The Condescension Of Liberal Politics.



The Condescension Of Liberal Politics.  I have always been fascinated by the conflict between liberal and conservative politicians.  Being a moderate independent, I have seen what I view as the extreme wings of each party seize control of their party’s message.  The moderates of each side have been marginalized and have repeatedly ending up being pawns in the radical wing’s ongoing chess match.  There is clearly merit to both schools of political thought, liberal and conservative, and clearly pitfalls to each.  Policy itself is something that can be discussed, debated, and given a reasonable chance, compromised upon.  There is much truth in the old saying that a good man will compromise on practice, but never on principle.  It is the philosophy behind policy that I have always found mysterious and it is this philosophy that I believe has led us to this poisonous WDC environment where nothing can get done in government.   Although there are certainly peculiarities about the conservative philosophy that merit discussion, it is the motivation behind liberal policies that I have always struggled to define.  I think that perhaps I have discovered why at least a portion of that which has puzzled me for so many years.

Many hold the conventional wisdom that liberals are tolerant and conservatives are intolerant.  Now that is oversimplification, but oversimplification is what we do to make sense of this complex world in which we live and work.  In fact, liberal philosophy is tolerance to the extreme; pushing to accept extraordinary behavior simply for the case of acceptance.  By the same token, many conservatives have pushed their claims to individual rights to extreme by arguing for the acceptance of extraordinary behavior simply because of personal liberty.  Herein lays the difference.  Liberals will force the individual to behave in a certain way because they, the liberal, see it as the proper way to behave.  A conservative my engage in strange behavior, but it is their own personal brand of strange behavior and even though it might be outside the norm, they are self-engaged and not foisting it upon anyone else. It has struck me as strange that of all the extraordinary behaviors that liberals have championed, the one that that they find the most difficult to accept is conservative behavior.

The new aspect to liberal thought that I would like to highlight is the fact that while seeming to be extremely tolerant, they are in fact being very dictatorial.  If a liberal would prescribe their desired norms to themselves and the right to be themselves, that would make them not unlike many conservatives.  In fact, I dare say that many conservatives would be just fine with this standard and recognize left individual behavior as much a basic privilege as right individual behavior.  But when liberals endeavor to dictate certain norms through government action, they are not only tossing aside the principle of tolerance, they are engaging in a condescending mode of intolerance.  Obamacare is a good example of what I speak about.  Serious people from both the liberal and conservative sides can agree that there are too many people in this country without adequate health care.  They could probably even agree on a system to make adequate health care more easily available to most of those people.  But the conservatives promote a free market availability, decision-based approach driven by personal choice and accountability.  The liberals, through Obamacare, have foisted upon those Americans who pay taxes the burden of providing, to varying degrees, health care to those in need of it.  There is no choice here; if you pay taxes, you will finance Obamacare.  But it does not stop there.  The government, through the ACA, will prescribe exactly what constitutes adequate health care.  The old adage about “give a starving man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will never be hungry again” is very much in play here.  It is not that conservatives are not compassionate, they simply choose to dispense their compassion in their own fashion; a fashion that is prescribed as their right and privilege under the constitution of this nation.  When the liberals assume their superior airs of compassion through tolerance to the point where they mandate that same behavior upon others who think differently, they lose their mantle of tolerance and become small-minded, condescending intolerants.  Does our government have the authority to make us all good people in the image of liberal philosophy?  As long as we are law-abiding citizens, don’t we have the right to decide exactly how good we choose to be in this life?

Both liberals and conservatives have a right to be idiots and many on each side choose to exercise that right on a daily basis.  However, the conservatives have grasped a fundamental concept that has eluded the liberals; each side has the right to choose their idiocy, as long as they don’t inconvenience others with it. Conservatives are fine with this; they promote individual rights and less government intrusion into our private lives.  Occasionally, they take it to extremes that weaken the whole at the benefit of the individual and on those occasions, some compromise of individual liberty is required.  However, when liberals promote a certain type of personal benefit, right, or behavior based on their own deeply-held beliefs, they are obliged to convince others to accept those beliefs based on merit, as opposed to structuring our society to a point where it demands that type of behavior. 

So…at the end of the day, it would seem that the tolerant liberals are not so tolerant after all.  Some conservative kooks are just that, but their kook-dom is their own individual issue.  Liberal kook-um, on the other hand, is considered by those dispensing it to be of such unquestionable correctness that they feel all should accept and adopt it, regardless of their individual beliefs and philosophy.  That is simply not consistent with the principles upon which this country was founded.