Conservatives care about logic. Liberals care about emotion.
Conservatives care about whether a program works or not. Liberals care
about how supporting a program makes them feel. Conservatives take the
positions they do because they believe they’re best for society.
Liberals take the positions they do because they make them feel and look
compassionate or superior to hold those positions.
Once you understand those basics, it’s very easy to see why both
sides hold the positions they do on most issues and to comprehend why
there’s so little middle ground. Once you get the mentalities, you can
predict where each side will come down on issues.
An extremely expensive program designed to help disadvantaged
minority children read better that has been proven not to work? Liberals
will support it and conservatives will oppose.
A program that cuts the deficit by cutting people off the welfare and
disability rolls who don’t belong there in the first place?
Conservatives will support it and liberals will oppose.
A program called “Puppies for Orphans” that hands out “therapy dogs”
to poor children at $100,000 per year in cost? Liberals will support it
and conservatives will oppose.
The problem with all of this is that most of what passes for
“compassion” with liberals isn’t real compassion. There’s a cost to real
compassion and thus, a limit to it.
For example, let’s say Bill Gates makes $10 billion this year and
gives away $500 million. Meanwhile, a middle class accountant makes
$50,000 and gives away $5,000. We could argue about who’s more
compassionate. After all Bill Gates gives away more, but the accountant
gives away a bigger percentage of his income. Furthermore, there are
limits to what both men can and should do. If Gates gives away so much
money that Microsoft goes out of business and the accountant gives away
so much money he loses his home, we’d consider them to be fools.
Compassionate fools, but fools. This creates limits on what truly
compassionate people can do. Many people talk about compassion, but only
a few are going to go work overseas like Mother Teresa, consistently
give 10% of their income to charity, or adopt orphaned boys.
On the other hand, 99 times out of 100, liberals’ “compassion” is
nothing more than “virtue signaling.” They’re offering to take your
money and give it to someone else. They’re offering to take rights away
from other people that they don’t care about. They’re saying people are
racist, bigoted, sexist or homophobic for disagreeing with them.
It’s cost-free for someone to talk about how much he hates racism
because racism is almost universally despised in America. There is no
price to be paid for attacking a zoo that made the difficult decision to
shoot a gorilla because a boy had fallen into his pen. If you’re not a
Christian and have no moral qualms about gay marriage, it’s easy to call
for the law to crack down on bakers or wedding photographers who refuse
to participate because they find it morally repulsive.
The problem with all this pointless virtue signaling is that because
there is no real cost to it, there are no limits to it. As long as
liberals lose nothing by advocating a position, but get credit for being
compassionate for taking it, why not go for it?
This creates a situation where people have to keep on upping the ante
to stand out. If racism is almost universally despised, how do you get
credit for being more sensitive about race than other people? You find
new things to call racist. Eventually, when liberals moved beyond parody
when it came to race issues, they showed they were compassionate by
obsessing over the 3% of the American population that’s gay. Then from
there, they became maniacally focused on the .3% of the population (if
that) that claims to be transgender.
The problem with this is that compassion, real or fake, has little to do with what makes a society successful. Capitalism is not warm and fuzzy. Contrary to what some people seem to believe, diversity and sensitivity to women’s issues are not what makes a military successful. In fact, the most effective policies are often not very forgiving or compassionate. So, when you have a large block of the country that completely abandons what works for whatever makes liberals feel good and look more “compassionate,” it creates enormous amounts of dysfunction. It’s like picking which car you’re going to drive in a race because of the paint job. A paint job isn’t irrelevant, but it’s also not going to win the race for you. Unfortunately, people with this mindset are only able to figure out that they’re doing something wrong after the car crashes and the whole country is along for the ride.
Editorial by John Hawkins
1 comMENTS:
Excellent and a much needed analysis.
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