{"id":798256,"date":"2019-08-05T14:05:14","date_gmt":"2019-08-05T20:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summitdaily.com\/?p=369541"},"modified":"2019-08-05T14:05:14","modified_gmt":"2019-08-05T20:05:14","slug":"opinion-morgan-liddick-the-people-in-the-debate-vs-the-people-in-the-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/local-news\/opinion-morgan-liddick-the-people-in-the-debate-vs-the-people-in-the-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Morgan Liddick: The people in the debate vs. the people in the audience"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last Wednesday, I watched the first installment of the gang of 20+ Democratic presidential wannabes while in Kearney, Nebraska. I didn\u2019t want to, but one must try to be informed.<\/p>\n

I was driving up the Platte River valley, which is always a visual pleasure: wide and shallow, the valley is lush farmland from just west of Lincoln, rich with soybeans, maize, corn and field corn.  Further on as the low hills at the valley\u2019s edge pinch in, forage crops begin to dominate. The landscape becomes lighter green and tan. The river zags away and one emerges onto the savannah that stretches away more than 100 miles to the bustling cities of the Front Range.<\/p>\n

Kearney is one of the small towns dotting this landscape at a distance of about 40 miles, a pattern typical of 19th<\/sup> century agricultural settlement. It\u2019s not large, and it is full of a variety of people doing things appropriate to folks in farm country. I grew up in a town like this.<\/p>\n

That thought came to mind while watching the debate. Simply put, the principal reason Donald Trump will be reelected is the contrast between the people in the room with me and the people on television. The former are women and men who make things, grow stuff or make it possible to do both. They love their country, want better lives for their children, work to be self-sufficient, help their families and neighbors, and understand that the phrase \u201cWe\u2019re from the government, and we\u2019re here to help you\u201d is often a bad joke, not a mission statement.<\/p>\n

The people in the room may disagree strongly with one another on details, but they all agree on one thing: The people on TV want to control our lives, right down to how we buy our eye care and what sorts of cars we will drive. They have plans for everything and everyone, and some of them don\u2019t mind admitting it. As someone who has lived in the wreck of a country that suffered the bad effects of central planning for seven decades, the idea freezes my blood. And there was more. <\/p>\n

There were accusations of racism. Oodles of them, like Sen. Bernie Sanders slamming Trump\u2019s \u201cracism and xenophobia.<\/a>\u201d Even the moderators got into the act, with Don Lemon suggesting that Trump voters shared his \u201cracism<\/a>.\u201d Perhaps the party has finally found a description to replace \u201cbasket of deplorables.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wednesday evening, there was the amusing irony of leading members of the party who celebrate openness and curiosity trying to evade inconvenient questions by dismissing them as \u201cRepublican talking points<\/a>.\u201d Aside from the schadenfreude of watching the squirming, there was more than a little annoyance: implicit in this deflection tactic is the shared view that ideas coming from outside the charmed circle of Democratic cognoscenti are worthless at best, a mere diversion or annoyance from the real business of making plans \u2014 again, for everyone.<\/p>\n

Between the two \u2014 the easy smearing of Trump supporters and the vigorous disdain for any but party-approved ideas \u2014 can be found the reason Trump will probably continue to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on Jan. 21, 2021. Simply put, the more Trump supporters are maligned \u2014 the more they are berated, insulted, belittled and ignored \u2014 the more likely it is that they will continue to support him and work to bring others along.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very odd. Currently, the \u201cVanguard of the Party\u201d vying for the Democratic nomination for president seem hell-bent on pushing the oldest political party in America so far to the left that it will be unrecognizable, while clearly showing a very large number of American voters how thoroughly they are despised. And that\u2019s not the worst of it.<\/p>\n

This sort of behavior spreads. In the political world, in media, in the academy and throughout society, we are drifting away from the ability to see each other as people. Instead of seeing one\u2019s intellectual or political opponents as men and women much as ourselves \u2014 as fellow-citizens with jobs, children, dreams, pets; people who love their country and wish it the best; people who differ with us only in the details of our politics or solely in opinions about which are the best methods to realize joint goals \u2014 we increasingly see each other as somehow mortal enemies or as evil. If we persist, it will be the end of us and of our country.<\/p>\n

And no, \u201cbut Trump!\u201d is not a remedy. Not even close.<\/p>\n

Morgan Liddick\u2019s column \u201cOn Your Right\u201d publishes Tuesdays in the Summit Daily News. Liddick spent 27 years working for the U.S. Foreign Service, primarily living abroad. He also spent 12 years teaching U.S. history and Western civilization at community colleges in Colorado and Texas. He lived in Summit County as recently as 2015 and currently lives in Virginia. Contact him at<\/em> mcliddick@hotmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

via:: Summit Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Wednesday, I watched the first installment of the gang of 20+ Democratic presidential wannabes while in Kearney, Nebraska. I didn\u2019t want to, but one must try to be informed. I was driving up the Platte River valley, which is always a visual pleasure: wide and shallow, the valley is lush farmland from just west […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-798256","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-18 19:18:34","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}