Big Sky Cairn

Conservatives are often faced with a related duo of frustrating facts when they deal with liberal friends. 1) By virtue of the fact that they are conservative, the liberal will presume that the cause of that ideology is some combination of stupidity or ignorance and 2) in their attempt to educate their conservative friends into liberalism, the liberal will ultimately be completely blind to their own intellectual biases and shortcomings.

Gregg over at Electric City Weblog posted an excerpt from an article that addresses this phenomenon:

Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes – or so many liberals are driven to conclude. Either that or bigots, clinging to guns, God and white supremacy; or else pathetic dupes, ever at the disposal of Republican strategists. If they only had the brains to vote in their interests, Democrats think, the party would never be out of power. But again and again, the Republicans tell their lies, and those stupid damned voters buy it.

It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.

Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.

I’ve seen this manifest itself over and over again in contemporary political discourse, but nowhere is it more obvious than in the debate about catastrophic man-made climate change. For liberals, the debate is settled and they’ve moved on to a public information campaign of epic proportions complete with Academy Award winning documentaries, public school curricula, and an army of legislators in the pocket of Big Green.

And maybe the best way to win an argument is to deny that there’s even an argument to be had. But is that the best way to arrive at the truth or the closest to it we can get?

If John Stuart Mill’s notion of a Marketplace of Ideas is to be adhered to - and Thomas Jefferson for one thought that it should be - there can be no greater crime to political discourse than a presumption of infallibility. The notion of the Marketplace of Ideas was one of the fundamental ideals of the Enlightenment that influenced the shaping of the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights - especially the First Amendment. It’s principle is simple: In a competitive environment where ideas flow freely, the better ideas will rise on their own merit.

Of course, that might be the problem right there. Liberals don’t really like marketplaces.

Disclaimer: I am not blind to the fact that the same can be said for the religious and/or social Right. For me, this particular branch of ideology is the same as the liberal left. They all want to declare a monopoly on life’s best practices and then impost that formula on everyone else.

Well said!

I tire of the leftists who assume I’m ignorant and a tool of the Republican spin machine. They assume I “bought” slick ads and marketing of the right wing. It never occurs to them that I might have come by my political leanings based on life experience and views arrived at by myself.

This fatigue of the left’s bent assumptions has led me to blog less and comment less frequently as well. You can’t have a reasoned discussion with many of them. Most are so closed minded that it blows my blood pressure up. I’ve got to think of my health, right?

Mark Trotsky has conclusively demonstrated why Republicans keep winning presidential elections, and it has nothing to do with voters being stupid. The elections are rigged.

Trotsky’s proof is simple and indisputable: Exit polling results do not correspond to the election results. Put another way, what people say they did does not compare to what they actually did, or something like that.

According to Mark Trotsky, the true will of the people is being thwarted by someone, probably Karl Rove, who is pushing a button somewhere that changes the vote tallies. This is the only possible explanation for why presidential elections are always going to the Republicans, no matter how intelligent, heroic, or exotic the Democratic candidate may be.

Poll after poll have revealed that Americans tend to identify themselves as moderately conservative to conservative. Those that call themselves liberal generally only poll around 25 to 33%. I believe the last one of these I looked at was a Zogby. This probably explains several things: the decline in traditional media’s influence because of it’s disconnect with the populace, the success of both Clintons and Carter(they were able to portray themselves as moderates), the high regard held for Reagan and Goldwater(they called themselves conservatives and they acted like conservatives), and the publics willingness to accept VP candidate Palin. Personally, I don’t try to educate liberals or worry about what they think of my political ideals. This isn’t out of arrogance so much as it is about time. I’m busy at work and I don’t have time to teach Econ 101 or explain the theory of “Peace through Power”. For those trying to convert the liberal, try this one on them. If they actually work and recieve a paycheck, ask them for a loan and then don’t give the money back. The govt does this every day. It’s your FICA contribution if you are under 40 years of age. The only candidate in this years presidential election that made a real issue of this was a conservative, Fred Thompson.

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