The liberal establishment is discovering the danger of assuming that your opponents’ arguments are ridiculous and unworthy of consideration. Last week, they learned that the people who actually pass judgment upon them might disagree.
They were shocked to see the Supreme Court give a respectful, thorough and (hopefully) favorable hearing to the conservative arguments against Obamacare’s constitutionality, which former Speaker Pelosi had dismissed as too silly to even address. Had she spent less time dismissing her opponents’ ideas and more time understanding and responding to those arguments, she might still be speaker instead of the most brutally repudiated legislator in generations.
The tendency of liberals to treat conservative views with contempt rather than engagement has been a gift to the Right. In 2010, liberals’ dismissal of the Tea Party, as a band of Astroturf Neanderthals longing for a return to the days of Bull Connor, not only annoyed fair-minded Americans who shared the Tea Party’s concerns, but also prevented the liberal establishment from generating an effective counter to its ideas.
After all, if your only answer to legitimate concerns about the growth of government is “You’re racists!” then citizens who share those concerns have little choice but to go elsewhere.
Conservatives often scratch their heads at the image liberals hold of them, as misers and brutes whose ignorance is only matched by their hatred of anyone who is not a WASP male. The Left’s contempt similarly encompasses those women, minorities and gays who “betray” their demographics to throw in with the Right.
Devout Christians, whose churches fund orphanages and relief projects at home and abroad, wonder how they became the scourge of the poor. Soldiers who have done tour after tour overseas are puzzled to find out that they “hate the government.” And beer-pounding party-cons are baffled by the notion that their social leanings are akin to John Lithgow’s in “Footloose.”
Conservatives, in contrast, understand liberal ideas because they have always been unable to escape them. After spending their lives listening to the liberal media, watching liberal Hollywood productions and being bombarded by a liberal education system from kindergarten to grad school, conservatives become experts in their opponents’ arguments.
If this tsunami of liberal indoctrination is not enough, conservative media obsessively focuses on liberalism. Rush Limbaugh — himself totally misunderstood by liberals, who refuse to listen to him — earned his followers not by regurgitating conservative cliches, but by analyzing and expounding upon what liberals actually think and want.
In contrast, liberals can avoid engaging conservatism altogether. If they stay within the mainstream of American popular culture, they are always safe from conservative contamination.
A common conservative critique of liberalism is its focus on “good intentions” in place of hard, verifiable results. An oft-cited example is President Obama’s desire to raise the capital gains rate in order to promote his concept of “fairness,” even if doing so will hurt economic growth.
But if you believe that the sole measure of an idea is the goodness of its intention, then it is easy to believe that every opponent’s intentions must be bad. This is why many liberals view conservative ideas as so morally bankrupt that there is no need to bother with the petty details of what conservatives actually think and why.
Ancient military strategist Sun Tzu taught the importance to victory of first understanding one’s opponent. But then, he never had to face an enemy so loathsome that it expected grown men and women to pony up and pay for their own birth control.
Kurt Schlichter is a lawyer, veteran and writer in Los Angeles. He can be reached at [email protected]
