It has oft-been said that liberals vote with their heads and conservatives, their hearts, but in my experience I've found the reverse. In arguments, liberals (I refuse to use their fancy new name - progressive) tend to make quite a few appeals to emotion, namely pity, while conservatives are usually the ones left on topic, appealing to logic and correcting basic history (on capitalism, slavery or what have you).
Perhaps liberal appeals to pity (and the patronizing, self-righteous attitude that follows) were more effective in times of greater inequality, when they could claim the moral high ground and claim they were being "more fair." But now these appeals to pity only serve to derail good conversations. Appeals to emotion are usually devoid of all logic and rationality.
What is an appeal to pity exactly? Well, for example, it's mentioning the plight of poor illegal immigrants in a conversation on the economic pros and cons of stronger border security, constantly bringing up race and how black people must feel in discussions on crime and deflecting to sob stories and personal anecdotes on discussions of corporations versus unions (Occupy is guilty of this. A great example was seen during the DSIE debate on the protests).
Some liberals build their whole arguments around these pity ploys, others only resort to them as a last resort. Either way pity ploys usually take a a good discussion and throw it out the window. When the emotional appeals come out, you know a liberal is hard-pressed to back up their argument with facts or at very least with obstructive, patronizing rhetoric.
If a conservatives avoid all their patronizing, liberal traps and press liberals for a rational argument, liberals will usually dissolve into crocodile tears and blame their poor arguing skills on some personal factor (in affect claiming conservative are "heartless," to use Perry's line). If this happens, the liberals have in effect thrown in the towel and no more useful conversation will be had. The conservative has "won" the argument, but only by default because the liberals could not stay on topic. The liberal's self indignation is used purely for the sake of getting out of a tough argument.
The liberal's reliance on emotion leads to a breakdown of political communication. As feminists always say, "the private is public," so the personal and the emotional must always be smuggled into an argument somehow, even if the discussion at hand is not conducive to emotional appeals or pity ploys. It's a way for a liberal (if this debate is public) to try and get the audience on their side without actually producing any facts.
Of course, these are broad generalizations. Liberals pride themselves on being rational or at least being perceived that way. And I do hear a lot of conservative appeals to emotion. But not as many as from the liberals nowadays. Liberals probably take their emotional appeals as fact and believe they are being more rational. They then use this "rationality," (really just self-righteousness) to believe they are "smarter" than conservatives.
I probably shouldn't say liberals and conservatives - most people tend to gravitate to somewhere in the middle. But I will say that that the typical liberal argument is full of not so much facts but the power of pity. Whether the grounds for this pity can be collected from their facts is left up to the reader to judge. Somewhere in that argument is a "feel sorry for me" or "feel sorry for this group of people." However, feeling sorry for someone or feeling sorry for oneself is not necessarily the basis of a good argument, much less good public policy.
It comes down to the elemental characteristics of liberalism and conservatism. I've alluded to this slightly before when talking about Romney and whether his religion othered him as a conservative or not. A major generalization one could make about the dichotomy of political thought is that liberalism emphasizes "I can't" or "these people can't" while conservatism emphasizes "I can" or "these people can."
Or to put it more nicely, liberalism speaks to (or at least pretends to speak to up to a certain point, at which we see some level hypocrisy or dishonesty - for example the 2008 Hillary v. Obama primary race) how people are othered by the establishment and fosters a sense of anti-establishment feeling (again I say at least up to a certain point - for example it's bad if Nike exploits people in far-away nations to make their products but it's OK if Apple does it, since liberal hipsters (are there conservative hipsters?) love Apple products). Conservatism emphasizes being honest or even proud of being apart of the establishment and tries to focus on the way people are not othered. Now, which political philosophy is more conducive to a better, less emotional argument?
This is not to say that liberals never make convincing arguments. I have heard many convincing arguments from liberals on diverse topics. However, liberals' weakness for pity ploys exposes the cognitive dissonance that hamstrings the effectiveness of the liberal argument. On one hand they are liberal and supposedly fighting inequality but on the other hand they are only liberal up to a point - the point at which their sense of superiority or the status quo is threatened. This is because liberals claim to be anti-establishment. But they rarely want to be honest about how privileged or devoted to the status quo they really are (if pressed they will turn their pity ploys on themselves and try to list all the ways they are supposedly othered or oppressed). I've expressed this before, but liberals become more defensive and insecure when they run out of pity ploys - i.e. run out of people to save.
For example, liberals mock black conservatives because they can't see blacks having a mind of their own when it comes to politics. Blacks are automatically always oppressed and othered i.e. pitiful and therefore need to come back to the party of the othered. Heaven forbid a black person could make up his or her mind. No, a patronizing liberal has save them and make up their minds for them.
