A letter to my liberal friends

I have talked with you, followed the news, studied the op-eds and given a lot of thought to the liberal position because I want to understand and respond.

I agree that the Republican Party has troublesome issues of unity, that the front-runners would be poor choices for president and that the GOP is not dealing with the situation well.

That said, I see things differently than you do.

The liberal position is so transparent to you that you do not notice how one-sided it is, namely that the liberal position is The Way and The Light, and any deviation from it or opposition to it is suspect at best and heresy at worst.

From your position, the legitimate role the conservative faction should play is to temper liberalism and progressivism, to slow them down perhaps, but not to oppose their premise, because fundamentally liberalism is the way to go, and eventually conservatives will also see the light.

You don't see the liberal role in creating the stew we are in. Since you see the conservative struggle as being internal, you do not connect it with behavior on the liberal side.

What we are witnessing is the conservative reaction to a very liberal agenda that is bearing down heavily and relentlessly on conservatives and the values they hold dear. When people feel threatened and want to fight back, varied responses emerge — from resignation to accommodation to attempted compromise to storming the barricades. This struggle is going on in the conservative camp and accounts for the disunity. But the reaction to extremism will usually be extremism.

Conservatives feel their values and their way of life are under fire from a government that has stopped listening to them, that shuts them out of negotiations, that belittles their concerns, that is manipulating information to fortify a progressive agenda and that is constricting free speech to stifle opposition. I'm not writing exaggerations here. This is how about half of America feels.

Half of America is frightened that all that they have worked for, that the people they cherish, that the very structure and the rules by which they have organized their lives and for which they have paid a personal price are in danger.

Liberals see the ship of state sailing to a Walden Pond-type body of water in which everyone will be content because everyone gets equal privileges, everyone is understood, government and its systems will take care of them, and keep the scary specter of responsibility at bay.

Conservatives see the ship of state already in white-water rapids heading for a waterfall where individual liberty will be sacrificed to avoid individual responsibility, where what people have earned by hard work and sacrifice will be distributed to people who are not pulling their oars, where they will have to depend on a distant, impersonal system to meet their personal and often urgent needs.

In an atmosphere of fear, extremism wins. We've seen it before.

The middle is always the hardest position to hold. Extremism has the clarity that the middle must struggle to create since, by definition, the middle has to embody a broader spectrum of views.

So now we are faced with a severely unbalanced election. There is no Democratic middle, and the Republican middle is struggling to overcome Trump.

The liberal view that the GOP is now paying the price for having been obstructionist and extreme during President Obama's presidency misses the point.

It misses what conservatives see: that the GOP's extremism is a reaction to liberal extremism. When you have less power — and the GOP has less power as long as it cannot override a president's veto and that president persists in taking executive actions in which the people have no say at all, not even through their representatives — the best you can do is dig in, pull on the brakes and hope you can delay the train until you can do something you think is better.

Liberals do not seem to wonder what has brought conservatism to this point. They see conservatives as traditionalists in a vacuum who do not value what liberals consider to be positive change. Liberals see conservatives as wanting to cling to a way of life that is outdated because it is familiar or because they are afraid of something new.

Liberals often do not recognize the genius of the American Experiment. Based more closely than any other country known so far on the Judeo-Christian principle of individual liberty coupled with individual responsibility, America has been a light to the nations. Warts and all, it has provided opportunity to the masses, lifted more people out of poverty and disease, and opened a pathway to the top for anyone willing to work hard and sacrifice.

If we continue leveling the playing field to the point of absurdity — where those who apply themselves and study according to the rules are passed over for those who have achieved much less; where people who work and sacrifice according to the rules are asked to give more of their money and the fruit of their labor to strangers who haven't worked as hard rather than to be able to keep it or give it to their children; where people who have scraped and saved to insure their families have to pay to insure people who haven't taken that responsibility; where people who have made what they consider to be moral choices are required to underwrite people whose choices offend them morally, and on and on — if we keep pushing that agenda, we are heading for a civil war or a revolution. Lacking the courage for either of these, America will become just another country, and the light of the world will grow dimmer.

My husband and I have worked very hard for a very long time — overcoming enormous financial start-up debt on the way — to get where we are today. Already the government takes nearly 50 percent of what we make. If the Democrats win, they will take much more, to the point where people like us will wonder if it's all worth it and start to do less. All of the people who live off our work, and those who benefit from it, will suffer. Is that what the government wants?

I want to pay our fair share to the government as long as it goes to the common good. I want roads, schools, law enforcement and national security. But I don't want to pay for other people's poor choices, passivity or lifestyles.

I don't want to make victims out of minorities by telling them, "That's OK, you can have my help because you can't make it on your own." That is soft bigotry. By all means, help minorities to achieve the prerequisites of their goals, but don't lower the standards for them.

I don't want an economy with constraints that hurt all of us — the poorest and the richest. Deregulate within reason. Lift all boats. The job creators that liberals want to hamstring will help the lowest rungs of society. But equality does not produce prosperity. Other people's money runs out, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, and if the desire to create more money is not stimulated, than everyone will live in mediocrity.

The government has no money of its own. None, zero. It has only what it takes from us.

I believe in a woman's right to choose — whether she has protected or unprotected sex, inside or outside of marriage. But I do not believe in her right to make me pay for the choices she makes or doesn't make or to demand that I pay for her to end a life without dire need for the health of the mother.

I understand that liberalism comes from a source that wants to do good. I question, though, whether liberal policies actually look to the end of what they are pursuing, whether they will truly help or only be Band-Aids that mortgage the future.

Yes, we need to progress, but let's not try to bend human nature and tell other reasonable people — as liberals insinuate — that they are holding up the works. Let's all move to the middle and take responsibility together for making this country work better.

Here's to us — dedicated citizens all — who will each vote his or her conscience.

Your conservative friend,

Rosemary

Rosemary Warschawski is senior vice president of exlnz, a Baltimore-based achievement consulting firm. She wrote this article for the Chicago Tribune.