Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Delusional Liberal Myths

The Weekly Standard did an article this weekend which listed ten myths liberals tell themselves. Some of these were right, but most really weren’t. So what are the real myths liberals tell themselves? In other words, what false ideas do liberals genuinely believe about themselves, even though those beliefs are nonsensical, contradictory, and/or contrary to all the evidence?

Myth No. 1: Liberals Are The Mainstream

Even though polls show 60% of Americans embrace conservative beliefs, twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative than liberal (40% to 20%), and even though liberal politicians shy away from the liberal label, liberals still believe they are the mainstream in America.

Liberals believe this because they live in a bubble. They cluster in predominantly liberal cities and they choose only liberal friends. Hollywood inserts liberal messages in their films, Madison Avenue does the same with advertising, liberal publishers do the same with books, and even the nightly news is entirely liberal, while pretending to be unbiased. Thus, to a liberal, the whole world seems liberal because that’s all they see and hear.

An interesting bit of proof of how much this can distort your view comes from a Gallup poll which asked what percentage of the American population is black. Blacks, who cluster together and who hear their leaders complain about under-representation despite being overrepresented in the culture, answered that blacks are 30% of the population. . . three times the actual number.

Myth No. 2: Everyone Genuinely Thinks Like Liberals Do

An offshoot of Myth Number 1 combined with an incredible lack of self-awareness, liberals believe that everyone genuinely thinks like they do. Indeed, when someone dares to express a different view, they automatically assume that person is motivated by bias or has been bought or misled. This issue also explains why liberals believe that all criminals are victims: because they personally can't conceive of wanting to be a criminal. Thus, since they know that everyone else thinks like they do, it stands to reason (to them) that anyone who commits a crime does so against their own will, e.g. they are forced by circumstances beyond their control.

Myth No. 3: Liberals Are Knowledgeable

Liberals believe they are better educated and better informed than the public at large. And they see their enemies as stupid, anti-science, anti-knowledge hillbillies. This is of course wrong. Not only has it been shown over and over that liberals are very poorly informed, but their incredible desire to block “inconvenient truths” through political correctness and simply denying reality, and their refusal to consider knowledge that runs counter to their beliefs (see Myth No. 1 above) keep liberals happily ignorant. So why do they think they are knowledgeable? Consider the old adage that the most intelligent person is the one who knows what they don’t know, and those who are most sure are those who know the least. That describes liberals. They are willfully ignorant of what they don’t know, and that blinds them to the truth and makes their own beliefs seem that much more correct.

Myth No. 4: Liberalism Has Never Failed

Liberal policies have failed whenever they’ve been put into practice. Indeed, the evidence is indisputable that liberal policies are highly destructive. Yet, liberals insist liberalism has never failed. Why do they say this? Because liberals disavow their failures. The most common defense mechanism involves believing that liberal policies weren’t actually tried. This delusion takes two forms: (1) either the liberals in charge turned out not to be "genuine" liberals and thus perverted the policies (e.g. the Soviets or Nazis) or they failed to go far enough (e.g. Obama or the Great Society), or (2) their policies were undermined by the enemies of liberalism, e.g. corporations, Republicans, the rich, white people, religious people, capitalists, the bourgeois middle class, etc. That's how despite 70 years of nearly-uninterrupted liberalism, liberals will tell you with a straight face that liberalism has never really been given a chance anywhere. And in rare instances, where its inescapable that liberalism was tried (e.g. FDR), liberals create elaborate lies to explain how it actually worked despite the historical evidence to the contrary.

Myth No. 5: Liberals Are Independent Thinkers

Liberals are the classic example of “group think.” They believe what they are told, no matter how contradictory. And their beliefs can be changed literally overnight if their leaders tell them so. Yet, liberals consider themselves independent thinkers. This is of course ridiculous. First, consider the fact that liberals actively dismiss all evidence that doesn’t fit their beliefs. Secondly, consider that liberals are poorly informed people who only get their news from liberal propaganda sources. Third, consider that liberals have no problem ignoring reality when they are told it is no longer politically correct to believe reality. None of that is consistent with independent thinking.

