Achieving compromise with one’s political opponents is difficult enough when you know what the other side wants. But identifying the possible grounds for political compromise is next to impossible if you don’t even know what your opponent is trying to achieve.
Unfortunately, today’s liberals are so cocooned in their own media and higher education bubbles that they have no idea what their conservative compatriots even believe.
Take two recent tweets by prominent liberal writers, the first by Princeton-educated Julia Ioffe, who has done work for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many other liberal outlets. Last week, Ioffe tweeted, “If you are anti-choice and you want to make sure women carry every pregnancy to term, why not make the person who created the pregnancy contribute? Why not have men pay child support to the women they impregnate? Surely, it is not the woman’s responsibility alone?”
Leaving aside Ioffe’s use of “anti-choice” to describe pro-life conservatives for a moment, Ioffe doesn’t seem to be aware that every state in the union already has laws that force men to pay child support to the women who give birth to their children. But let’s be generous and assume she just meant that this obligation should extend to the mother’s pregnancy as well — and not just post-birth expenses.
Even then, anyone with even a passing familiarity with the pro-life movement would know that conservatives are perfectly fine with forcing men to pay for the pregnancies of women they impregnate. In fact, the state of Utah, a deep-red state with a Republican Legislature and Republican governor, passed a law doing exactly that earlier this year! Yet Ioffe is completely clueless about this conservative viewpoint.
Moving to the second tweet, University of North Carolina-educated Nikole Hannah-Jones of 1619 Project fame wrote last week, “Why do ‘school choice’ advocates never advocate eliminating school district boundaries/funding schools by local property tax and allowing poor, Black students to attend white, wealthy schools in neighboring municipalities? They don’t really want choice, just privatization.”
As Hannah-Jones would have quickly discovered if she bothered to read the replies to her tweet, many conservatives have advocated for this policy for years. The Heritage Foundation even recently published a paper on exactly this topic. Yet Hannah-Jones is completely clueless about this conservative viewpoint.
Ioffe and Hannah-Jones are far from outlier cases. A 2018 study asked 2,100 adults to identify what they believed about a wide range of political issues and then asked them to estimate what people in the other political party believed about those same issues.
The study found that centrists and those not interested in politics did much better at estimating what the other party believed than politically involved partisans. But while a person’s level of education made no difference when Republicans estimated what Democrats believe, the more time Democrats spent in school, the worse they did at identifying what Republicans believed. Democrats with a high school degree did worse than those without. Democrats with a college degree did worse than high school graduates. And Democrats with a graduate degree did worst of all.
It seems that the longer liberals stay walled off in communities dominated by their own kind, which is exactly what higher education has become, the worse they are at understanding and empathizing with those who hold other views.
Ioffe can’t even bring herself to call her political opponents by the name they want to be called. For her, every “pro-life” conservative is really just a defender of the patriarchy only interested in controlling women’s bodies and protecting male privilege. It never occurs to her that a conservative could actually value life over letting men get away with promiscuity with no consequences.
Similarly, Hannah-Jones famously views every human action through the prism of racial oppression. For her, school choice can only be understood as an effort to take money away from public schools that serve black families. It is beyond her understanding of the world to imagine that conservatives genuinely believe all families should have the right to send their children to the school of their own choosing, regardless of where they live.
In a better world, conservatives could be working with Ioffe and Hannah-Jones on policies that force men to pay for pregnancies they caused and allow families to send their children to the schools of their choice. But, in order to get there, liberals would have to admit that not every conservative position is motivated by a desire for domination and oppression.
