Maggie's Farm

Story by Alexander in the WaPo. One quote:

...even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival.

Read the whole thing. For many, we think, Liberalism is a matter of social fashion; conformist, self-congratulatory, conspicuously virtuous and "open-minded" (not that I think it is virtuous or open-minded at all - how many Liberals check out Maggie's for fresh views on things?). It says that they aren't rubes, but rather "caring," sophisticated, and bien pensant. Part of the crowd, acceptable. Nice. 

I don't think that we Maggie's Farmers are morons or uncaring even though we do like our guns and our Bibles and our Constitution and our ceegars...and lots of other things.

I also think that the condescension often passes over into raw hate, as Dr. Bliss discussed recently. Related, see Liberal Hate Speech at Am. Thinker.

Photo is Lionel Trilling, a neurotic Liberal who also had interesting things to say about literature.