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A politically progressive friend of mine always seemed to root against baseball teams from the South. The Braves, the Rangers, the Astros -- he hated them all. I asked him why, to which he replied, "Southerners are prejudiced."
Brooks goes on to outline the emblematic irrationality that so-called "liberals" often reflexively demonstrate as they unconsciously display their own uninformed "views:"
The same logic is evident in the complaint the American political left has with conservative voters. According to the political analysis of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose perception of irony apparently does not extend to his own words, "The right wing, that is not where America's at . . . It's just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate . . . They are hate-triots."
Liberals, of course, have a fair different assessment of their own perspectives:
What about liberals? According to University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, "Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others." They also "believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference." Indeed, generations of academic scholars have assumed that the "natural personality" of political conservatives is characterized by hostile intolerance towards those with opposing viewpoints and lifestyles, while political liberals inherently embrace diversity.
It is simply amazing how liberals ape and mirror the unconscious self-righteousness I encountered while living overseas in France during the Gaullist era and in Saudi Arabia while talking to "devout" Muslims----the unreflective chauvinism in France and disdain for real diversity in Saudi were everywhere, and the victims simply projected their own insecurity about their particular fanaticism towards those who didn't believe or belong to the group of patriots/Muslims. Brooks adumbrates a bit about liberals in the USA and their attitude toward the "other" and "difference" as the French philosophers so much in vogue among them would put it:
As we are dragged through another election season, it is worth critically reviewing these stereotypes. Do the data support the claim that conservatives are haters, while liberals are tolerant of others? A handy way to answer this question is with what political analysts call "feeling thermometers," in which people are asked on a survey to rate others on a scale of 0-100. A zero is complete hatred, while 100 means adoration. In general, when presented with people or groups about which they have neutral feelings, respondents give temperatures of about 70. Forty is a cold temperature, and 20 is absolutely freezing.
In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.
My alma mater Michigan's statistical prowess is probably the best in the US. Just what, however, is the reason for the left's apparent intolerance, all while the liberal imagination believes itself to be above petty partisan bickering:
Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.
To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
This doesn't sound very tolerant to me -- nor especially rational, for that matter. To be fair, though, let's roll back to a time when the far right was accused of temporary insanity: the late Clinton years, when right-wing pundits practically proclaimed the end of Western civilization each night on cable television because President Clinton had been exposed as a perjurious adulterer.
I can remember back then that the media were in full hue and cry about how irrational the right was to claim that a felony committed by a sitting president was fit reason for impeachment. Didn't one have the sophistication to realize that sex crimes weren't covered by the U.S. Constitution when Articles of Impeachment were considered? How narrow an interpretation of the law did conservatives have, that exposure to consistent perjury for political benefit could be considered as moral turpitude and unfitness for high office? How pre-modern, or at best, merely modern!
In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.
Which brings us to the conundrum of current American politics, that the most partisan unreflective hatemongers in American politics reside on the left, where bigotry is second-nature:
Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.
The spirit of the Salem Witch Trials and "McCarthyism" and "smear politics" and "the politics of personal destruction" are the serene empty-headed possession of the ultra-left, whose obscenities and screechings are the daily bread of blog sites like Kos & C&L & vapid moronic screeds on foreign policy who shall remain unnamed.
In the end, we have to face the fact that political intolerance in America -- ugly and unfortunate on either side of the political aisle -- is to be found more on the left than it is on the right. This may not square with the moral vanity of progressive political stereotypes, but it's true.
This has been noted so often by so-called "centrist" blogs, Ann Althouse comes to mind, that it is accepted as part of the on-line community---the fact that any thoughtful commentary not containing the latest liberal buzz mantras of the last 24 hours is automatically dismissed with snarky dismissive disdainful put-downs by youngsters with a good education. The hoi-polloi are the riff-raff Kossack crowd are the street mobs of the left.
Their venomous hatred of any but their own kind will eventually poison their hearts and probably ruin their mental health---if it hasn't already.
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