Myth No. 6: Liberals Represent The Little Guy

Liberals love to believe they represent the little guy. Yet, their representatives do the bidding of Big Business. Their minimum wage kills the very jobs the little guy needs. Their unions crush small businesses and keep out outsiders (particularly minority workers). Their regulations stop all but the best connected companies. Their open borders keep wages low. Their love of taxes crushes low and middle class workers. Their protectionism hurts consumers. And all their heroes have come from the idle rich class. So much for the little guy.

Myth No. 7: Liberals Aren’t Racist/Sexist/Ageist

Liberals believe everyone else is racist, sexist, etc., but not them. Yet, big liberal cities (like LA, Boston and Washington) have the worst racial problems. Liberal companies don’t hire more minorities than conservative companies. Anyone who knows liberals knows they freely tell racist and sexist jokes. . . which they claim doesn’t make them racist, but would make conservatives racist. Their attacks on conservative blacks and women often take the vilest forms of racism/sexism and few liberals (read: none) will ever raise an objection. And there is a deeply racist underpinning to the liberal view of civil right, i.e. that minorities don’t have the ability to succeed unless white liberals hold their hands the whole way.

Myth No. 8: Liberals Aren’t Full of Hate

Liberals claim everyone else is full of hate. Yet, liberals are the ones who seethe with hate. They rant and rave and want their opponents destroyed. Liberals don’t just want apologies (something they would never feel they owed if the situation was reversed), they want people fired and driven from the public square. They demand re-education, i.e. brainwashing. Their protests turn violent. They want their opponents silenced. They openly hate the rich. . . actually anyone they consider a “have”. They hate religious people. They openly hate Jews again. They hate those who disagree with them. They hate conservatives. They tar their opponents as racists. And they want all of these people crushed by the state.

Myth No. 9: Liberals Are Better People

Liberals believe they are better people, pure and simple. In fact, it's fascinating how self-righteous liberals get about charity. They dismiss the efforts of people engaged in genuine charity, but they think their vote to give your money to someone they feel deserves it more makes them better than you. You see this in every facet of their beliefs. They see themselves as the saviors of the poor, of minorities, and of the very planet. . . all done with your money, though they take all the credit. And they look down on anyone who isn’t as “noble” as they believe they are.

Myth No. 10: Liberals Are Rational

Finally, liberals believe they are rational, but they aren’t -- they act on emotional impulses without any thought to what they are proposing. This is why their policies are often childishly stupid, e.g. “if someone doesn’t have healthcare, then we should just give it to them. Duh.” This is also why they can actively believe things that cannot be true and why they can believe contradictory things at the same time -- because they aren't thinking, they are feeling. This is also why they get so irrationally angry at anyone who disagrees with them, because they a dealing purely in emotion, where disagreement is a personal affront. This is also why they think their good intentions justify their failures. . . "sure you got hurt, but I meant well."

Put simply, liberals are incredibly not-self-aware morons.

33 comments:

Tennessee Jed said...

Lots of content here so I'll probably try and think about them some to do them justice. That said, I think people of all political pursuasions tend to think their own views are the very definition of "main stream." There is also a tendency of people to view the ideological wings of the "other" party as what is typical. It is just human nature.

There is the famous quote from a NYC Manhattenite who professed shock at Richard Nixon's victory in 1968. "I don't know a single person" who voted for him," she said. Likewise, the old "main stream" media was always liberal, so that was a handy device.

It is easy for some to demonize both sides of the political spectrum. There is a legitimate argument that free market capital concentrates wealth in too few hands. I just happen to believe that with it's flaws, it still beats the alternatives by a mile.

TJ said...

"Put simply, liberals are incredibly not-self-aware morons."

That is indeed a very simple way to put it Andrew.

I've been out of town the past 10 days, so I have a lot of reading to catch up on!

AndrewPrice said...

Jed, I'm not saying conservatives aren't without their flaws or that ALL liberals fall for each of these myths, but these are what you find when you start running into liberals.

And they are objectively provably wrong because they really do believe contradictory things and the evidence is there -- they just refuse to see it.

AndrewPrice said...

