How Modern Liberals Think: An Hypothesis

[LowDown]

Evan Sayat gave a talk to the Heritage Foundation in 2007. In it he lays out his understanding of how modern liberals (which he refers to as Liberals, upper case, to distinguish them from classical liberals, lower case) think. He was raised in New York and considered himself a liberal until the aftermath of 9-11 when he was appalled by the attitudes of his liberal friends toward America. He began a quest to find the source of these attitudes.

The following is a summary of the talk. If you prefer to listen to the talk itself it is here. Any inaccuracies in the following summery are entirely my fault.

The text in square brackets is an explanatory point Sayat makes in a later talk.

I’d be interested in what those who think of themselves as Liberal think. Any counterexamples, etc., would be appreciated. I don't need a lot of ad hominem attacks since those are easy enough to imagine. I posit that the sort of person Sayat describes as the modern liberal does not really exist, that no one actually thinks the way he describes.

Sayat says that there is one thing that modern liberals know about world history, and that is that despite all ideas, religions, politics, ideologies, and governments throughout history war, poverty, crime and injustice have not disappeared from the earth. [They know that human beings are basically innocent and have no innate tendencies to drive them to do such things, so the conditions that lead people to war and conflict must have been imposed on people from without. Thus mankind can be perfected and war and conflict eliminated if those things making them act in these ways are removed.]

Since all previous ideas have failed to bring about a perfect world liberals believe that all wars, conflicts, and disharmony in the world are caused by, can only be caused by, the attempt to be right. The disagreements over what is wrong and right, good and evil, etc. are what lead to conflict which in turn leads to war, injustice and poverty, so the remedy is to eliminate all such efforts to discriminate between the good and what is not good. Discrimination or discriminating thought therefore becomes the one great evil of the world.

The belief that discrimination is to be avoided leads liberals to attempt to be indiscriminate in all things. This leads to the rejection of all fact, reason, morality, and decency as the basis for thought. They therefore seek to tear down, eliminate, and otherwise discredit the traditional values because they are based on discrimination between good and not-good as determined by fact, reason, logic, morality and decency.

All efforts to distinguish good from evil, wrong from right, the behaviors that lead to success from the behaviors that lead to failure, and so on, lead to conflict and therefore are to be avoided.

But this does not lead modern liberals to be tolerant. In fact, they have become much more illiberal. They believe more strongly than ever that there is evil in the world, and it is the evil of discriminating thought.

It is undeniable that there are people, companies, countries, ethnic groups, and so forth, that are successful, policies that have better outcomes than others, choices that lead to bad outcomes and others that lead to good outcomes. Most ordinary people know why some things or people are successful and others are not, which is that certain things are better than others. But the liberals, because they forbid themselves to make the necessary distinctions and further believe that no one has any basis for making such distinctions (they believe that the very real differences between what is good and what is not good don’t exist or have no meaning and that no one really believes that they have any meaning), have no rational explanation for why some things and people succeed while others don’t. They conclude that any time this sort of thing happens, when certain things appear to be good, it can only be because there was some sort of cheating going on. No other evidence is needed. There mere existence of success is proof that there must have been some sort of chicanery or bigotry at work and the unsuccessful were victimized; they were discriminated against.

This leads modern liberals invariably to choose policies that are not good over those that are good; promote evil over the righteous, failure over success, and wrong over right, because of a warped sense of justice that always elevates the unsuccessful, which is presumed to be innocent, over the successful, which is presumed to be guilty. It leads them to hate the successful and extol the failed. It leads them to love and support evil people, terrorists, and tyrants, especially those who have obviously failed or are failing, and hate the successful leaders of democratic nations.

Consider an issue in the news. We all know that mainstream media outlets have for some time been refusing to call terrorist organizations terrorist. The reason they give for that is that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. In other words they refuse to discriminate, make the distinction, between the two. Most people can easily make the distinction, though. As a minimum a freedom fighter ought to be someone who is fighting for freedom, and Islamic radicals are fighting to bring about a society that reduces women to the status of animals, gays to corpses, and non-Muslims to the status of pigs and monkeys, so they are clearly not fighting for freedom. People who deliberately attack civilians as primary targets in order to terrorize the population are in fact terrorists. But news organization refuse to apply the minimum of critical thinking needed to discriminate between the two. The differences in actions and behaviors between the terrorist and the freedom fighter simply don’t matter to the modern liberal. All that matters is the act of discrimination.

