Liberal Condescension

Gerard Alexander thinks that he's found a new weakness among liberals: condescension. The easy answer to why liberals think they know everything, are right about everything, and have no reason to change their ideas, is that liberals do know everything. We are always right. And the conservatives are just a bunch of ignorant yahoos. At least, that's Al Franken's point of view.

This is a long article, but it may be worth reading for some serious thoughts about why the two sides aren't listening to one another.

I think, from my own point of view, that most of the up-front policy ideas on both the liberal and the conservative side are based upon deep-down attachments to ideas that no one has examined very thoroughly, and which everybody finds rather frightening to question.

Whenever I see a reaction out of all proportion to the action which supposedly triggered it, I know that there is some underlying force that has built up on the reactor's side.

Here's an example. The Republicans are highly averse to tax increases. They are passionate about not allowing any tax increases. This is practically an article of religious faith with them, and the evil of higher taxes is so self-evident to them, that they find it difficult to articulate reasons for their position. In fact, a lot of the opposition to taxes is based on a still-deeper article of faith: You can reduce the size and influence of government by cutting taxes.

The problem is that the "starve the beast" theory has never worked. The government, whether under Democrats, Republicans or Martians (I refer to the late Bush administration), continues to spend, borrowing to make up the difference. The Republicans cannot admit that starving the beast is an ineffective strategy, however, because they don't have any other strategy for cutting the size of government, except by doing things that voters don't like.

Let's face the obvious problem: The people, in their majesty - vox populi, vox dei - want more services than they are willing to pay for. They want the government to do things that cost more than the amount of money they are willing to allow it. And they don't want their representatives to tell them that they can't have it both ways.

You can't cheat an honest man, as the saying goes, but what we have here is a dishonest electorate.