Why liberals are ignorant of conservatism

Sage McLaughlin writes:

You made the remark that “Liberals never think that conservatives believe what they believe because they think it’s true. As liberals see it, all conservative beliefs are merely a neurotic or vicious response to some other issue—economic stress, for example.”

How true this is. One of the defining characteristics of a liberal’s approach to conservative thought and temperament is an absolute, total unwillingness to entertain the possibility that any person could actually believe what conservatives believe. One of the ways this comes out is when liberal writers attempt to summarize or describe conservative reasoning. When an attempt is being made to be even-handed, as in a textbook or sometimes during a television dialogue, it’s amazing how utterly liberals fail to comprehend their subject. I honestly believe liberals don’t understand conservatives at all, not in the very tiniest degree, and have demonstrated themselves incapable of doing so. This in spite of their loud and incessant claims to understand conservatives perfectly well, and to despise what they see.

By way of example, I recall a political science textbook from college. Try as they might, the authors were completely unable to describe either American political history or the various divides in American political thought in a fair and accurate way. It was clear they could never really accept the idea that conservatives could have reached their conclusions honestly, or that they really believed what they said at all. In a section describing what “liberals” and “conservatives” in America thought about political and social life, the section describing liberals was long, detailed, and in places absurdly complimentary—such as that liberals believed in “the creative power of the individual,” which bizarrely suggests (if it means anything) that conservatives do not. The section describing conservative thought was very short, and began this way:

“Conservatives believe—or say they believe—that…” I was shocked at the obvious incongruity, the complete inability of a textbook writer, even for the purposes of simple description, to entertain without caveat the possibility that conservatives believe what they say about their own beliefs. The book went on to say that conservatives think that if a person is poor, it is because he has brought it on himself and in some cosmic way deserves it, and that the same went for most any of life’s unfortunates. It was obvious that these people—that is, almost anyone in the academic world, from textbook writers to professors, people whose job it is to know—had no familiarity whatsoever with what conservatives think and why. The reason is obvious—we live in a public environment in which it is possible to go through one’s whole life without ever encountering a serious and well-expressed conservative idea.

More examples from my personal experience: I had an angrily, nastily anti-Christian, anti-Western leftist professor once who had no clue whether the story of the Fall or the story of Cain and Abel came first in the Old Testament. He did not consider himself an ignorant man, quite the opposite—his contempt for the obvious stupidity and lack of learning required to be anything other than a leftist was crystal clear in everything he said and did. And yet he had not even the most passing familiarity with the most important text in the entire Western world. Years ago, when I was much more liberal, I knew a radically anti-Christian, feminist woman who despised Christianity with such venom that she once expressed the hope that any Christian missionaries caught in Afghanistan “got what was coming to them.”

I was eventually to discover that she did not know that the Incarnation—the belief in Jesus Christ as divine—was something that Christians believed, that it was a Christian doctrine at all. I insisted that it was, and that it was in fact the essential part of what it meant to be a believing Christian. I was never able to convince her that this was actually a common belief among Christians, that Christ was literally God. She had no idea about the Trinity, or any of it. Her absolute ignorance of the Christian conception of God did not prevent her from congratulating herself for rejecting it. (I still wonder to this day how such ignorance of the prevailing religion of one’s own society is even possible—this girl’s mother works in a Baptist church and stared blankly when I asked the question whether she knew what the Trinity was.) And you know what? She is not at all atypical of serious liberal true believers. But this ignorance does not go the other way. For example, committed conservatives who cannot identify the source of the phrase, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” are almost non-existent.

It’s true that liberals have a much deeper bench in the intellectual department than do conservatives. In fact, it’s really no contest. Given that, the ignorance of and failure even to comprehend the basics of conservative belief among liberals is a source of constant astonishment to me.

LA replies:

Mr. McLaughlin writes:

“One of the defining characteristics of a liberal’s entire approach to conservative thought and temperament is an absolute, total unwillingness to entertain the possibility that any person could actually believe what conservatives believe.”

Why is this the case? I think it’s because liberals cannot conceive of any belief system outside liberalism. And why is that? Because the central belief of modern liberalism is that all human beings can get along on a basis of good will and reasoned negotiation, without unequal relations of “superiority” and “inferiority,” and without unbridgeable differences leading to exclusion and hostility. But for this equal, unified, liberal world to be the true world, the only true belief can be liberalism. If there were a non-liberal belief that was based on something permanent, such as truth or a self-sustaining culture or religion, then liberalism would cease to be valid. Liberals must therefore see all non-liberal beliefs as resulting from irrational or crazy or cynical motives, or from factors, such as resentment over inequality, that are temporary or curable by liberal programs. (For example Barack Obama says that Jeremiah Wright type hatred of whites can be ended by renewed efforts to end racial inequality.)

Thus liberals and mainstream conservatives (who are a type of liberal) spin out endless non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism, theories that explain Islamic extremism as resulting from every factor you can think of other than the things that Muslims themselves say they believe, because if Islamic extremism comes from what Muslims say they believe, i.e., from Islam, then Islamic extremism can’t be overcome and the liberal belief in a universal brotherhood made possible by universal subscription to liberalism breaks down. In the same way liberals spin out “non-conservative theories of conservatism,” theories that explain conservatism by every imaginable factor other than the things that conservatives actually say they believe, because if the liberals acknowledged that conservatism is a self-sustaining, internally coherent, and sincerely and rationally held belief system, liberalism would cease being the only real belief system in the world and the liberal claim to universal validity would be broken.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 12, 2008 12:19 PM | Send