So since to the modern liberal there is no objective difference (that anyone really believes in or believes is important) between the actions and policies of, say, George Washington and Saddam Hussein, then the only reason that George Washington is traditionally upheld as a hero is because he’s a privileged white Christian man of European descent. The only reason that Saddam Hussein is seen by ordinary people as a villain is that he’s a brown skinned Muslim man of Arab descent. It can only be discrimination that draws any line between the two men, so where does this discrimination come from other than prejudice and bigotry based on identity.

The effort to determine what is good from what is not good is evil to the modern liberal. If I say that Saddam Hussein was a bad man then I have discriminated and it is I that am evil and it is Saddam Hussein that is the victim. Most people know why they think that Saddam Hussein was a bad man. They believe this because they think rationally and make value judgments. For those who have forbidden themselves to discriminate that way, for which thinking and judgment have no meaning, who have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they can’t believe that they have any real meaning to anyone, there must be some other reason that they make that distinction – their prejudices. And so their way of thinking leads them to side with a horrible murderous tyrant.

When liberals do attempt to develop policies they run up against their inability to use facts in a rational fashion. They don't believe that facts really matter, so facts are used in rhetoric but not in the service of finding good policy, not effectively. They end up with policy that is invariably 180 degrees from being successful governance because the real agenda is to build up the unsuccessful and tear down the successful. Thus their attempt to craft a health care law ended up being a mishmash of efforts at social justice that threatens to tear down the American health care system.

 

[WI Crippler]

I think this is a fair assessment for a portion of modern liberal thought. But it's a small, yet boisterous portion. I know many people that consider themselves to be modern liberals who don't quite measure up to this guys interpretation, but I also do know a few who fit this description with 100% accuracy. And those people are always louder than their more sensible counterparts that I know. It's the equivalent of rational thinking conservatives who get overshadowed by the louder, more aggressive factions of conservatism. It makes for easy, broad sweeping generalizations of a political viewpoint if you can point at the most ridiculous of your opponents and use them as the measuring stick for your opinion of their ideals as a whole, as this author has.

For the people he does describe, and they do exist, I consider them the lowest of people in our society. I don't think society can thrive with people like them in any position of authority.

 

[Redress]

So some one with no clue what liberals think makes a bunch of insults, and thus is meaningful how?

 

[Redress]

Well, now that Deadliest VCatch is over and I am at my computer and not on my tablet during a commercial, let's go through this.

Evan Sayat gave a talk to the Heritage Foundation in 2007. In it he lays out his understanding of how modern liberals (which he refers to as Liberals, upper case, to distinguish them from classical liberals, lower case) think. He was raised in New York and considered himself a liberal until the aftermath of 9-11 when he was appalled by the attitudes of his liberal friends toward America. He began a quest to find the source of these attitudes.

The following is a summary of the talk. If you prefer to listen to the talk itself it is here. Any inaccuracies in the following summery are entirely my fault.

The text in square brackets is an explanatory point Sayat makes in a later talk.

I’d be interested in what those who think of themselves as Liberal think. Any counterexamples, etc., would be appreciated. I don't need a lot of ad hominem attacks since those are easy enough to imagine. I posit that the sort of person Sayat describes as the modern liberal does not really exist, that no one actually thinks the way he describes.

Two things need to be done here. First is to laugh at Sayet, some one who called liberals "morally and intellectually retarded", as some how being a good person to look to for analysis of liberals. He claims to have been a liberal, but it is easy to claim alot of things. This does lead us into the second thing that needs to be done however, which is to define what a modern liberal is. To my mind, a modern liberal is one who feels that government can and should do as much as feasible for the country. Two key things there. First is the word feasible. Some things are beyond the scope of government, some things are just undoable, some things the cost is too high for the reward. Being a liberal is not being blind to these things. The second thing is the word country. A country is not just some lines on a map, it is more than anything the people represented by the government. The people is who the government should be working for.

The basic difference between a modern liberal and a modern conservative(and this is not referring to the ideologues of each, nor those who define themselves by opposition to the other, or democrats and republicans) is the size and scope of the government they support.

Sayat says that there is one thing that modern liberals know about world history, and that is that despite all ideas, religions, politics, ideologies, and governments throughout history war, poverty, crime and injustice have not disappeared from the earth. [They know that human beings are basically innocent and have no innate tendencies to drive them to do such things, so the conditions that lead people to war and conflict must have been imposed on people from without. Thus mankind can be perfected and war and conflict eliminated if those things making them act in these ways are removed.]

