This blog post by Stanley Fish in the New York Times blog is really close to having a clue. He argues that liberals are only making the Tea Parties stronger by mocking them and the only possible way to defeat them is to accept them as a legitimate viewpoint and argue with them intellectually. The main problem with that idea is isn’t the point of trying to dismiss the Tea Parties as racist, trying to dismiss them as possibly violent, or just mocking them in general is that deep down the left understands that they are on the losing side of the argument and need to do all they can to avoid the argument. The more people learn about Obamacare, the more unpopular it becomes. And as for the attempts at economic stimulus, all we have is much higher unemployment (with an unverifiable claim of millions of invisible jobs created) and tons more debt. What is the left’s intellectual argument right now? “It sure looks like we’re making things way worse, but just trust us that we’re super-smart and help us make the government bigger, more intrusive, and spend even more money!”
Still, this isn’t to say liberals wouldn’t be doing better if they stopped being dismissive and actually listened to other people’s viewpoints and argued with them as equals. But it’s one of those sine qua non things where if a liberal wasn’t dismissive of other viewpoints, would he cease to be a liberal?
Hedley LaMar: Take this down Taggert, “Being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry! Or that you were ever wrong, mistaken, in error, confused, miscalculated, misconstrued, misfigured, misguided, mishandled, were not precise, not right, not working, off-target, on the wrong track, out, out of commission, out of line, out of order, perverse, sophistical, specious, spurious, unsatisfactory, unsound, unsubstantial, untrue, immoral, dishonest, bad, base, blamable, blameworthy, blasphemous, censurable, corrupt, criminal, crooked, debauched, depraved, dishonorable, dissipated, dissolute, evil, felonious, illegal, illicit, indecent, iniquitous, naughty, profane, profligate, reprehensible, reprobate, risqué, sacrilegious, salacious, shady, sinful, smutty, unethical, unfair, ungodly, unholy, unjust, unlawful, unrighteous, vicious, wanton, wicked, wrongful, or…Methodist!”
Taggert: “Could you repete that sir?”
“…arguing with them as equals”?…anybody who voted for this regime and still supports it, in the face of all the deceit and incompetence that they have unleashed cannot be reasoned with. They know they’re wrong on the facts, and trying to reason with them is pointless. There are smarter creatures living in ponds. Better use of ones time would be to catch one of those and try to teach it to play the banjo….
Being a liberal means never having to say you are sorry!
@Zzyzx: Score!
Apparently also, being a liberal/marxist/communist means never having to say you sorry for being a Pentagon bomber, terrorist, racist, anti-Semite, thief, cad, scoundrel, disgrace, lech, leach, parasite, molester, criminal, or obama.
Being a liberal means you never have to think. Raw emotion trumops logic to them. I guess it’s all the drugs.
Democrats have come to realize that when they try to “argue with them intellectually” they always end up looking like fools. Better to loudly screetch bumper stickers like “Bush lied and people died”, even if you don’t really understand how that actually supposedly happened.
Son of Bob hits on the problem with Fish’s proposition. The only way for liberals to advance sans mocking and sloganeering is to convince more people of the validity of their POV over that of Tea Partiers.
But that means convincing people that taxes should be raised – not cut or held steady – in a recession.
It means convincing young people that they will be better off paying more for health care in order to subsidize seniors.
It means convincing parents and grandparents to impoverish their own children and grandchildren.
It means convincing everyone that energy taxes will not send jobs & investment overseas and that the planet will somehow be “greener” despite increased industrial activity in the decidedly un-green third-world.
Fish may be right – that mocking the Tea Party makes them stronger. But the alternative will only make liberals weaker.
Mocking the Tea Party does not make it stronger – but it does not achieve the desired end of the mockery, which is to destroy the Tea Party.
That’s what happens when your mockery extends to a huge swath of the public, rather than following the Alinsky rules of mocking/demonizing an individual, isolated target. The goal of the isolation and mockery is to make that individual, usually a powerful opponent, spend time fighting the mockery rather than advancing their own agenda. That won’t work with a huge crowd – they all realize the mockery does not apply to them and the others they know in the group, and thus likely the mockery is ignored and the group continues doing what it is trying to do.
All that may make sense, may not make as much sense as Fish actually thinking he can win on the merits, and ignores the liberal unseriousness of purpose as they fling poo like monkeys rather than do anything useful.
At the heart of liberalism is elitism. Elitism holds that there is a select enlightened group that is uniquely capable of making public policy. The masses need only be led along, by truth or lies. It matters not which because the masses are unable to understand the complexities involved.
Now, neither truth nor lies work for liberals. This is a prob for them, hence the daily reports of Democrats running around like chickens without heads.
The best hope for a liberal is to find constituents who are a bunch of morons. No liberal can actually stand on his policies and not look like a moron to sensible people because his ideas are moronic. So, the people have to be morons or he has to distract them from the issues somehow.
And both tactics often work!
What is odd about liberals is. given that it is impossible to argue intellectually and logically with one, liberals generally consider themselves highly educated. More educated than you.
When a young liberal’s daddy pays for his Ivy League education while the student spends more time fornicating and getting high than studying, that still counts as education.
Being a liberal means never having to say you’re wrong, even when you are.
I have always wanted the Tea Party to remain under the radar. That way it’s so much more satisfying when their candidates gob smack both the Demoncrat and the RINO.
If liberals started treating the Tea Parties seriously, I would immediately suspect the Tea Party leadership of selling out their principles.