Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader found an interesting peice on the Washington Post this morning while he was watching the snow fall, and fall, and fall.
The piece is Gerard Alexander’s “Why are liberals so condesending?”
Rather than give his own intro, your Maximum Leader will excerpt some of the key points here we go:
Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling’s 1950 remark that conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” During the 1950s and ’60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to “the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.”
[…]
…liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians’ speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.
The first is the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics…
[…]
…the second variety of liberal condescension, exemplified in Thomas Frank’s best-selling 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Frank argued that working-class voters were so distracted by issues such as abortion that they were induced into voting against their own economic interests. Then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee, echoed that theme in his 2004 presidential run, when he said Republicans had succeeded in getting Southern whites to focus on “guns, God and gays” instead of economic redistribution.
[…]
The third version of liberal condescension points to something more sinister. In his 2008 book, “Nixonland,” progressive writer Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon created an enduring Republican strategy of mobilizing the ethnic and other resentments of some Americans against others. Similarly, in their 1992 book, “Chain Reaction,” Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall argued that Nixon and Reagan talked up crime control, low taxes and welfare reform to cloak racial animus and help make it mainstream. It is now an article of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants.
[…]
Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety — including fear of change — whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. Former vice president Al Gore made this case in his 2007 book, “The Assault on Reason,” in which he expressed fear that American politics was under siege from a coalition of religious fundamentalists, foreign policy extremists and industry groups opposed to “any reasoning process that threatens their economic goals.” This right-wing politics involves a gradual “abandonment of concern for reason or evidence” and relies on propaganda to maintain public support, he wrote.
[…]
These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant — they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking. Indeed, when the president met with House Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same breath.
[…]
To many liberals, this worldview may be appealing, but it severely limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps most painfully, liberal condescension has distorted debates over American poverty for nearly two generations.
Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades — until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited — until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.
[…]
Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend. Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals.
Professor Alexander’s piece really appeals to your Maximum Leader. (Apologies to you all who thought your Maximum Leader was just excerpting a few short bits from the piece - he wound up excerpting a lot more than he thought he would.) Of all of the things that annoy your Maximum Leader about political discourse in America today the immediate dismissal of any conservative idea at all using any of the four methods Alexander describes is the most annoying. The third and fourth items are particularly galling.
Your Maximum Leader has from time to time had political debate on poverty and crime in which he was engaged ended by another person throwing out that his arguements were blatantly racist. He has often wondered by no liberal seems to equate the playing of the race card to end a discussion as obnoxious as a pro-lifer invoking God’s will to end a discussion on abortion.
Sadly, when it comes to debate many on the left would prefer to “debate” the conservatives who easily fit into a category that is easily dismissed. Take for example Ann Coulter. Coulter is intelligent and can make a clear detatched and reasonable argument for her positions; but she often just takes the rhetorical points and doesn’t go for the reasoned discussion. Your Maximum Leader also realizes why she does this. She does it because most liberals are really not interested in a discussion because they have already boxed conservatives into a preconceived sterotype and don’t feel a discussion is possible or necessary.
This is not to say that there aren’t conservatives who do legitimately fall into the stereotypes and with whom you can’t have a logical discussion - there are. But so many liberals don’t realize that they too are the mirror images of the conservatives that they so often marginalize.
Your Maximum Leader doesn’t have a larger point here except to say that he agrees with Gerard Alexander’s piece. You should click through and read it. If you have thoughts you’d like to share on this topic, comments are open as always.
Carry on.
