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QoTD: The Left Believes We’re Stupid
Voters can be unwise, hidebound, prejudiced. Sometimes they fail to discern their own good and even vote for the
opposite. Progressivism, by contrast, holds that it has discerned the people’s true interest and redefines democracy as what the people would vote for if only they were smart enough to know their own good. –Michael Anton, in The Stakes
In this quotation, Michael Anton gave one of the most astute descriptions of the Left’s beliefs about the Right. It would be funny if it wasn’t true about them.
It’s quite stunning that the Left overall believes that they know what is best for everyone, especially the Right. Considering how every individual is unique, with many different beliefs, desires, attitudes and philosophies, I’m fascinated by the Left’s arrogance; I’m also frustrated to be told repeatedly that they have the TRUTH, and I only need to step up and pay attention and I will be able to learn at their feet.
My experience with people on the Left is that they are not necessarily stupid, but they are naïve and ignorant. People can be intellectually brilliant, but when brainwashed with balderdash, they have no clue that they have bought into nonsense. They also know next to nothing about the beliefs of people on the Right, since they have swallowed the lies and deceptions that the mainstream media religiously spreads. They are not the least bit curious to look beyond the stereotypes. And they insist that they will be able to “encourage” all of us to join them, because they’re, well, right.
The Left doesn’t care if it’s inconsistent, incoherent, or illogical. They simply know what they want, and that is enough for them.
Fortunately, it’s not enough for us.
Published in Group Writing
It must be exhausting to possess all the answers like that. I don’t understand how they do it.
I guess you could say it’s “mindboggling”; you’d just have to ask whose mind is being boggled.
There is a reason that many within the Republican Party refer to it as the Stupid Party. On the other hand, it’s better than being part of the Evil Party.
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I can’t argue with that. Good point, @arahant
It strikes me that instead of fearing the “patriarchy” people need to fear “paternalism”. That is handily non-gendered. It simply aggregates power to the “parents” to dictate terms to everyone else. “Because I told you so” is the dictat of the Left.
Good point, @rodin. I just noticed an irony: they want to be “parented” by the government, so they assume that all of us want to be parented by them! No thanks. One adolescence was enough for me.
When you read that Biden is being evasive about packing the Supreme Court, it’s to keep people like this in his big tent. He can’t win without them.
Project Veritas turns over the rock:
I think I am smarter than most voters, so I can’t blame them for thinking that:)
There are too many people that just want to have all the risk taken away and all those choices taken away, because life is scare and complicated. Freedom is scary for them, so all freedom should go away.
If they don’t want to live in freedom, they can just move to N. Korea. They’ll welcome them there.
The violent revolutionary Bernie Bro in the video is on his county’s Democrat Party Central Committee. I don’t know about Colorado, but in California, those are the people who, among other things, choose the electors who aren’t electors ex officio.
When views are never challenged, the mind becomes weak in the face of resistance or argument. It’s so much easier to dismiss dissenting views and opinions as racist, sexist, whatever-ist. Conservatives are battling and using mind muscles all the time. Now if we could only organize ourselves as well as the left…
The man was terrifying. I hope he’s more bluster than brutality.
County level party committees are where it all starts. That’s a northern Colorado county, heavily agricultural; Greeley is the county seat. If there’s someone like Jacks there, there are probably people like him at the local Democrat Party level all over the country.
He is LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) a revolutionary.
The left stayed away from dinging JFK from the mid-1960s onward, but they felt no qualms about mocking his technocrats as “The Best and the Brightest”, mainly due to their failure in Vietnam. What they refused to get was those same technocrats were liberals just like they were, only not as far left, but with the same idea that a few really smart people could run the world correctly, in a way that the average person would have no clue of doing (what the far left took from it, since people like Robert McNamara came from the private sector, is don’t hire anyone from the private sector for future iterations of “The Best and the Brightest” and just rely on career politicians, academics and bureaucrats who’ve never spent a day of their lives in the private sector).
The even greater arrogance of the far left in their own super-genius status and the fact their egos are entirely wrapped up in being smarter than the proletariat means their plans can’t be wrong and they can’t fail on their own. They have to fail only because they were sabotaged by evil, outside forces, which is why every time a progressive government gets in power, they start trying to clamp down on and then eliminate their critics, and keep casting the net wider and wider to find their Enemies of the State as the failures continue. So the public is stupid and the higher-profile critics are evil, and nothing in terms of economic or foreign policy failures is ever their fault.