For liberals, crime is always a "touchy" subject for blacks because so many are in jail, and blacks are therefore pitiful. It is impossible in the liberal mind that a black person might be upset about crime for crime's sake and not because of the race of the perpetrator. Finally, if black person takes offense to this stereotypical assumption, they are being "touchy" or "overly-sensitive." Blacks must never get angry at liberals it seems. If they do, they are being "uppity" or ungrateful for all the equality liberals have purportedly procured. Meanwhile the liberal in question will be as sensitive as ever, cry crocodile tears and demand sympathy at the drop of a hat.
Liberals seem to think it is impossible for them to be prejudiced and that somehow they are always in the right (there's that self-righteousness again). They seem to think that because they are the "good guys," they can never be racist. They do not realize that their patronizing pity is racist. It is no wonder blacks will begin to see that they cannot gain anything in the party of pity. Blacks are tired of this "jump...how high?' go around with liberals. I think it was President George W. Bush who said "beware the soft bigotry of low expectations." It's time we retire some liberal mainstays that worked in the past but function as soft bigotry now - mainstays such as affirmative action.
One could probably say one distrusts conservatives because they have a self-interest to maintain privilege and the establishment in a way that benefits them. Liberals also try to paint conservatives as the "bad guys," who oppress people and hold on to power. Liberals are supposedly the "good guys" committed to equality and fighting back. But really if one wants to distrust anyone, one should distrust the liberals.They appear as the "good guys" but they are in it for self-interest too. The fact that they try to paint themselves as "good guys" is insincere and should be pointed out by conservatives. Liberals are perhaps just as prejudiced and committed to privilege as conservatives they lambaste, which makes them seem all the more duplicitous and untrustworthy.
When confronted on their biases of pity, liberal arguments usually break down because there is no where else to go. Often the liberal in question will find some way to get out conversation lest their ego take a hit. Liberals fail to realize that the basis for their patronizing, knee-jerk pity for blacks, gays, women, Hispanics, what-have-you, is itself steeped in stereotypes, racism, sexism, classism and othering. Liberals like to point out othering whenever they are not the source of it. They fail to realize that the basis of many of their arguments promotes the othering they are trying to combat. If a liberal can somehow be convinced to realize the error of his or her ways. they are usually "shocked."
This is not say conservatives are without bias and are absolutely clean when it comes to furthering inequality and instilling mindsets of pity. But as I alluded to earlier, conservatives are less likely to use these stereotypical pity ploys because they don't assume people are to be pitied. Conservatives start with the assumption everyone is on an even playing ground and then look at the exceptions. Conservatives start with people saying "I can" as opposed to people being pitied for saying "I cannot."
Liberals on the other hand start with the reverse and lots of good intentions. They start by seeing everyone on an uneven playing field and trying to rectify that. But emotion and appeals to pity get in the way. Eventually we never get to an even playing field with liberals because their self-esteem depends on the self-righteousness and privilege acquired from pointing out inequality.
Paradoxically, liberals raison d'etre is to perpetuate the idea of an uneven playing field. Whether they like to admit it or not, they have no reason or motivation to ever level the playing field or declare the playing field leveled because then they will lose their voice, their importance, their message, their esteemed status as whistle-blowers.
They will never admit it but liberals seem care more about their message, their elevated place in the world, their moral high ground than actual equality. Equality would mean the battle is over and that there would be no more need for the liberal viewpoint. Then we could all just be conservative. But liberals obviously would not want that. As liberals will love to tell you, inequality will always be around so they will always be around - along with their knee-jerk appeals to pity.
This essay is not to say all liberals are bad or that all liberalism is bad. This is to say that perhaps due to the passage of time or complacency, rot has developed at the core of the mainstream liberal message. And that rot is a fixation with pity and perhaps a problem with pride and self-righteousness. Going forward liberals need to learn to "check" their prejudice and privilege and not automatically assume they are immune.
The days when liberalism was automatically the anathema to inequality are gone. Liberals will have to change their arguments, more readily take in rebuttals to their arguments and perhaps not view conservatives as so very different from themselves. Political thought adapts. Conservatism is evolving - becoming more open to blacks and gays for one thing - liberalism must evolve as well. The old model of self-interested pity will not work anymore.
- Ryu
Note that I neglected to mention the terms "Democrat" and "Republican" on purpose. The liberal or conservative mindset will not always translate smoothly over to the political parties of Democrat and Republican. People seems to forget that Lincoln, a Republican freed the slaves and 50 years ago the Democrats were for segregation. Political parties change; liberalism and conservatism, for the most part, stay the same. Today, it is possible to have moderate or even conservative Democrats - President Obama is an example of this.
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