Condescending Liberals

Frequently, we’ve made the case here that the liberals that dominate the Boston-Washington corridor as well as the Left Coast are smarmy, arrogant and condescending through and through. Our Lord and Savior is the poster child for that arrogance. Ivy League education, nose up in the air, talking down to the little people, the Great Unwashed who occupy flyover country, the term actually used to refer to the section of the country flown over when traveling from coast to coast.

This picture summarizes it:

It’s why, when their policies are rejected by the American people, the Left always thinks it’s either because the policies were presented correctly (i.e., public relations FAIL) or because the American people just didn’t understand them or they were misled by (a) Republicans, (b) special interests, (c) talk radio and Fox News, (d) all of the above (i.e., the American people are too stupid to understand what we want).

Gerard Alexander makes a similar point here:

Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation — as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a “Bolshevik plot” — and the country’s failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. “We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

Here’s the dirty little secret: the modern American liberal cares little for freedom. Hence, the word liberal is a misnomer. The modern American liberal is really a statist. Statists by their very nature are elitists, and elitists view themselves as better than the average person.

Alexander cites examples going back to the 1950s and brings back such golden oldies to memory:

• Hillarys’ Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, in which strategerists, think-tanks and right-wing media conspired to mislead the public on a regular basis.
• The Left’s general derision against conservative media and Fox News.
• Claims such as the one that conservatives are waging war against science; that by opposing leftwing-agenda driven junk science such as global warming climate change and evolution, they are really opposing science as a whole.

Then, he moves on to the manipulators and the manipulated:

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: “What do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?”

In Krugman’s world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of “these people” — only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.

But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. This is 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.

And speaking to a roomful of Democratic donors in 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama offered a similar (and infamous) analysis when he suggested that residents of Rust Belt towns “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” about job losses. When his comments became public, Obama backed away from their tenor but insisted that “I said something that everybody knows is true.”

It’s the politics of personal destruction as taught by Alinsky. Not just wrong, but evil as well. Not only must the message be defeated, but also the messenger must be destroyed as well.

The “What’s The Matter With Kansas” book was a direct, full-frontal assault on Middle America. In the eyes of the author, red-state middle America was just simply too stupid to see that voting Democrat was in their best interest because the Democrats — and by extension the Left — were going to give them things and take care of them.

And Obama’s remarks showed just what a condescending elitist He was: anyone opposed to His leftwing agenda was just a dumb, ignorant hick who clung to guns and religion out of fear of change.

This is what they think of you.

Obama made those comments in the safe pinhead elitist bastion of San Francisco, Bela Pelosi’s home turf. When those comments got out, he lost one Rust Belt primary after another, but it wasn’t enough to derail Him.

Alexander goes on to detail how the Left always accuses conservatives of using the tactics of fear and division, all the while employing those same tactics itself. For example, which side plays the race card and divides Americans into different victim groups? The Left. Who plays the class warfare card so skillfully? The Left. Who every two years tries telling America’s elderly that Republicans want to take away their Social Security and Medicare and toss them out onto the streets with nothing but a case of Mighty Dog for Seniors? The Left.

Finally, there’s this:

[L]iberals 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.

Prominent liberal academics also propagate these beliefs. George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike conservatives, “still believe in Enlightenment reason,” while Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant, argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual. “They like to read and think,” Westen wrote. “They thrive on policy debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right.”

Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the influential progressive Web site Daily Kos, commissioned a poll, which he released this month, designed to show how many rank-and-file Republicans hold odd or conspiratorial beliefs — including 23 percent who purportedly believe that their states should secede from the Union. Moulitsas concluded that Republicans are “divorced from reality” and that the results show why “it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country.” His condescension is superlative: Of the respondents who favored secession, he wonders, “Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumb-[expletive]-istan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?”

An elitist is an elitist is an elitist. They are the ones who think the little people are too stupid to take care of themselves and there exists the need for government in the form of the Nanny State. They are the advocates of all forms of mass transit, from buses to choo-choo trains to light rail, thus controlling where the little people go and how and when they get there, including where they can live and work.

After all, the little people aren’t smart enough to make the “right” choice when given a choice now, are they?

Advertisement