Webster Fun House ☀
You want to know why the left has ideas and the right has discipline? Because people who like ideas and dislike authority tend to identify with the Democratic left, while people who feel threatened by new ideas and more comfortable in a disciplined and ordered world tend to identify with the Republican right. Democrats and progressives let a thousand flowers bloom. Republicans and the right issue directives. This has been the yin and yang of American politics and culture. But it means that the Democratic left’s new ideas often fall victim to its own notorious lack of organization and to the right’s highly-organized fear mongering.It’s annoying whenever anyone, regardless of their political affiliation, feels the need to characterize their allies and their opponents in this way. Essentially: Well, the people who agree with me tend to be intellectuals, while those on the other side chew with their mouths open. It takes a special lack of self-awareness, though, to utter the first bolded sentence above at a time when Reich and his brethren are trying to significantly increase the authority of the federal government, while town hall protestors unquestionably oppose this expansion of authority. (That’s not to say that Republicans are consistently against authority—they seem to like authority just fine when Republicans are in charge, just like the Democrats love authority when Democrats are in charge. The only party that consistently opposes authority in any meaningful way is the libertarian party.)
Uh, you levy an unfair extrapolation here — from “threatened by new ideas”, a leap to an assertion of intellectual superiority. Actually, maintaining the status quo and “holding to traditional values and cautious about change or innovation” is woven into conservative DNA. Whereas the very definition of liberal or progressive entails being open to new ideas or “favoring or implementing social reform”. If you find fault there, take it up with Webster and fellow dictionary publishers.
And I will toss an additional conservative/liberal dichotomy card onto the pile — the open discourse nature and embrace of logic by liberals and progressives vs. the tribal stubbornness and meanness reality resistant conservatives possess. Not that one side holds a monopoly on playing the censorship card or rudeness card, just that my experience maintains (and I frequent the online conservative blogs, forums and radio shows just as equally or greater than the left leaning ones) that liberals/progressives tend to argue the facts and the issues whilst conservatives employ an us vs. them filter that purposefully ignores or distorts empirical evidence. Kind of like fundamentalist Christians that proudly proclaim “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” But I will concede that the liberal/progressive side hurls more obscenities and profanities.
Note that I did not mention the dreamy, mythical textbook widget toting, illusion clutching, economic utopian libertarians.
