The liberal religion and the devils on the right
This piece by Dennis Prager is one of the best summaries of the left’s attitude towards the right, and why it is so recalcitrant to change.
It also explains why the ostracism and demonization faced by liberal to conservative “changers” such as myself from their liberal or leftist friends and family is so commonplace, and no accident.
AGENDA: Grinding America Down (Trailer)
vimeo.com/13722147
Prager says it all, really. Question is, how do we counter their propaganda? We have a serious problem with silos: each group listens to its own town criers, and no others. Fox News is also demonized, so one almost doesn’t dare listen to it if the neighbors can hear you; ditto Limbaugh et al.
And the brainwashed ones stick their fingers in their ears and screw their eyes shut if they hear or see any news/opinion from the demonized sources. (My neighbor downstairs, an intelligent Stalinist, says proudly that he won’t read the Wall Street Journal “on principle.” Pig-ignorant and proud of it.)
@Beverly
thing is: conservatives are in the majority – we just don’t know it. Thats how effective the media saturation has been. When I went to my first Tea Party, what I liked best was looking around at all the happy, intelligent people who believed in small government. I liked looking at them and thinking: They are just like me! We all believe in small government! There are so many of us!
I can read polls, and thus I knew most Americans are conservative. But, at an emotional/gut/unintellectual level: I, also, was beaten down by being demonized as an extremist. Being at the Tea Party reminded me: I am not the extremist. The left are the extremists. The left are the minority. They’ve just been fooling us via media saturation.
So, my point is: play Fox News, and turn it up loud! You reside solidly inside the American majority. Don’t be fooled by propaganda which tries to convince you otherwise.
In time the brain-washed generation will die off and be replaced with a generation that understands that it was an Obamist who brought the destruction of the dollar, the Iranian bomb and the world wide decline of the Pax Americana and all the security and prosperity that went with it. The face of victory will look very hungry.
Playing on people’s fears of not fitting in is a powerful tool. And major media, supposedly designed to reflect trends and fashions coming out of the folk, now has taken on itself the job of telling the folk what the trends should be. The tail is now wagging the dog.
If modern liberalism is a religion, then in the beginning was the word, and the word was made electronic.
Robin of Berkeley is different – she’s the “changer” her ‘mate’ Jon has remained on the Left.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/sleeping_with_the_enemy.html
Sorry, the above comment was intended for the mixed-marraiges post.
While visiting with relatives, we have an iron=clad rule – no politics! Yesterday, we sat and listened to diatribes about Reagan being terrible for the US, gun-rights proponents being wrong and dangerous, Tea partiers being radicals, etc., etc. I was appalled at our cowardice, but for the life of me, I don’t know what we could have said. There is no changing these peoples minds. But I am very embarrassed at my own lack of self defense.
Neo, based on my twenty-year experience of two female liberal friends (my ex was another one), I believe their liberalism is imprinted indelibly, whether by their unionist parents or their public schools and choice of media. They cannot argue logically in defence of their “religion”; they can only vent accusatory venom in face of my suggestions that they read up on what they are defending. I am arrogant and judgmental and islamophobic, etc.; they are simply right, end of discussion.
I admire you for your political ‘conversion experience’.
We’ve commented on this before – the peculiar tendency of leftists/liberals to presuppose that everyone agrees with them, election results notwithstanding.
It may be a social signaling device, a shibboleth, on their part to pre-emptively assert their “coolness” and then await accolades from the assembled comrades.
Or it may just be garden-variety ignorance and lack of social graces.
No need to be embarrassed; it’s probably a waste of breath to present the opposing viewpoint. Perhaps more productive is to plant the seed of doubt/thought in the fertile soil between their ears, and let it go at that.
One example is turning leftist viewpoints back on one’s interlocutor apparently without noticing the conflict, viz., if talking to a liberal physician, go on a tear about how Obama’s absolutely right that doctors yank out body parts just to turn a buck, and that you for one are glad that Obama (keep using His name) has had the courage to punish such parasites and cut back their income. It’s for the children!
Other examples include:
1. Talking up militant unionism to anyone who has to (or in some future development, may have to) deal with them.
2. To a liberal mom holding forth about her child’s performance in school, talk about how the Dems are absolutely right that grades are elitist and merely reflective of class advantages, that her child should be sent to an inner city school to learn about the downtrodden, and that since all children are equally valuable they should therefore all receive the same grade. (If anything brings out the hard-nosed side of most women, it’s something that disadvantages their children. And quite right, too.)
3. To a liberal dad who’s proud of his son, talk up homosexuality, and tell him you agree that all children should be taught the …uh…ins and outs of all the myriad “lifestyles” Dems support, and encouraged to try them all. If he’s proud of a daughter, talk about how you approve of abortion without parental consent, and think that the Dems are right to support illegitimate births among teen-aged girls.
4. To accusations of “Islamophobia,” from a liberal who is female, Jewish, homosexual, or a non-believer, extol the virtues of Islam, and speak approvingly of Islamic policies toward the group to which your interlocutor belongs. (“No, no, I admire Islam. They sure know how to keep their ________ in line, don’t they? We could learn a lot from them.”)
5. To union members, talk about how you approve of the Dem’s environmental policies. “Barack’s right, we must preserve the environment for the spotted howling cockroach, no matter how many jobs are lost. Losing blue-collar jobs is a small price to pay for seeing the cockroaches gambol merrily in a pristine habitat.”
