This Is Why Liberals Got Their Asses Handed To Them
Posted by Melissa Clouthier on Dec 11 2010
As Congress seems to be coming unwound due to the Democrats losing power, liberals try to Make Sense Of It All. I visited a new blogger due to Matt Zemeck’s recommendation on Twitter. The blogger attempts to explain the Sarah Palin subculture but might as well generalize to all conservatives.
Here are some assertions that I’m pulling at random from the blog After The Future. I will do a rough translation:
All the complexity, all the problems that come from living in the modern world can be reduced to blaming the Liberals because Liberals are, by definition “kooks” and “fools”. [Conservatives are simple and cannot handle complexity.]
And I think that I’ve come to see that Sarah Palin conservatives don’t really want a lively exchange of ideas. That’s a luxury they can’t afford, because for them it’s about survival.
[Conservatives are primal, instinctual, base animals whereas liberals are sophisticated, higher formed beings.]
Sarah Palin conservatives talk about losing their democracy and freedoms, but they’re really talking about losing a particular white, Protestant-dominated imagination of America.
[Conservatives are racist.]
Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are these conservatives’ Sitting Bull or Chief Joseph or Geronimo. And they are very like fundamentalist Muslims in that they both hate the same thing–the modern system that is destroying their respective worlds of sacred meanings and relationships.
[Conservatives are reactionary and dangerous--as dangerous as Islamofascist killers. In fact, their impulses come from the same place.]
The most offensive part of this guy’s blog post is that he indulges in the very kind of stereotyping he attributes to conservatives.
The second most offensive part of the post are the broad, false assertions themselves.
If I understand this guy correctly, liberals are better because they shun traditionalism in favor of a “pluralizing modern world”. Neither term is defined. The author is not, he says, a multi-culturalist. That is, he believes some cultures are better than others.
He begs the question: what culture, today, is better? Another: What modern world does he aspire to?
Because, here’s the thing: If you want me to buy in this new world, define it. Explain what this new world holds for me. To use his bigoted analogy: Be John Smith and explain to me, the savage, Pocohantas, how your ideology and world view would benefit me and society.
When your aim is to discard tradition–and we’re not even talking about Judeo-Christian/Western tradition here, but tradition woven into the history of mankind (such as marriage between man and a woman)–you better have compelling evidence for the societal benefit of your worldview.
The Indians exchanged technology and ideas with the American settlers, but in the end, a better culture and society emerged. Yes, better.
Now, as to innovation and creative expression and the vaunted Science, America was formed by inventors and thinkers who happened to be Christians. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and then Thomas Edison. They were big thinkers in all things–politics, science, law and religion. They set a nice foundation.
That is not to say that America has not and is not evolving and changing. Technology and knowledge continue to remake and transform. Intermarriage has begun to make the author’s assertions of a reactionary and white-only political movement seem quaint. And conservatives embrace this growth and change heartily but they do not discard a moral framework in which to put these novel and new developments into context.
So I find it strange reading a guy who, by his very suppositions, unscientifically casts aspersions on a group with whom he disagrees in direct contradiction to his stated notion of plurality.
He does not believe in a plural modern world. He believes in his own version of the modern world but does not define that world. This is very convenient because no one can argue the comparative merits of the two worlds. He distorts and mischaracterizes one world and then condemns the cartoon he creates and wants us to consider him a genius because he’s not of that world. He’s better. Just because.
And that, in short, encapsulates the liberals we know. They lionize Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, and when a conservative points out that socialism is a tried and failed societal model, they protest that “it just hasn’t been done right.”
Liberals kvetch about the world ending with global warming. When a conservative points out that the policies they put forth will harm American citizens, but worse, do more harm to the environment by pushing manufacturing to third world countries who pollute more, they ignore the evidence.
Liberals craft legislation “for the children” that inevitably creates a perverse disincentive to care for a child. When a conservative points out that the traditional institution of marriage is the scientifically proven hedge against poverty, liberals create more public policy that undermines the family–the very institution that would protect the children they claim to care so much about.
In order to be taken seriously, a modern liberal has to come up with ideas and institutions that are objectively better than traditional ideas and institutions that have been time-tested, and, oh by the way, work. The scientific method is based on hypotheses, experimentation, and then, most importantly, evidence. It must be reproducible.
Instead of laying out a concrete vision, the liberals ask America to take their undefined vision on faith. It changes, they say. It depends on context, they assert. Mmmmhmmm… That’s just another way of saying, “trust us, we know better than you.”
And this smug self-confidence comes across as particularly galling when it is so without evidence and merit. So while people go about their lives and work and in the very concrete world where feedback loops give ample of evidence of what makes sense and what doesn’t, liberals ask them to ignore the evidence in favor of some ill-defined vision that changes depending on the liberal one talks to.
Liberals may wonder why they lost this election cycle, but their condescension toward their political adversaries certainly has to be near the top of the list. If only conservatives were smarter, open to complexity, sophisticated and well, just like liberals. Alas. Those poor, ignorant savages do not even know when they encounter a superior being.
Well, superior beings, scientifically lay out the superior society you have in mind and then we’ll talk. Until then, your criticism will be taken for what it is: emotionalism wrapped in the illusion of intellectualism designed to demonize your loathed opposition.
UPDATED:
Why liberals only criticize others and don’t put forth their own ideas. It’s called the Frankfurt School. Watch and learn more about this Marxist variant here.
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