Since all previous ideas have failed to bring about a perfect world liberals believe that all wars, conflicts, and disharmony in the world are caused by, can only be caused by, the attempt to be right. The disagreements over what is wrong and right, good and evil, etc. are what lead to conflict which in turn leads to war, injustice and poverty, so the remedy is to eliminate all such efforts to discriminate between the good and what is not good. Discrimination or discriminating thought therefore becomes the one great evil of the world.

And we find the first reason why Sayek is clueless about liberals. He makes huge, broad generalizations that really don't have anything to do with actually being a liberal(or being a conservative for that matter). When I look at history, I see something complex and not able to be defined in a couple paragraphs. I see people who are sometimes innocent, sometimes guilty, sometimes deceived, sometimes deceivers. I see many events which cannot be boiled down to good vs bad, or right vs wrong. Discrimination is only one factor among many.

So right away, either Sayek is lying to you, or just not bright enough to actually understand what he is talking about.

The belief that discrimination is to be avoided leads liberals to attempt to be indiscriminate in all things. This leads to the rejection of all fact, reason, morality, and decency as the basis for thought. They therefore seek to tear down, eliminate, and otherwise discredit the traditional values because they are based on discrimination between good and not-good as determined by fact, reason, logic, morality and decency.

And more nonsense. As a modern liberal, I believe in using my head. Some things should be "discriminated" against. I firmly believe in discriminating against, for example, criminals. I do believe in judging people based on their actions, which is by definition discrimination.

But it is good to see we get to the mindless namecalling early. It is stupid, but at least it is mindless. It is so easy to hate on those you disagree with when they "reject all facts, reason, morality or decency". Small minded solutions for small minded people(see, I can do it too). Just to be clear, liberals are not trying to "tear down, eliminate or otherwise discredit traditional values". Being thinking beings however, we do beleive in analyzing traditions, seeing what works,m what doesn't, what is due to change. Many traditions however are very good ones.

All efforts to distinguish good from evil, wrong from right, the behaviors that lead to success from the behaviors that lead to failure, and so on, lead to conflict and therefore are to be avoided.

Ok, that is just ****ing stupid.

But this does not lead modern liberals to be tolerant. In fact, they have become much more illiberal. They believe more strongly than ever that there is evil in the world, and it is the evil of discriminating thought.

Really, you actually think there is truth to this? This was good enough you had to post about it?

It is undeniable that there are people, companies, countries, ethnic groups, and so forth, that are successful, policies that have better outcomes than others, choices that lead to bad outcomes and others that lead to good outcomes. Most ordinary people know why some things or people are successful and others are not, which is that certain things are better than others. But the liberals, because they forbid themselves to make the necessary distinctions and further believe that no one has any basis for making such distinctions (they believe that the very real differences between what is good and what is not good don’t exist or have no meaning and that no one really believes that they have any meaning), have no rational explanation for why some things and people succeed while others don’t. They conclude that any time this sort of thing happens, when certain things appear to be good, it can only be because there was some sort of cheating going on. No other evidence is needed. There mere existence of success is proof that there must have been some sort of chicanery or bigotry at work and the unsuccessful were victimized; they were discriminated against.

Interesting. So you feel that some ethnic groups are better than others? Because that is a necessary result of your first two sentences here.

The rest is just more stupid along the lines of the previous. Liberals do not assume that the only reason for success or failure is because one is better than the other. However, it certainly can be that in some cases. Making generalities like that(which seems to be a pattern here...is modern conservatism based on making huge generalities that clearly cannot work in all cases?) is bound to fail. What has to happen is actually looking at a situation and analyzing it to determine what went right and what went wrong. That is rational thinking, something Sayek does not seem capable of.

This leads modern liberals invariably to choose policies that are not good over those that are good; promote evil over the righteous, failure over success, and wrong over right, because of a warped sense of justice that always elevates the unsuccessful, which is presumed to be innocent, over the successful, which is presumed to be guilty. It leads them to hate the successful and extol the failed. It leads them to love and support evil people, terrorists, and tyrants, especially those who have obviously failed or are failing, and hate the successful leaders of democratic nations.

Yeah...this is the whole make **** up to demonize those you disagree with thing. The irony in your post is astounding.

