Questions to Determine Whether a Friend or Relative Is a Liberal or a Leftist

A liberal hates anyone more prosperous than he is, and wishes the prosperous to fall to their level or lower.

The conservative is happy for all prosperous people and hopes more hard work will make him prosperous as well.

Not hard to tell the difference.

Neither

> They want to generally just hear themselves talk about their own political positions..... <

We see this all the time on the national level. A Leftist calls for “an honest dialogue”. But that ALWAYS means they lecture while you listen. And please do not try to offer your own opinions. That’s not permitted.

and my answer is: President Trump, who else?

I wouldn’t waste one minute of my time trying to convert a friend or family member. If converting leftists to right-think was a feasible goal, communism would have died in the 20th century. People come to the conclusion to change their life on their own, you can’t change them with arguments. Like a drug addict or an alcoholic, change comes from within, that’s where it starts. Change doesn’t happen because you point out hypocritical points about their beliefs.

Yepp ... exactly, and they pick the topics that will be discussed as well. Controlling the subject is extremely important, because it controls your thoughts.

... “ALWAYS means they lecture while you listen”....

Absolutely....unless you make it clear otherwise, and this several times, they never stop either!

Respectfully, Prager’s approach is to use pure reasoning but the knowledge and ideology that liberals and conservatives have is determined by social and economic location in a certain social class. As Karl Marx noted, political ideology is a mix of rationalizing and material self interest, not pure reasoning. A liberal is not likely to be persuaded and change their opinions as long as their job, social status and social position depend on it. Upton Sinclair expressed it this way: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it”. Both liberals and conservatives defend their ideologies through denial and social exclusion of the other social class (also called cognitive dissonance). This is why Prager’s approach will fail. The Left converts its adherents by providing them government jobs that are protected by unions, anti-discrimination laws, etc. The Left takes over institutions while the Right wants to argue philosophy - a losing proposition. This is one reason why Prager was initially a very reluctant supporter of Trump who he thought had no religious values and was not a nice person (”niceness” being the utmost Jewish value). But Trump is a member of the Business Class while Prager is a member of the Jewish Religious Knowledge Class.

Exactly, Liberals have never grown up past high school. Gossip, back biting, lying are their tools.

My Subaru or Prius question was meant as one that could be added to the list of question to determine if someone was a liberal. It wasn’t directed at you. Just an attempt at humor which I often fail.

I very much admire Dennis Prager as a reasonable and rational person. I have always been interested in his concept of PragerU, and most especially, the 5 minute videos which I find provide EXCELLENT primers to subjects I may know little about.

I can appreciate this point he makes about liberals versus leftists, but from reading this, I get the impression Mr. Prager is making a distinction that is different from the one I have made nearly my whole life.

I understand the classical view of “liberal” which is...fundamentally conservative, and it has been deliberately and effectively hijacked by the Left, so much so that they have decided that the “Liberal” adjective, now being a shriveled and violated husk of its original meaning is no longer useful because people have long since begun using it as a pejorative to describe Leftists, that they now want to use the terms “Progressive” or “Democratic Socialist”.

This is unfortunate, but that is what they have done, and I have always felt it is a wasted effort to try and reverse that. I view it in much the same light as people who rail that Republicans have been designated with the color red, while the Left has been assigned the color blue, when it should be the reverse, but...while I am fully sympathetic, I see that as a lost battle, not worth fighting.

It is as if the Leftists would be gleeful to see us spin our wheels in these endeavors to make Liberal equal Conservative again, or reverse the Red and Blue political designations, while they further burrow into things that are meaningful.

That said, I have, for decades now, separated the Left into two major camps: Leftists, and Liberals.

Of course, none of us would even give Liberals and Leftists a second thought if their idiocy did not intrude into our lives, raise our taxes, and degrade our liberty.

And that is precisely why we have been unable to ignore them. Most of the “Liberals” generally leave us alone except for their mild condemnation of something they know nothing about and their propensity to be used as tools by the “Leftists” to accomplish their Nanny Statist goals.

A good example of this is many of the people who have “Black Lives Matter” signs or “Hate has no Home Here” signs. They have no idea, none at all what that raised fist on their stupid “Black Lives Matter” sign really means (Marxism) but their kid brought the sign home from school and wanted to put it in front of the house. A liberal parent might think “How could I be against Social Justice and Inequality?” without taking even a second to consider exactly what “Social Justice” or the concept of “inequality” means. They just put the signs out in much the same mindset of a 15 year old kid who wears a Che Guevara t-shirt...because it seems right and looks cool.

Myself, I have long made a distinction between “Liberals” and “Leftists”. Living in the bluest of blue states, I have had to mentally construct a stratification

Of course some liberals are jackasses, in the same way some conservatives are. I like to think of Liberals as people who just haven’t gone all the way down to road to Leftists.

They have some of the same ideological underpinnings as Leftists, but...mostly without the malignancy. Most liberals are just...wrong. They haven’t thought things out, they are still watching the news and reading the newspapers, accepting their reporting as unbiased truth, and are generally uninformed in many ways.

These are people with whom you can converse, and if you offered a conservative point of view about something like taxes or minimum wage laws, they might be taken aback and say “Really? Why are you against a higher minimum wage? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

When you explain that minimum wage jobs are not meant to live on, but are meant as as entry level job into the workforce where you can learn skills and begin to work towards migrating out of the minimum wage jobs into more financially rewarding ones with harder work and more responsibility, and that raising it is fatal to the very industries that offer minimum wage jobs, they might say something like “Huh. I never thought of it that way.”

