Jumping the Shark II

Abiola points to an astonishingly obtuse screed by Matt Young at Panda's Thumb, all 1400 or so words of which amount to saying that "Liberals*" are nice and "Conservatives" are nasty. You really need to read the whole lot to appreciate his incredible smugness and the range of unexamined assumptions Young holds but here's a little flavour:

What, then, is the difference between a liberal and a conservative?  My educated guess is that one main difference is sympathy or lack of sympathy for people who are not close to them in some way.  Thus, a liberal feels compassion for the poor, the underprivileged, the oppressed, whereas the conservative feels compassion primarily for those people like him or her, or close to him or her in some way.

A satirist who wanted to caricature "Liberals*" as intellectual narcissists concerned above all with asserting their own moral superiority and disinclined to consider any opposing point of view on its merits would be had pressed to come up with something better than this. Panda's Blog was originally set up to counter the insidious influence of the "Intelligent Design" movement which is a pseudoscientific brand of Creationism. Running pieces like Young's one, riddled with strawmen, non-sequiturs and extremely poorly argued - it is ultimately one big begged question - on a matter completely unrelated to the blog's theme does nothing for its intellectual credibility.

Take a "conservative" policy platform, let's say it consists of lower taxes, lower public spending, education vouchers and welfare reform. Now, a "Liberal" may disagree with this policy platform and point out the negative effects which might flow from such a platform, one by one. I would be happy to argue the point with her because this is a repectable, refutable argument. A "Liberal" such as Young who disagreed with this policy platform solely on the basis that "conservatives are just meanies" demonstrates no intellectual seriousness and is not worthy of respect.

[* again, contemporary oxymoronic usage]

Comments

[Peter Nolan]

"My educated guess is that one main difference is sympathy or lack of sympathy for people who are not close to them in some way. Thus, a liberal feels compassion for the poor, the underprivileged, the oppressed, whereas the conservative feels compassion primarily for those people like him or her, or close to him or her in some way."

Such as family, friends, professional colleagues, customers of one's business, all those people who make for a rich personal and professional life rather than frantically trying to fill one's inner emptiness with telepathic "empathy" for people whose lives you aspire to manage.

[Frank McGahon]

And that "empathy" is surely the most patronising kind of ersatz empathy - elitism by another name. His "educated" guess is that people like him know better what is in the interests of the poor and "the oppressed" (opressed by whom? - The Man?) than they do themselves, hence for example the initiatives against obesity or more accurately against the freedom to choose cheap crappy food.

[Todd]

No, it isn't "empathy" at all -- it is a matter of delusional noblesse oblige on the one hand, and calculated deception on the other.

Illiberal-Welfare-Statists (please stop using the term "liberals") see it as their Goddess given duty to care for and feed all of the childlike people of the world and protect them from the evil-machinations of greedy Capitalist Imperialists. That's their schtick and their schticking to it. Most actually believe it and are completely oblivious to the elitist nature of their positions.

Years ago, I was marching in a rally in Cumming, Georgia to protest the fact that a small group celebrating Martin Luther King's Birthday in that town had been attacked by thugs a few weeks before. It was such a tense scene that the Governor had called out the State Guard to prevent further violence. Hecklers and members of the Ku Klux Klan in full dunce-capped drag had shown up in droves to scream threats and hurl insults at the "outsiders" who'd come to their little town to tell them how to live their lives. I watched as one Klansman threw a lead pipe into the crowd of marchers and split a young girl's face open -- the pipe landed not three feet away from a toddler being pushed along in a stroller by his mother.

At the rally, Andrew Young (then mayor of Atlanta) pleaded with the crowd not to allow themselves to answer the hatred they'd witnessed with more hatred. Instead, he said, they should blame those who had shut down the local mills and taken jobs aways from these young white men. It was those greedy industrialists who had created this climate of ignorance and hatred, he said.

Now, I had known many unemployed Southerners. I had known many, many more poor(and poorly educated) Southern whites. Yet, none of these people had ever attacked people on the streets. I had never met anyone who burned crosses on lawns or lynched black folks for sport. The poor whites I'd known in small towns such as LaGrange and Athens were more likely to attend integrated schools and churches, as well as work alongside, socialize with, date, live with and marry blacks than were any of the pampered white-suburban Betties nodding their agreement with Andrew Young.

Maybe some naive kids like this Matt Young fellow actually buy into that crap, but my "educated guess" is that men like Andrew Young, Michael Moore, John Kerry, or Al Sharpton fully understand that to further their political agendas they need scary bogeymen like "the cold-blooded capitalist," "the greedy Jew," and "the poor, ignorant, white, christian fundamentalist bigot." And if they can't produce living examples, like Socialist-Sybils they create them by divining the unspoken intent of their opponents.

Today, it is most often the illiberal-Left that fuels the flames of race-, gender-, and class-hatred by propagating these execrable stereotypes and myths.

[Frank McGahon]

Illiberal-Welfare-Statists (please stop using the term "liberals")

Well I only use it with scare quotes - I consider myself to be a (classic) liberal and it galls me that the term has been associated with what you rightly describe as an illiberal political outlook.

The poor whites I'd known in small towns such as LaGrange and Athens were more likely to attend integrated schools and churches, as well as work alongside, socialize with, date, live with and marry blacks than were any of the pampered white-suburban Betties nodding their agreement with Andrew Young

Yes, it's the smugness that really grates - the moral superiority complex which Young unwittingly evinces here.