We all seem to know someone who may be a perfectly nice, friendly, and cheerful person until the topic of politics arises. Then, this nice, friendly, and cheerful person immediately turns into a nasty, spiteful, arrogant, and condescending pain in the you-know-what. I know a couple of people like that, and I know of families where the discussion of politics at family gatherings has been banned because of this problem.
And those people are almost always on the left. The Democrats have a problem with arrogant condescension and Democrat strategist Julian Epstein is calling them out on it.
Democrat strategist Julian Epstein said late this week that the political Left lost the 2024 election because they are too woke and they are condescending to others.
Epstein made the remarks during a Friday interview on Fox News while discussing the course correction that he would like to see his party make.
“We have spoken many times in the last year or two about what the Democrats are doing wrong. And Democrats in their postmortem are sort of talking about these things,” he said. “They had the wrong candidate and their policies were wrong.”
He said Democrats needed to recruit “better candidates and they need to move back to the center on economic and cultural policies.”
You can see the video as well:
This is known as belaboring the obvious.
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But we might ask why this is the case. Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians are far more likely to be willing to enter into a calm, rational discussion. When those of us on the right of the center disagree, we tend not to take it as personally as the left does. The answer may be found in a famous quote from the late, great Dr. Charles Krauthammer:
Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.
For the “woke” left, the certainty of their righteousness is overwhelming. The “woke” left is convinced that people have a right to free health care and forgiveness of their student loans, the right to push transgender treatments on children, the right to have Drag Queen Story Hours in elementary schools, and they will not consider arguments to the contrary.
This comes back to Dr. Krauthammer’s quote. Conservatives may think liberals are stupid, but as long as the liberals aren’t actually mentally impaired, they may be open to an honest discussion based on facts. Conservatives and libertarians, the people to the right of center, generally don’t naturally start off being uncivil, as doing so would make the listener unreceptive. Conservatives tend to see civility as a virtue.
But liberals, with their reflexive belief that conservatives are evil, react with arrogant condescension, and given their assumption, why wouldn’t they? Liberals see incivility as a virtue when dealing with those whom they sophomorically see as evil.
It’s an interesting phenomenon and explains a lot about the state of political discourse in the United States today.
Too many people, of course, are loathe to listen to opposing views. We should do just the opposite: seek out those views, read them or listen to them, analyze them, and refute them — the better to enter into these inevitable discussions and to knock the arrogant condescension of the woke left down a peg or two.
