[guitfiddlist]

It's easy to think that, but I know a lot of bright people who hate Bush more than they don't like Kerry. I can never get them to say exactly why they hate Bush -- they just do.

I also know many people like that, unfortunately too many in my own family. They never have any good reason for their hatred, but after long observation of them, and by living quite a few years in many of the Left's bastions (Boston, NY, DC, SF), I have a general theory.

It is intellectual pageantry. They are overimpressed with their own intellects, and feel that nobody exuding a folksy commonsense 1950's sense of decency can possibly have a clue as to the nuanced sophistication of modern-day knowledge and current societal paradigms. They are "progressives", in their own minds, because they have moved on from the simplistic world view held by dinosaur Republicans living in "Leave It To Beaver" Land.

Every time I hear a liberal caller to a conservative talk show, I hear the exuberant smugness of intellectual superiority in their voices. Never mind that they uniformly get dissected and splayed out for all listeners, they go back to their liberal friends - and mischaracterize the "battle" as stumping the host.

My general response to them is that they are too smart by half, and that they are only part-way around the circle of wisdom. They hate to hear things like "The more things change, the more they remain the same." And they are completely flummoxed by people like P.J. O'Rourke - who was a Leftist long enough to see the general idiocy of their philosophy - and now can eviscerate liberals with a single sideswipe of his pen.

I think they all should be looked straight in the eye and told "You don't impress with your fashionable intellectual elitism, because it is absolutely no substitute for wisdom, nor a solid grasp of logic, facts and history."

[CasearianDaoist]

There is a truth to what you say. I would, however, call it "the pageantry of intellectual immaturity." It is a quite old vice of the left; it goes back to the New Deal and was further exacerbated by the boomer generation's upbringing, the society that surrounded that and their own imagine of themselves. The middle aged of the Liberal world came from somewhat more humble background than they will own up to and have been pedaling this notion of superiority - mostly to themselves - their entire youths. They hate where they came from, which is to say they hate themselves. Now they find themselves facing the fruits of this self loathing and self deception and they cannot bear to look it straight in the eye. Like alcoholics, they lash out at any who who dare to place reality in front of them