6. To someone who makes a lot of money, talk about how everything over some sum (choose, say, 70% of the guy’s annual income) should be confiscated in taxes and given to the poor. He’s got so much, they’ve got so little. It’s not fair!
7. Car buff? Government Motors should produce only strictly utilitarian transport (Trabants!) They’re good enough for the proletariat.
You get the idea. Dem policies have a thousand cleavage planes in them, because they’ve cobbled together a whole bunch of groups that have mutually exclusive views. Jam the person’s face in the part that’s repellent to him, but act as though you presume he — as a Dem — will agree. The hard part is keeping a straight face.
Additionally, just for fun, with people who don’t know my actual views, I sometimes like to use psychic ju-jitsu; express agreement, and then go progressively (sorry) even further left to titrate their views, ending up waxing eloquent about policies that would make Karl Marx squirm. (Think Kim Jong Il’s press secretary and you’ve got the idea.) The trick is to see how far you can go without the other person realizing that you’re engaging in parody. It’s amusing to watch initial smiles of agreement slowly slip, and even more so if they start arguing a more conservative line.
Sloan: one possibility for dealing with the relatives is to say something like, “You know, I really disagree with you, but in the interests of family peace I don’t want to argue. Is it possible for us to talk about something else now?”
It may not work, of course. They might get angry at you for trying to limit their conversation. But if said politely and calmly, it might work to at least get them to change the subject.
@ Bob from Virginia 4:28 p.m. All-too well-said.
Neo,
Your advice to Sloan was very kind and helpful, but I did find Occam’s Beard’s comments very, very funny.
The husband of a good friend of mine still doesn’t know the extent to which I have had a conversion experience to conservatism. We were over at their house for Labor Day Picnic and he commented about how much he liked Nancy Pelosi. (Yes, seriously;. Uggh). My response; “Well, I don’t like her at all”, but as he handed me my burger I added, “but I’m not going to bite the hand that feeds me.” He laughed, but I think it’s like what Prager discusses in his column-That fellows liberalism is such a religion to him that he can’t even conceive of anyone becoming a non believer. I wonder whether he thinks I’m joking or something.
Wow! You totally gave me a strategery that I had not thought of (I don’t know why?) I think this is the whole problem with we conservatives — that we don’t think like this. But we’re starting to, little by little. I just hope we don’t end up being like them as a result.
We can’t continue going to gun fights with only fists, to reverse-paraphrase our annointed majesty. I’m done being hobbled by our etiquette, godammit.
The only remedy for this mental abberation is to live for 20 years in a true Stalinist state. Nothing is more effective for coming to one’s own senses than Siberian concentration camp. Many of my relatives with this type of experience could never be fooled again, even if they were ardent Communists when arrested.
I find myself avoiding liberal friends. It’s like they’re telling me Jim Jones in Gyanna was a reasonable guy and i don’t know how not to call them stupid f^&cking idiots for it.
I like Occam’s approach. I do this myself on occasion, and it’s truly amazing how few actually catch on that they’re being parodied, and how far you can lead them down the garden path. The smarter ones sometimes realize they’ve been had after the fact; the dumber ones rarely figure it out. But if what I say helps plant even a tiny mustard seed of doubt, then I’ve been successful. As a certain Book notes, mustard seeds can grow.
I tend to like the agricultural village model that House of Eratosthenes proposed (you’ll need to scan down, but there are links to other articles explaining it.)
I’m in the same boat as SteveH. I just have to bite my lip and resist the urge to slap some sense into liberal idiots. One day I would like to think that I would be brave enough to just laugh loudly in a libs face and say something to the effect of “Yeah…I used to think stupid things like that when I was a kid too.” With a southern upbringing, I just cannot bring myself to do it.
However I do like the suggestions that OB gave out. I tend to think linearly and the arguments that immediately come to mind will make no difference to a lib. But, I do love the idea of screwing them in the head by taking their view to the N’th degree with a vengence. Thanks!!
The problem with OB tactic is that even when they are Jewish and/or homosexual, female, parent, business owner etc they like to present to the world how UNBIASED and OPEN-MINDED they are despite belonging to a certain group/section of population.
I used to have a boss who during a carride to the jobsite went on talking to us, with passion, about his approach of TLC rasing his daughter (the only child): “I told her if she ever brings a bastard to this family I’ll not let her over the threshhold – that’s what abortions are for, not to discomfort parents of a foolish teenager. She knows I keep supply of condoms in a foyer table’ box especially for her going-outs, so she has no excuse!” The girl is 14 (!), a timid slim violin-player, team-swimmer, educated in private school…That strange reference came up as a counter example during his hate-speech re: Palin and her daughter – to show us what a correct way of raising girls should be!
It would be a waste of breath trying to “praise” teenage abortion to him – he would enthusiastically agree.
Same goes for Jews who are liberals – they support Palestinians dead-set on destruction of Israel.
Etc, etc, etc.
These people are mentally sick, you see – they revel in self-flagellation.
They want to be ‘bigger saints than the Pope”, so to speak – they get a perverse pleasure in supporting policies that are out to destroy them perosnally.
When I was in college forty-some years ago, the profs used to pull the ol’ “there’s the enlightened us and there’s the moronic, unwashed, semi-literate rest of society”.
Works well with acne’ed nineteen year olds and that includes about half the undergrads.
After which, the structure of the belief system thus inculcated is a specific against real education.