Why Liberals Are So Condescending

The ultraconservative rag the Washington Post has published a must-read opinion piece on the liberal mindset:

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: “What do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?”

In Krugman’s world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of “these people” — only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.

I’m not certain what’s worse: the idea that the American people (and anyone to the right of the New York Times‘s editorial page) are just too stupid to understand the unqualified benefits of socialized medicine and the slow eradication of the free market, or we do understand, and because we’re backward and evil and hateful we resist these things and don’t want anyone else to have them.

There’s no real difference of opinion, you see: there’s what’s good for you (the Democrat-run government’s prescription for the country’s well being), and there’s everything else (“Teabaggers,” Republicans, Jesusland, and the rest of flyover country).  The American Left may want to consider the idea that we have heard what you have to say, we do understand it, and we still reject it.

To expand a little on Obama’s recent talk with House Republicans, it was amazing to me that the most partisan, divisive President elected since Andrew Jackson had the gall to complain that his policies were failing because of partisan Republican obstructionism.  It showed an unbelievable lack of self-regard, which I suppose should not be considered unusual in a man who, in a recent speech, felt it necessary to inform the listeners that one of his supporters who died of breast cancer was buried in an Obama T-shirt.  You’re not just wrong: you’re stupid and/or evil and wrong.

Don’t insult our intelligence.  Don’t call us “teabaggers” and expect us to want to work with you on policies that we think are destructive.  And don’t accuse us of blind obstructionism in one breath, and in the next attack our motives as racist, fear-motivated, or just plain greedy.  Get over yourselves.