-Watching Ritual That Comforts Me in an America Ruled by Criminals and Liars