Gerard Alexander, a professor in the political science department at the University of Virginia, contends that liberals have a particular problem with condescension:
American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension. . . .
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. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to “the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.” . . .
It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: “What do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid—life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?”
In Krugman’s world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of “these people”—only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.
But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. . . .
In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters’ underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or “tea party” gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen. . . .
Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety—including fear of change—whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. . . .
These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant—they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking.
Where I part company with Dr. Alexander is in his statement that liberals are much worse than conservatives in this regard. That may well be true in his experience, but it isn’t in mine. I think his description of our liberal intellectuals and political leaders is basically accurate, but I can think of many conservatives who are just as dismissive of liberals as folks like Krugman are of conservatives—it’s just that they don’t have the megaphone. Conservatives inside the Beltway and those who work for the so-called “mainstream” media mostly cannot afford to be right-wing equivalents to Krugman, because very few would manage to survive. Moderation of language and attitude is much, much safer. Outside of that environment, though, it’s perfectly safe for conservatives to deride liberals as godless, self-absorbed, shallow, unpatriotic, and power-hungry—and many do.
The key here is that this is the way partisans tend to think, because this is the sort of view of one’s own side and the other side which partisanship tends to inculcate. Jay Cost has a much better view of the matter, I think, in an excellent post examining Barack Obama’s highly partisan pretensions to bipartisanship. As Cost says, partisanship tends to define one’s own side as the ones with rational arguments who are motivated by the desire to serve the public interest, and the other side as calculating propagandists who are motivated by self-interest. This tends to generate and feed the idea that those who disagree with me really know that I’m right, but refuse to agree with me out of nefarious and unsavory motives; this is further driven by the sinful human desire to see ourselves on the side of the angels, and our opponents as hating the good, the true, and the beautiful.
This, I believe, is the great infection in our politics: we have learned to assume that if our opponents were willing to see reason and do what is right, they would be on our side—and that their failure to do what we want must therefore be willful and malicious, making them not merely our opponents but our enemies. The most important political discipline we can practice, I believe, is that of granting our political adversaries the same assumption of good motives that we grant ourselves.
We need to recognize and admit that even if we may advocate different methods, in many areas we’re all working toward the same goals—we all, for instance, want good schools and a strong economy in which everyone can find a job which will support them at least adequately. Of course, there are many areas in which that isn’t true, as well—as for instance, with regard to the whole complex of issues around homosexuality; but even there, we need to recognize and admit that those who disagree with us do so because they have an honestly different understanding of what is good, not because they have decided to pursue evil instead. Until we can do this, our politics in this country aren’t going to get any better.
Image: DonkeyHotey, 2011. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
I commend you on your understanding of the issues surrounding Partisanship. I tend to agree with many different parties on the same issue but this dichotomy of mind is not very well suited to decision making. There i may be a place for partisanship so long as it is considered partisanship and i agree that politics will continue on it's path until we stand up and fix it.