As President Obama’s agenda crashes against a Gibraltar of unpopularity many liberal elites are trying to figure out what went wrong. Predictably, they’re looking in all the wrong places for the answer. The two most popular scapegoats are stupid Americans and evil conservatives. According to liberals there is no problem with the agenda since their intentions are as pure as the driven snow.
Krugman doesn't have time to understand alternative opinions.
Conservatives aren’t evil. No political philosophy is perfect; however, simply dismissing everything someone thinks just because one feels intellectually superior is dangerous. Gerard Alexander had a great article last week titled Why Are Liberals So Condescending? Alexander does a superb job of explaining the depths of this phenomenon.
This worldview was on display in the popular liberal reaction to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Rather than engage in a discussion about the complexities of free speech in politics, liberals have largely argued that the decision will “open the floodgates for special interests” to influence American elections, as the president warned in his State of the Union address. In other words, it was all part of the conspiracy to support conservative candidates for their nefarious, self-serving ends.
It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: “What do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid–life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?”
Paul Krugman is a perfect example of this kind of thinking. The man is so partisan he can’t even see his own hypocrisy. It’s seems a bit naïve to point this out but not every liberal shares this worldview; however, this condescending attitude among elite circles is a lot more prevalent on the left than it is on the right.
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