It is why, in general, young people are often liberal, and get more conservative as they grow older and learn more about life. Some people just never move on from that stage, because they don’t give it much thought unless some issue smacks them in the face. Many of them are unwilling or unknowing Useful Idiots, and are exploited to the fullest by the Left.

Anyway, those are Liberals. There is hope for some as they get older, pay taxes, have kids come home with lesbian advocacy literature, or have an idiot tax levied against them.

Leftists are another matter altogether. They are to be avoided or fought against. Leftists I divide into two groups the spittle lipped-bug eyed ones whose faces are mottled with rage, who really believe in the concepts of “Social Justice”, “Systemic Racism”, and “White Privilege”. These are the foot-soldiers and cannon fodder of the Left. They really believe that crap, and are Antifa or BLM, and radically so.

And they don’t know that if the people they advocate putting into power, if they ever got into power and ran things as they wished, would likely have them dragged away to be shot at the first opportunity, and as they were dragged away in the middle of the night, they would be the ones screaming “Why are you doing this? I am on your side!” They would be dragged away and shot, because these “True Believers” in all the social justice crap have shown how dangerous they would be in the event another entity that is a threat to power comes along that could control these people and turn them against those in power.

Lastly, the ones in power are evil. Pure evil. They don’t believe in the Social Justice, Inequality, or any of the other crap. They are interested in leveraging those concepts as tools to manipulate people and obtain and keep power.

THOSE people we should not just avoid. We need to fight against them, tooth and nail. Which is, in their case, what will eventually have to happen. They wish to have dominion over and destroy those who are in their way.

And we are in their way, as we have clearly seen since 2016.

“Like a drug addict or an alcoholic, change comes from within,...”

...and the many successful recoveries are tied to a belief in God, and his essential presence in their recovery. Leftism boiled seems to replace God with “man is God” - a real crisis of the soul.

I agree with you on the politics here - one is wasting time, cannot convert another to a different political belief. At best, to say or do something that enables the other side to discover and make their inner conversion. It may take a long time, or never. Some of the unhappiest people in the world are old, retired leftists.

The best one can do is to counter the left at every turn. IOW, their stupid and failed ideas, stuck in the 1800s (that always gets them) are going to be challenged and resisted. They really hate that - too bad.

Ask them if they regularly (more than once a month) attend a church or synagogue.

If the answer is “yes”, statistically there is something like a 90% chance they are conservative, even if they go to a very liberal house of worship (e.g, reform Jewish or episcopal).

This does not work for Muslims. Older blacks there is no such correlation. Youngish (age 50 or less) it does work with blacks.

One problem.
Leftists lie. It is their stock-in-trade.

1) Prager is deluded if he thinks this is practical advice.

2) Prager’s advice, as usual, perpetuates the ineffective approach conservatives have always taken, always leading to loss.

3) There is no such thing as a liberal today, and if you believe there are, you are not a conservative, you are brainwashed.

4) Listening to idiots like Prager is exactly why our country has been given away to the people who hate us.

Heh...I love it.

“How do you feel about the color orange?”

Hahahaha...that made me grin. But...given the overwhelming support by conservatives for Trump makes that a valid question.

It has been my impression that many people (like myself) were unsure about Donald Trump when he entered the campaign. Was he just being a showman? Was he really a conservative, or someone who would say anything to get elected? Was he a liberal in conservative clothing?

I had all these things floating through my mind as I watched the 2016 campaign.

Then, when he was elected, nearly the first thing he did was to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. That made me sit up and take notice.

Then, one after another, he began doing things like reducing the size of the Federal Register, seeing unemployment drop, earnings went up, tax cuts, building the wall...the man was what I was looking for in a President.

Then, when he withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, and I watched the speech from the Rose Garden and read the transcript...I was a full believer.

So, to ask “How do you feel about the color orange?” is a Litmus Test I would be fully onboard as a valid measure of conservatism!

Nicely done, Antihero101607!

That one is fun, but not accurate at all, IMO. I drive a Subaru, and one of the staunchest conservatives I have ever known drove a Prius!

Of course, I had no idea what someone was talking about when they declared I was driving a "lesbian car"...so in that respect, I admit I might not be the best judge!

Drop them out of a helicopter.

If they fly, they are a liberal.
If they don't, they are a leftist.

Either way, civilization wins.

Thanks for your expanded thoughts. Lots in there. I’ll only comment on this one briefly as it is time for the office:

“Most liberals are just...wrong. They haven’t thought things out, they are still watching the news and reading the newspapers, accepting their reporting as unbiased truth, and are generally uninformed in many ways.”

Most liberals would say the same about conservatives ... that at best conservatives are uninformed and indoctrinated by Fox news. Of course I think they are wrong - easy way to prove is to have them explain a conservative’s view on any topic, and you will find out rather quickly they give the leftist version of the conservative view, not what the conservative actually said or stands for. I know many conservatives who read/listen to the opposition; most liberals only read/listen to liberals and leftists. (There are exceptions of course, but they are exceptions.)

way too complicated and ineffective, the easiest way to determine if a person is a flaming progressive liberal is by simple observation.

ALL Liberals. within 15-20 minutes of ANY conversation with anyone will lead to a liberal complaining about other peoples problems that they created for themselves through piss poor decisions they made, then they will want to try and fix it somehow with your money.