Seven Huge Flaws in the Way Liberals Think

1) Liberals believe they can change human nature. Sure, human beings can be shaped and molded to a certain extent. Any parent who has spanked a child can tell you that. However, most people care more about what they're having for lunch today than an earthquake that kills ten thousand people on the other side of the world. We're just built that way and no amount of sensitivity training, preschool classes, or Michael Moore documentaries is going to "fix" it.

2) Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies. One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we're good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, "Why do they hate us?" The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don't even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we're nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can't be reasoned with.

3) Liberals don't have enough respect for our culture and traditions: To liberals, our cultural, economic, and political norms were formed by backwards troglodytes making arbitrary decisions based on superstition and racism. Unfortunately for them, as a general rule, that's not so and proceeding as if it is, will often lead to exactly the same difficulties that our ancestors already dealt with in times past. No matter how smart we are, as Thomas Sowell would say, our wisdom is often no match for the "distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before." Truly wise people are aware that there is a great deal that they do not know.

4) Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy. Ironically, given all their talk about "shades of gray," liberals have a very Manichean view of the world. They consider their fellow travelers to be on the side of the angels, while the people who disagree with them are treated as evil. This leads to an "anything goes" mentality when dealing with their foes: ignoring the law via a "living constitution," politically based prosecutions, shouting down opposing speakers, and treating lying about their agenda or opponents to be moral. On the other hand, liberals will support other libs, no matter how corrupt, sleazy, or vile they are as long as they're politically useful to the left. See Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, John Murtha, and Robert Byrd for examples of that. In other words, as Margaret Thatcher has said of the Left, "For them, the end always seems to justify the means."

5) Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people. Liberals who're obsessed with money think they're compassionate because they give away other people's tax dollars. They believe they care more about the earth than other people, even as they fly around in private jets, because they babble on about global warming. They can be dumb as a rock, but believe they're smarter than most other people because they're liberals. In other words, in the minds of most liberals, liberalism is an all-purpose substitute for actual virtue instead of just another political philosophy.

6) Liberals have too much faith in government. Even most liberals would admit that government regularly fails the people. If you don't believe that, just ask them about the Bush Administration and they'll give you an earful. However, liberals tend to believe that with the right person in charge, government won't be so slow, stupid, inefficient, and badly run. Human history proves that they're wrong about that.

7) Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not. To most liberals, whether a government program betters people's lives is completely irrelevant to whether they'll support it. A program that doesn't work and costs billions, but sounds compassionate and helps Democrats politically is a huge success in the eyes of the Left. Once you understand that liberals think this way, their baffling support for programs that make no "common sense" is much easier to understand.

They PROCEDE logically from an erroneous assumption.

They would say that that is also what we do.

Our (the conservative) base assumption is the “tragic” view of mankind, where humans are inherently limited (need I say “sinful”?) and incapable of perfection or even of having enough knowledge to make decisions for others whose situation is not intimately familiar. This aligns well with the biblically revealed truth of the human condition.

Their base assumption is in the perfectibility of the human condition, and the only thing holding us back is the social constraints and institutions we live under. Put the right institutions in place, with the right highly enlightened people in power, and you have utopia. It’s humanism. Plain and simple.

8. Liberals solve dilemmas by escaping reality

Liberals will often insist that simultaneously embracing both sides of a contradiction is the "solution" to a problem. These "solutions" cannot exist in the real world. Like Schröedinger's cat, they are simultaneously A and not-A, a state that is not permitted by the laws of this Universe.

This is how programs that simultaneously feed the hungry and teach self-reliance happen. It is how one arranges Affirmative Action without quotas. To non-liberals, it is apparent that each of these pairs of goals is contradictory; we must choose between them, or at a minimum recognize that any point on the continuum between them represents a tradeoff that sub-optimizes both desired outcomes. Yet liberals will blithely insist that Affirmative Action without quotas is not only possible, but the "solution" to the dilemma.

Where they can (say, in California) liberals will impose many of these "solutions" on vast numbers of people, each solution a surreal layer of bureaucratic fog over what ought to be an explicit tradeoff. As these policies accumulate, they slowly but inexorably tie everything in knots, for they mandate that people behave in ways that do not, and cannot, actually exist.

1) Liberals believe they can change human nature.

No. Liberals proclaim that the MUST change human nature. Why? Because at heart they know they need to change themselves, but they are so childish that they refuse to. Therefore everyone else MUST change.

2) Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies.

No, that's not quite true. The truer rendering is that Liberals HATE US, and want to befriend the enemy of those they hate, especially since it will make us upset. They really don't give a flying f-k about our enemies, except that these enemies make us upset.

3) Liberals don't have enough respect for our culture and traditions: To liberals, our cultural, economic, and political norms were formed by backwards troglodytes making arbitrary decisions based on superstition and racism.

Again liberals do not give a flying f-k one way or the other for our traditions and culture. We could have a totally different set -- even opposite set -- of traditions and culture but they would be just as oppositional to it. Why? Because it is US they want to bug and upset and demean. They would be perfectly happy to demean Genghis Khan, or Andy Warhol with those same cutting terms, if Genghis and Andy had been the ones we admire. Liberals define themselves by oppositional hatred and jealousy -- the objects of those evil feelings fo not matter.

4) Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy.

Yes. But 'amoral' is a better term. The immorality is intrinsic to why they hold to their philosophies -- in order to entertain great and constant feelings of hatred, jealousy and envy. Morality, one way or the other, doesn't so much matter to the, although they do incline to moral degeneracy.

5) Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people.

Hmmm, maybe. ... No, not quite. What liberals want to indulge beyond anything else is "vain belief"! You hate reality. Why do they love lies? The bigger the lie the more magnificent it is to believe! And what is the only greatness measure of 'goodness' they have -- to hold everyone else to those lies while you yourself can take them or leave them. The sure-est demonstration of RAW POWER over others -- make up some ridiculous lie and force all others to accept it! Such Despotic Power is Goodness to them.

6) Liberals have too much faith in government.

Only in DESPOTIC governments! Government is good when it can exercise raw despotic power over US -- we, the people whom liberals have chosen to be the designated objects of hatred.

7) Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not.

Well, liberals hate facts and hard reality, so of course they hate programs that actually work. Such things challenge the Big Lie. Lies do not survive reality, if reality is allowed to be part of the public discourse.

To libs, however, their is a way of saying a program worked -- if it fails in all regard except as a exercise in despotism and destroying all we hold in any regard.

One thing that gets me is how liberalism itself is a self defeating philosophy to the extent that the annihilation of the individual will inevitably result in the dissolution of the movement itself and those who support it.

I questioned a college professor on that once.

I pointed out that when Communist initially take over, one of the 1st things they do is kill all the teachers and intellectuals, so by supporting Communism he's actually supporting his own murder.

They never really have an answer for that, except that previous communist just weren't the right guys but the new guys will "do it right" or other nonsense.

The same can be said with all Liberals (especially gay ones) and Moslems. If they attack they aren't attacking rural Red State America, they going to hit targets and kill people in the big Blue cities.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.