Martin Schneider writes:

A centrist friend today forwarded me an email from a Republican friend. This person, whom I don't know, is a staunch Republican who works in Boston. The message ran, in part:

Obama is destroying this country, I am not nuts.

Also, read about what is happening in MA with its healthcare. This is what may happen to the country under Obamacare

By now we're all used to entrenched opposition to Obama's health care plan, so that part doesn't faze me at all.

What struck me is the phrase, "Obama is destroying the country." It occurred to me that a liberal would be less likely to use those words, if the accusation were flowing in the opposite direction.

Let me be clear about what I am and am not saying here. I'm not saying that Republicans are more paranoid or more unfair or more ideological. Those things may or may not be true, but in any case I'm not saying them right now. There was plenty of rhetorical excess coming from liberals when George W. Bush was president, and it's useless to deny that there is some equivalency between the two sides. This is not about liberals being better than conservatives; it's about liberals being different from conservatives.

"George W. Bush is destroying the country!" Is that something we heard a lot, a few years ago? I would submit that it is not, although the phrase "George W. Bush is ruining the country" may have been more common. Destroy and ruin are pretty close to synonyms, but I submit that there is a subtle and meaningful distinction. To destroy something is further down the line; destruction is totalistic and irreversible, ruination not so much. To destroy something is to annihilate it, whereas to ruin it might mean making it subpar in some fundamental way. And I think the two groups of speakers were using the words with such distinctions in mind.

What did liberals actually say about Bush? It seems to me that liberals were more likely to worry about Bush "taking over" the country, trample all over our civil rights, take us down the path to fascism, and so on. In short, liberals, deep down, felt that Bush was an obstacle in the way of the good side of America expressing itself. The concept of Bush "destroying" America just seems odd to me—how would he be able to do that without my consent or the consent of many millions of his opponents? He would not be able to do that.

It's well known that conservatives are attracted to a theory of the "constitution in exile." I don't want to debate the merits of that position right now; what's striking, though, is that conservatives are prone to the idea that there is an essence of America lurking about somewhere, and that essence can be threatened in an almost physical manner. If something should happen to that essence of Americanism, then (one might say) the country is destroyed.

Liberals don't think like that. Liberals are more likely to think that Americanness, liberty, equality, dignity, and so on are things that reside in individual Americans—every American. Since liberals don't believe in some Fort Knox of Civic Virtue somewhere underground, it is not in their style to imagine it being threatened by an ideological or despotic nuclear strike, so to speak. (Yes, I have Goldfinger in mind here.) As long as there are Americans who resist despotic government, cherish liberal ideals, and so forth, then America will still exist. Or something like that, this is a tendency and an assumption, not an explicit premise, usually.

One last thing. It's often been noted that conservatives favor simplicity and liberals complexity. One need only mention Darwin, evolution, climate change to see that difference. Again, I'm not giving out awards for superiority here, this is descriptive. But this idea of a top-down presidential ability to "decide" whether America will be "destroyed" or not, this also strikes me as a conservative way of looking at the world. Ayn Rand believed in the primacy of great men of action, and she is a conservative icon. But there's another resonance here that interests me.

Students of Tolstoy will be familiar with the epilogue to War and Peace, in which Tolstoy tries to suss out the true meaning of Napoleon: is history dictated by Great Men or is it dictated by the complex and unswervable tides of history? It seems to me that conservatives find more allure in the Great Man theory ("Obama is destroying this country"), and liberals are more attracted by the complex river metaphor.