Never Trumpers are the same way.
Excellent points, @jon1979. Remember when Obama was quoted as saying something like he was smarter than all of the people who worked for him? From the Free Beacon, 2016
Unfortunately, you are correct, Bryan. Arrogance is not exclusive to the Left.
When Clinton was having his problems prior to the 1994 GOP midterm tsunami, he made a stop somewhere in early April that year, and the AP reported one of Clinton’s aides berated the media during the event for the current troubled situation with HillaryCare and other issues, telling them that Bill was the smartest president America’s had since Thomas Jefferson. It was ego-and-hubris by proxy (AP didn’t name the aide who played the “We’re geniuses and you all are idiots” card, but if it was Stephanopolous, I wouldn’t be surprised).
It matters who you are calling the left. The leftist leadership thinks we are all stupid, left or right. They have good reason to believe that, since their followers so readily lap up the lies and haywire policy proposals they feed them. They just make the mistake of thinking that the ‘unwashed masses’ on the right are as stupid as their own leftist masses. The concept of an educated and intelligent populous is outside their belief systems. They are congenital totalitarians.
The key question is, are there enough stupid lefty mind numbed moron masses to elect the lefty leadership?
Let’s hope not, @phenry. The idea is frightening.
The arrogance is breathtaking.
To discern the people’s (my) interests and then implement what is in my “best interests” they must know exactly what my circumstances are, what my history is, every experience I have had, what “turns me on” and what “turns me off,” how strong each of those are, and my thinking process on balancing them, how I respond to different inputs, and a whole bunch of features that are part of making me a unique individual.
Since it is impossible for any group of “progressive” rulers to know the unique details of 330 million individual people, they must ignore our individuality, and lump us into predefined demographic groups and treat everyone as guessed approximations of our actual selves. But as soon as they do that, some of the people in those groups will not receive what is in the “best interests” of those specific individuals.
Oh, @fullsizetabby, you’re just nitpicking. And they probably know lots more about you than you can imagine. Lots more.
The county went 54/34 for Trump in 2016. With this publicity, if the local Dems don’t get rid of this guy in November that’ll be a pretty good indication of where the party wants to go at the grass roots.
After all, they are fed info from Google and Facebook.
“The Left doesn’t care if it’s inconsistent, incoherent, or illogical”.
I believe you’ve just described the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Except for Hirono; I don’t think that the word has been invented yet that accurately describes her.)
Remember when they painted Ken Starr as some sex obsessed pervert for investigating the Clinton Monica relationship? How is Hirono not a sex obsessed pervert by those same standards? I mean, there are plenty of other random bad acts that could be asked about without evidence. “Have you ever killed a puppy?” “Have you ever robbed a bank?” Yet Hirono is obsessed with sexual harassments or violence.
I suspect it is just that she is too dim witted to move on from the last baseless attack on a nominee, so she falls in to the same old playbook. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
To me the Left’s belief that they know all the answers is second to their belief that they dominate the moral and cultural high ground which to my mind is infinitely worse. I find that this is what comes out with conversations on masking and Covid where they don’t have all the answers (those change often enough as we’ve seen- thanks Fauci-) and their real scorn for their fellow citizens who are opting to make different choices, often based on their very immediate economic concerns, is horrifyingly evident.
Leftist elites have exactly the same attitude toward voters that Southern slave holders had toward their slaves. And, like the slaveholders, the truth about which they deceive themselves, always, is that they’re really all about maintaining their own power, control and prosperity by maintaining a certain social order that keeps them where they are. (Oh, and by the way, they’re as fond of censorship as Southern slaveholders were in the 15 or 20 years before the civil war for exactly the same reasons the Southern slave holders were. The only difference is the much more subtle approach they take to go about censoring others.)
I want to emphasize that I think they aren’t, all of them, always completely conscious of their real or deepest motivations. But then neither were the slaveholders.
Oh yeah. I also forgot that “my” best interests are not what I think my best interests are, but what they think my best interests should be.