TJ, That does seem to sum it up nicely! :-)

Welcome back.

T-Rav said...

Aw crap, Jed beat me to the "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" story. It happened with Reagan too, I think. As for the "liberals are better people" myth, all we have to do for that is look to Mr. Hoffa and his lovely speech to the labor unions yesterday.

I'd say perhaps the most important myth is the one that liberals are the only rational people. This has made it very easy for them to demonize their opponents as acting out of either stupidity or bigotry--although sometimes they'll dress it up as "not fully understanding" liberal policies. That's more civil and condescending.

AndrewPrice said...

T-Rav, The "I don't know anyone who" bit is absolute proof that they live in a bubble. But even beyond that, if you ever start talking to liberals you will quickly find that (1) they refuse to go to non-liberal sources for news and (2) they dismiss anything that doesn't come from an approved liberals source. I've even seen conservatives show liberals how something simply could not be true or was a contradiction or show them evidence to the contrary and their response was literally "there has to be something wrong with that" or "but you're a conservative, that's what I would expect you to say." They are like robots who will not accept information that goes against their programming.

And you're right that the rational argument is why they think that everyone else is stupid or not worth listening too -- which protects them from having to process reality. They actually believe that their beliefs (which are purely emotional) are have been tested and proven logically. But they're full of it. They have simply redefined logic to exclude anything that could disprove their beliefs -- which is how emotions work. That's why politics is so personal to then -- because they are dealing in emotion.

AndrewPrice said...

I need to disappear for a couple hours, but I will be back.

T-Rav said...

Andrew, I think the reason liberals have managed to get away with the "You're stupid!" line for so long is because they tend to be more educated. Well, they're really not, but they have more pieces of paper from college saying they're educated. This allows them to use lots of theoretical and sophisticated-sounding language to make it sound like they know what they're talking about rather than just saying "You're stupid!" So it's harder to combat them.

I think that's changing, though, because of the information revolution the Internet has caused. It's not hard anymore to dig up some facts and throw it right back at their heads--oh jeez, is that too violent? I don't want to be like Mr. Hoffa or nothin'--to dig up some facts and present them to liberals, whether they'll listen or not. So I have some hope.

Ed said...

Andrew, Excellent article - much to think about this fine Tuesday morning. :D

I think you're right in your diagnosis.

Unknown said...

The "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" remark is attributed to Pauline Kael. Before she became a New York Upper West Side liberal, she ran a small movie house in Berkeley. I was [un]fortunate enough to know her back then, and she was pretty much able to say the same thing about her friends in the Bay Area.

I like Ronald Reagan's quote: "It's not that our liberal friends are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so."

As for limousine liberals congregating in the big cities, San Francisco is a perfect example. When I first moved there, the black population was approximately 13%. Today, after decades of loving and caring for minorities, the black population is less than 9%. In New York City, they used to joke that this was called "slum relocation." San Francisco went them one better, and moved their slums clear out of town and across the Bay to Oakland. Liberalism is nothing more than mass delusion.

Unknown said...

Speaking of the liberal mindset, an interviewer on Fox just asked former Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas) if given today's myriad of government regulation, could Sam Walton start his business (Wal-Mart) today in Arkansas. She actually said that "regulation" produces "certainty" which encourages small business start-ups because they know what the rules are.

She also said that it's the government's job to "empower" business. No, Blanche, you idiot. It's government's job to get the hell out of the way and assure that business can be done without crippling regulations and taxes.

That said, even she sees that the Obama administration has gone a regulation too far, and has joined up with the National Federation of Independent Business to oppose the latest round of executive orders and bureaucratic regulations. Maybe she's starting to see the light, but she's starting from the wrong premise--government is there to create business. She wants to tinker around the edges instead of simply abandoning the liberal thought-process.

Ed said...

I checked out the Weekly Standard article and I agree that the guy missed his own point a lot. I think he's projecting a lot.

The one that frustrates me is the "liberalism has never failed." You're 100% right that they disavow any failure. It's absolutely stunning to hear them claim "liberalism has never been tried" when it's been tried all over the world for decades and failed every single time.

DUQ said...

This describes the liberals I know to a T.