Continued in a second post due to character count(I got to be getting close since I think it counts characters in quote tags).

 

[Redress]

Continued from above:

Consider an issue in the news. We all know that mainstream media outlets have for some time been refusing to call terrorist organizations terrorist. The reason they give for that is that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. In other words they refuse to discriminate, make the distinction, between the two. Most people can easily make the distinction, though. As a minimum a freedom fighter ought to be someone who is fighting for freedom, and Islamic radicals are fighting to bring about a society that reduces women to the status of animals, gays to corpses, and non-Muslims to the status of pigs and monkeys, so they are clearly not fighting for freedom. People who deliberately attack civilians as primary targets in order to terrorize the population are in fact terrorists. But news organization refuse to apply the minimum of critical thinking needed to discriminate between the two. The differences in actions and behaviors between the terrorist and the freedom fighter simply don’t matter to the modern liberal. All that matters is the act of discrimination.

You know this? Care to document it? Bet you can't. The media has no problem throwing around the term terrorist. Making **** up to argue against is much easier than actually arguing facts, but, well...

So since to the modern liberal there is no objective difference (that anyone really believes in or believes is important) between the actions and policies of, say, George Washington and Saddam Hussein, then the only reason that George Washington is traditionally upheld as a hero is because he’s a privileged white Christian man of European descent. The only reason that Saddam Hussein is seen by ordinary people as a villain is that he’s a brown skinned Muslim man of Arab descent. It can only be discrimination that draws any line between the two men, so where does this discrimination come from other than prejudice and bigotry based on identity.

Oh for god's sake that is just painfully ****ing stupid.

The effort to determine what is good from what is not good is evil to the modern liberal. If I say that Saddam Hussein was a bad man then I have discriminated and it is I that am evil and it is Saddam Hussein that is the victim. Most people know why they think that Saddam Hussein was a bad man. They believe this because they think rationally and make value judgments. For those who have forbidden themselves to discriminate that way, for which thinking and judgment have no meaning, who have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they can’t believe that they have any real meaning to anyone, there must be some other reason that they make that distinction – their prejudices. And so their way of thinking leads them to side with a horrible murderous tyrant.

Really, you actually bought into this ****? And thought it was so important you had to share it?

When liberals do attempt to develop policies they run up against their inability to use facts in a rational fashion. They don't believe that facts really matter, so facts are used in rhetoric but not in the service of finding good policy, not effectively. They end up with policy that is invariably 180 degrees from being successful governance because the real agenda is to build up the unsuccessful and tear down the successful. Thus their attempt to craft a health care law ended up being a mishmash of efforts at social justice that threatens to tear down the American health care system.

Oh good, even more mindless namecalling. Hint: some one who clearly did not critically think about what they read probably should not accuse others of not being able to use facts in a rational fashion. This whole thing is nothing more than a bunch of made up nonsense with no basis in anything approaching reality. When all you can do is namecall and make things up to demonize and ridicule those who disagree with you politically, you probably should hang your head in shame.

 

[Redress]

Now, you may have noticed how I made it a point to start out by defining a modern liberal. It is important. I did it for two reasons. One is to contrast with Sayek, who did not make any kind of definition. It would have made it much harder to make mindless ad homs against an actually defined group. The second is to show the biggest reason why everything he said fails. None of it, not one tiny bit, has anything to do with what a liberal actually is. I suggest in the future if you want to discuss what liberals think, you start by looking at what they actually think. I would be more than happy to tell you what I think about any issue, and how it fits into a liberal ideology. Going to an anti-liberal(which is not a conservative, being defined by being against something is not standing for anything) is probably not the brightest thing to do. Going to Ed Shultz or Al Sharpton or Democratic Underground to find out what conservatives think would be patently stupid. Doing the reverse is likewise.

 

[LowDown]

I'm not seeing where the key points Sayet made were answered, those being that modern liberals are too obsessed with avoiding discrimination to be able to tell good from bad or make any necessary judgements or distinctions, they invariably see success as evidence of oppression and failure as evidence of being oppressed, and strive to bring down the successful and elevate the failed. I'm afraid that to those of us who observe modern liberals from the standpoint of not being liberal Sayat's analysis is hardly far fetched. Yet I'm not convinced it's entirely correct. I'm especially sympathetic to the idea that he's painting with too broad a brush.

 

[CaptainCourtesy]

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