The sample quotes below, from National Review, which I think is considered a respected conservative magazine, should lay to rest all the claims that “liberals” are “condescending and arrogant and think they know best”.
In the samples below, we see ample evidence of arrogance and condescention, and feelings of superiority. And these are not the exceptions, but the rule.
Both sides are arrogant and condescending, so can we stop this stupid meme that’s been going around that only liberals are?
The question is not whether liberals do it.
The issue is that both sides do it, but the current meme spreading through message boards, blogs, etc, is that *only * the liberals do it (and “that’s why they lost the election, because they turn people off”)
Sure, a certain level is detectable from both sides because both are genuinely convinced that their way is the Correct One. However, I didn’t hear much in the way of “If you vote for Kerry, you’re stupid.” Seemed to go much the other way, no?
The “meme” is that much of the left (pundits and politicians) mock the electorate. Sure this happens on the right, too, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as widespread. There’s a big differnce between conservative pundits mocking liberal pundits or liberal politicians (or liberal hollywood types), and liberal pundits mocking the voters themselves.
And if the voters get a sense that the pundits are mocking them, it rubs off on the politicians that the pundits support.
Democratic presidential spouses seem to add to this “meme”. Note the HRC “I’m not some stand-by-my man, cookie baking woman…” (paraphrased) or the comments THK made about Laura Bush as well as her comments about the “stupid people” who don’t support Kerry’s healthcare plan.
Why bother trying to stop it? Whether or not one is condescending has little or nothing to do with being correct. Perhaps someone has put forth a postulate stating the level of one’s condescention toward opposing viewpoints is inversely proportional to the accuracy of one’s own position; but I’d be hard-pressed to agree without better evidence than current events have provided (witness Bush’s reelection, which I stubbornly refuse, in my characteristic liberal impudence, to see as anything other than a travesty). Now that conservatives have tasted great victory and feel more self-assured, to merely suggest that they still are wrong, despite their having an apparrent majority of oppinion (offered as “proof” of virtue), is regarded by them as the clearest evidence of liberal condescention yet; so it seems we are put in the position of either providing acknowledgement (as the times simply must dictate), or further demonstrating our “snotty elitism”. Given those options, I’d rather be right.
Pardon me now, as I scuttle off to wrap myself once again in a chrysalis of arrogance and self-righteousness.
Because when choosing your condescencion tactics, you seek to hit what you perceive as the weak spot, and sometimes it backfires – a potentially valid put-down, “don’t you realize W’s bamboozling you??” got understood by the audience as “boy, you gotta be dumb to believe him”.
I didn’t hear so much criticism directly about voting for Kerry as there were many remarks about my, ahem, lack of ____________ by not supporting Bush. Lessee… you could fill that in with morality, integrity, patriotism, empathy for the little/common man, humility, and much deserved fear of God. The people who said such things would agree that a pharmacist who works for a nationally owned company has the right to refuse a birth control prescription, that Halloween is evil and that Saddam is synonymous with bin Laden and that they were all working together to try and take us under on 9/11. I know that I don’t denigrate them for that. Unfortunately, I usually don’t get the same courteousy in return. But, those are the folks that I know. Can’t speak for the entire populous at large, just from my own experience on this particular subject.
I just know that I have no desire to legislate their beliefs. I wish they felt the same way about me.
You don’t see a difference between “you should be careful… I suspect that a bunch of smart and unscrupulous people are pulling the wool over your eyes and taking advantage of your patriotism and trust” and “you are one stupid idiot”?
No, I’m sorry, I don’t. The first implies that I am so stupid/dumb that I blindly concur with “sound bites” as opposed to making my own rational decisions. Forgive me if I don’t depend on the left to save me from my own gullibility.
I predict this thread will quickly prove a point the OP did not intend.
There could be one. He could be an evil genius bamboozling them not because they’re any stupider than the norm, but because he’s such a good manipulator. Something very much like this is what I think happened to GWB himself . . . he’s an average kind of trusting guy who got manipulated by sharp political operatives with an agenda of their own, and who’d been planning for years how to foist an Iraq war on a public and State Dept. that didn’t much want it.
Re: Kerry is a terrorist: that’s insulting, but not condescending.
I think the feeling that the Dems were condescending began when the GOP was not in the ascendency. I think it is not unjustified. Dem. critics are spilling gallons of ink about “the need to try to figure out the thought process of the red states,” as though engaged in anthropology in the Congo. It’s an open question who’s more insular: a liberal on the Upper West Side, or a [fill in the pejorative] conservative in the Bible belt. What’s for sure is that the Bible belter won’t be agog at the very existence of the blue state liberal, while the latter isn’t true. He’ll just think the liberal is wrong-headed (or “evil,” to indulge the stereotype).
My brief summary: there’s the difference. Partisan liberals think (and say) conservatives are evil and stupid. Partisan conservatives just think (and say) liberals are evil.
Yeah…This is exactly the point. I mean, we have hard data that a large majority of Bush supporters are ignorant on certain facts (e.g, from www.pipa.org). For example, 45% of them believe that immediately before the war, Saddam had WMD and 27% believe that he had major development programs for them, only a quarter believe that the best description is that he had some activities related to WMDs but no major development programs. And, only 2% err on the other side of believing that he had absolutely nothing. By contrast, 51% of Kerry supporters have the view on WMDs generally shared/concluded by the experts (i.e., some activities related to WMDs but no major development programs) and then the remainder a more-or-less evenly divided between thinking Iraq had more than the experts believe it did and thinking it had less. (In fact, slightly more believe more rather than less…But, the divide is not nearly at the 72% to 2% difference it is for Bush supporters.)
[If you want to argue that maybe the people are right and the experts are wrong, the PIPA poll also asked what in fact the experts, and specifically, the Duelfer report had concluded and didn’t get markedly different results.]
Now, I am not saying that these people believe these things because they are stupid. I think they believe these things because they are being lied to and deceived. I believe that our democracy is in danger of failing because our leaders are too cynical and are purposely trying to take advantage of the fact that most people don’t have a lot of time and resources to discover the facts and that the media is failing pretty abysmally in uncovering the lies and deceptions.
Personally, I find much more arrogant / condescending the attitude of secrecy, deception, and not engaging in an honest discussion of the issues that you see with this administration. I.e., on one side you have people actively working to keep the general public ignorant and misinformed and on the other side you have people who are pointing out that the public is ill-informed and are trying to work to get them better informed. And, somehow it is the latter side that is being labeled as arrogant and condescending. Go figure!
Personally, when I am incorrect, I’d rather have someone tell me I am wrong and help me get the resources to learn the facts rather than have someone tell me I am very smart but treat me like an idiot and feed me misinformation and half-truths consistently and do their darndest to try to keep honest information from me. But, hey, that’s just me.
I feel the same way. Either get in lockstep or be a traitor. Or immoral. Or EEEEVILLL. While we are talking about the “sore loser” party, let’s not forget the Insufferable Gloating Never Let It Go party. A lot of the resentment right now is because the “winners” are getting so much fun throwing their 51 percent landslide up all the time as some sort of universal “mandate”. Some of us tried to offer a congratulations of sorts, but it got thrown in our faces.
“You have to be more like us.”
“You have to work with us” -which means cave in on everything or be swept aside like yesterday’s garbage.
“We won because you weren’t polite enough” - we didn’t kiss enough ass.