AndrewPrice said...

T-Rav, I think that's true in part, but it works even with completely uneducated liberals. I think it comes from the fact that their leaders are condescending about all opposing views and when they turn on the news or read a book or see a movie, their views are confirmed by "the authorities." So they think they're smart because they are told they are smart over and over and over again. It's like brainwashing.

Think of it in cult terms. If you spend all your time in a cult that just beats into you that your little group is the only group in the world that truly knows the truth, then you will eventually begin to see everyone else as wrong, evil, whatever. This is the same thing minus the compound.

AndrewPrice said...

Thanks Ed, I'm glad it gave your brain a workout.

AndrewPrice said...

Lawhawk, It's the same thing in Boulder, Colorado. They put heavy zoning in place to keep the riffraff out and in the process made sure that blacks and other minorities couldn't afford to move there. Then the hypocritically attacked the rest of the state for not being as cultured and liberal as they are.

I like that Reagan quote too. And it's very true. Once something becomes general knowledge among liberals, they never give it up no matter how obviously stupid it was.

AndrewPrice said...

Lawhawk, Blanche is typical of liberals. She doesn't see anything wrong with the concept of regulating to "create" business (and she knows the fake nomenclature that justifies this in her mind ("certainty")), but she thinks the reason it hasn't worked is that they just used the wrong regulations. Welcome to Myth No. 4.

AndrewPrice said...

Ed, That's one frustrating too because it keeps liberals from learning form their mistakes -- because they assume they've never made a mistake.

If you want an example of never having been tried, think back on the whole education reform issue. Education is an area that liberals have run without conservative input since the 1940s. It's a total mess. Yet, what do they blame? Lack of money and racists who undermine the system. Ridiculous. But that's what they believe.

AndrewPrice said...

DUQ... ditto. :-)

rlaWTX said...

yep.

AndrewPrice said...

rlaWTX, LOL! Very succinct!

Tam said...

You forgot the classic liberal argument against blatant hypocrisy, "It isn't the same thing." Spoken in the most condescending tone possible, often with a patronizing epithet such as "honey" attached.

AndrewPrice said...

Tam, Good point. I'm sure we've all heard that one over and over and over and over again. I actually had one liberal I was arguing with who insisted that liberals can't be hypocrites because "they're not judgmental." Huh?

Tennessee Jed said...

Well Andrew, I'd be hard pressed to try and argue with your list. On the other hand, I kind of thought the Weekly Standard's list was pretty good, too. Maybe, I just find a lot wrong with liberals. Somewhat in the same vein, I enjoyed a post this morning at BH from Lawrence Myers about facebook and liberals that was a hoot.

AndrewPrice said...

Jed, I'm glad you found nothing to disagree with! :-)

It's not that the Weekly Standard list is wrong per se, it just struck me as looking at symptoms more so than causes. For example, believing that the Tea Party is dangerous and extreme is just an offshoot of seeing themselves as the mainstream. Also, the idea that liberals move forward and conservatives move backwards is just semantics, that's another way of saying "liberals think liberalism is better." And the idea that "liberals think they have moved beyond religion" is a conservative myth, i.e. that all liberals are anti-religious and that only conservative religious beliefs are valid religious beliefs.

That's why I think the idea is a good one, but the list itself leaves a lot to be desired.

Notawonk said...

andrew: we should start our own list of what liberals ARE.

I'll get the ball rolling, after your astute observation, of course:

Liberals are pompous gasbags who insist you agree with them even when they're making sh*t up.

AndrewPrice said...

Patti, The trick would be getting them to read the list. I suspect their little minds would explode! LOL!

Doc Whoa said...

Andrew, I work with a group of liberals and this describes them perfectly. They believe every one of these myths.

AndrewPrice said...

Doc, I've been trying to think of a liberal I know this doesn't apply to and I really can't.

Ed said...

Andrew, I remember that from your Waiting For Superman review.

Ed said...

Andrew and Patti, You should put together a huge list defining liberalism. That would be useful.

Notawonk said...

andrew: i'll be linking this article on the 15th. POW!

AndrewPrice said...

Thanks Patti!

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