Stupid Liberals, Evil Conservatives

Used to be, the conventional wisdom from each end of the political spectrum towards the other was (respectively) that Liberals were stupid, and Conservatives were evil.

You know, Liberals were wooly-headed, sob-story-loving, flower-sniffing hippies with bleeding hearts, whereas Conservatives were greedy, rapacious, heartless bastards with no hearts at all.

The equations went something like this:


and



Thankfully, we've moved past all that now. The old stereotypes, the baggage from the Vietnam War and the Reagan Revolution, are all behind us. We are truly living in a brave new world.

Here's what we see now, instead:

and


Seriously. We've done an about-face on political stereotyping. What mystifies Liberals these days is not so much How Can Anyone Be So Evil (Dick Cheney aside) as How Can Anyone Be So Stupid? The Right is full of blowhards and assholes, sure, but mostly they're just dumb and wrong. The usual lament on the Left is: if Only They Understood the Facts as Well as We Do, They Would Surely Come Around. Rush Limbaugh is a clown. Bill O'Reilly is an idiot. Sarah Palin can write almost all her letters, as long as the crayon is sharp.

Liberals, on the other hand, are seen by the opposition as Servants of Dark Powers. The question for them is not How Can We Convince Them They're Wrong, it's How Can We Stop Them Before They Eat Our Children? Hillary Clinton is a castrating bitch. Barack Obama is somehow simultaneously Hitler, Stalin, Bull Connor and Karl Marx, all rolled into one.

The Right exasperates and infuriates the Left, the Left offends and terrifies the Right. Both sides get to enjoy a similar feeling of superiority, but the Left's is intellectual whereas the Right's is moral.

It's an interesting dynamic, one we haven't seen since the days of FDR and Hoover, Johnson and Barry Goldwater. It has a lot to do with the way the Right cornered the market on folksy charm with Reagan and Bush II, and the way they absorbed the culture and values of the South and of Fundamentalist Christianity, which tend more towards favoring the hearts of the righteous than the minds of the learned. Similarly, the Left has staked out its turf in intellectualism (Gore, Obama) and pragmatism (Clinton, Obama), while hitching its wagon to the urban coasts, which have always tended to put head before heart if they had to make a choice. Add to that the newfound dearth of intellectuals and thinktankers on the Right (used to be you couldn't swing a cat without hitting one), and the strong liberal culture on most college campuses, and it starts to make a bit of sense.

But it's still interesting to me the way that a two-party political culture can shift. It's especially interesting when you consider how strongly we tend to identify with our political beliefs, and how patchwork and arbitrary those can often be (How can Republicans be against Gun Laws, but for the War on Drugs? How can Democrats be all about Human Rights abroad, until it comes time to put boots on the ground?) So much of political culture is received knowledge, and so much of it will be completely unrecognizable a generation from now.

Just a little something to think about the next time someone tries to tell you what the Founding Fathers would have thought of a particular piece of legislation.

-- The Prolix Wag
Silly thing to argue about. They would have thought what I think.