They hate that which they cannot understand

Excerpt from this NYTBlogs post by Judith Warner

Fred Thompson had warmed up the crowd, his familiar old district attorney’s voice restored to full bombast, and he’d been in fine form, denouncing – to loud boos from the crowd — the “lawyers and scandal mongers and representatives of cable networks” (boos from the crowd) who were at that very moment descending upon Alaska looking for dirt on their Sarah.

“I hope they brought their own Brie and Chablis with them,” he’d said, to raucous laughter, as I willed myself to disappear, remembering, with a shudder, that my children had demanded Brie for breakfast only that morning.

Take some time and give that link a read. You will see a very liberal woman getting a bit schooled on what makes people who support the McCain-Palin ticket tick.

Included in her post is a link to this report from Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia associate professor of Moral Psychology, titled “What Makes people Vote Republican” which Ms. Warner sums up as thus:

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

Perhaps that’s why the conservatives can so successfully get under liberals’ skin. And why liberals need to start working harder at breaking through the empathy barrier.

I have read the link Ms. Warner provided and this layman finds it to be more than a bit condescending and claptrap, but worthy of the minor amount of time it will take to read and comprehend.

As Professor Haidt excerpts at the top of his post:

…the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer.

But despite his “studies”, Professor Haidt himself doesn’t seem to “get it”.

He puts “liberals” only in the Democrat column and “conservatives” only in the Republican column, and proceeds to use these divisive terms to separate people into easily classified groups for his own ends. But he doesn’t “get” that humans are complex creatures who are not easily classified, even at the individual level.

For instance: I am of the “social liberal” type, but am equally “fiscally conservative” as well as “conservative” when it comes to the powers of government. I believe that most, though not all, folks who stop by RNS are also like this, to one degree or another, individually.

We vote Republican because, in general, and though not of recent vintage, that party does not see government as an end all to every problem plaguing individuals and society, as the Democratic Party does. Likewise, we also prefer the ideals of the Republican Party on issues such as personal property, including, but not limited to firearms, as well as their belief that there are not only individual rights, but also responsibilities.

The current Democratic Party can stand for none of these things and still keep the majority of their current constituents. They have drawn a line in the sand that connects at both ends to form an oval and they do not want you if you cannot fit into their idea of a “liberal” or “progressive”. I see this daily on the leftosphere. Ask The Pro-Gun Progressive about his attempts to clue the folks in the leftosphere onto why they lose the gun vote every single election. Just last week there was linkage to the Democratic Underground’s forum posts on how regulars there were breaking off friendships and not talking to relatives because they did not support the proper candidate.

While part politics still is and always will be party politics, you don’t have to be anti-abortion to be a Republican. Nor do you have to be a hardcore gunnie or an anti-gay bigot. These things do sometimes work to our benefit and sometimes they are detrimental, but either way, we do encompass a more broad spectrum of the populace than the Democratic Party.

Some folks have asked how I can stand to go to places like the dKos Animal Farm and Petting Zoo. While I do like each and every one of y’all who stops by even if it is just semi-regularly, RNS is somewhat of an echo chamber. Not that that is entirely a bad thing, but reading the other point of view is helpful to keep the fire in the belly and the eyes open and on the prize. I am not one to be “Zero Tolerance” on anything that isn’t a human right.
I believe that Professor Haidt’s biggest error is his stuffing all religious peoples, and thereby all “moral” peoples, into the Republican Party. He goes off the assumption that if you believe in a Christianity, you must always have the same morals as your fellow and that these morals direct you to vote Republican. He forgets that as of this week, the Democratic candidate has locked up somewhere around 94% of the Black vote, which includes a very large and, in general, very religious constituency.

I know for a fact that my morals are not the same as my very, very religious next-door neighbor’s, and yet, if I can believe his yard sign, he is going to vote for McCain-Palin. The family across the street from me are quite religious as well, and yet they will be voting for the Obama-Biden ticket, according to their yard sign.
But all is not lost for Professor Haidt. He is correct and deserves a decent amount of praise simply for telling the truth about how leftists are incapable of understanding the points of view of folks on the right side of the aisle and how they need to figure out ways to be empathetic without being condescending to folks outside their very tight circles.

I not only read leftosphere blogs, but I also comment on them. I do try to be as much a gentleman as possible, since it is their playground and their ball.

In one recent instance, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was going to make a stop in Washington State to campaign for our Republican candidate for Governor, Dino Rossi. A couple of the local leftosphere blogs got a hold of this info and started writing the most horrible posts about Jindal. One of the sites made mention of all the “right wing” organizations who had endorsed or supported his candidacy, and it was mentioned that he got an “A” from the GOA.

So, silly me, I asked just what was so bad about getting an endorsement from a civil rights organization like the GOA. Apparently there is no faster way to get a comment deleted there than to ask that question. Not a single other person commented on that post for the duration of its stay on their front page. They could have had a lively discussion on any number of angles stemming from my question, but they instead chose to just act like no one had said anything.

And that is the norm at most leftist blogs. Here at RNS, I give anyone the opportunity to make an ass of themselves in the comments section. I figure that just because I have the front page, I shouldn’t be the only one allowed to stick their foot in their mouth.

And here I’ve gone and fell off the script.

Essentially, I’m trying to say that Leftists don’t care what folks who vote Republican have to say because to them we’re just stupid simps who can’t see that we’re “voting against our own best interests”. Even Professor Haidt seems to think this must be true, otherwise he wouldn’t have conducted his study and issued his report.

You can read those words in quotation marks almost every single day at the larger leftosphere blogs and at least once a week at the small and medium sized ones. It is gospel to the left that anyone who cannot agree with their policies is just not smart enough and is need of education in order to see just how wrong their previously held views were.

I could go on and on about this for pages of pixels, but I think you get the drift. I may continue on this in the future, but I am currently getting close to being late for a appointment with Frau Docktor and must adjourn.

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments, as well as any corrections you think necessary. maybe We’ll just make this a thread.