“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
Pauline Kael, Film Critic for The New Yorker, December 28, 1972
When it comes to our politics the divisions in our country are often deplored. What really should be deplored is that one side of our politics, leftists, tend to lack the imagination to conceive how anyone could possibly in good will disagree with them.
Case in point Gail Collins’ op ed in the New York Times entitled “How Could Anyone Vote for Trump?”.
Why isn’t she leading 3 to 1? This is not a normal race between a Democrat and a Republican. One of the candidates has made it clear that he has no attention span or self-control. World security experts in both parties are terrified by the idea of a Trump presidency. He’s screwed small contractors in his business dealings and bought dumb presents for himself with money from his charitable foundation — a charitable foundation, by the way, that appears to have been managed by a team of gerbils. Also, he keeps changing his positions on critical issues and has paid settlements to people alleging he discriminated against them on the basis of race or not being attractive enough.
Go here to read the rest. Why? This really isn’t a hard question:
- Clinton is a transparent crook who throughout her adult life has monetized her political power to enhance her personal wealth.
- Clinton in her use of a personal e-mail server demonstrated that she has no concept of security and was willing to jeopardize this nation in order to hide her shady activities from public view.
- She is a leftist and will implement policies anathema to a large segment of the population.
- Her proposed economic policies will be more of the same, continuing the economic stagnation of the past eight years.
- She has demonstrated complete contempt for law and has used her political power to avoid prosecution in situations where lesser mortals would have found themselves facing felony charges.
- Her lying to the families of the Benghazi dead, literally over the bodies of their loved ones.
- Her decades long role in protecting her predator husband whose crimes include rape.
- Her backing of the Iran deal which ensures that Iran will soon have nuclear weapons.
- Her constant lying about matters great and small.
- She is obviously suffering from serious illness and she will not be honest with the American people about it.
See, that really was easy. That Ms. Collins and the readership of the New York Times, and the comments as usual are a hoot, are unable to recognize the motivations of around half their countrymen paints them as small minded and provincial, the usual qualities they project upon their adversaries. Not being able to put yourself in the shoes of those you disagree with is not only a failure of imagination, it is also dangerous in a democracy. When you cannot understand what truly motivates those who oppose you, it easy to imagine them as stick figures in a morality play and seek to punish them for having the temerity to disagree with you.
Thanks Donald. The Kael quote if funny. This is what you call bubbled-in. The truth is, most liberal are not interested in the truth. They don’t want to hear about the results of their programs. They think anyone who doesn’t agree with them is benighted or stupid.
Anyway to list of your reason I would add.
11. Hillary obviously doesn’t care about our Constitution. By her speeches she rejects Freedom of Religion, Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms, etc. If she is elected she will appoint left-wing judges who change the Constitution to suit her. What she will have done is destroy the country and begin setting us up for a totalitarian socialist dictatorship.
Hopefully enough voters will get the picture. And it would be rather nice if the Bishops could lend a hand and they will be some of Hillary’s first victims.
Liberalism is a mental disease or defect. These people cannot be reasoned with. There is something fundamentally wrong with their minds.
Any person who cannot read or understand our Founding Principles disenfranchises himself of citizenship, that office that is endowed by the state at birth to any innocent individual lucky enough to be born in America. Clinton has long ago disenfranchised herself from citizenship in America with her disenfranchisement of the newly begotten sovereign person in the womb and her efforts to use international law as the measure of government. Should America be brought to its knees by a godless international body such as the UN with the blessings of Clinton, instead of” the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our constitutional Posterity” America will cease to be a nation of free people. Clinton has contempt for religious freedom in particular and freedom of the people in general. God stands in the way of Clinton’s lust for power.
The absence of the quality of humanness is a sign of devil possession. “The quality of mercy is not strained but dropeth as the gentle dew from heaven…”
Mac, That is a useful list of Hillary’s “issues”/disqualifiers. However, an insufficient number of potential voters knows any of it because the “See no evil (about Hillary). Hear no evil (regarding Hillary). Speak no evil (concerning Hillary).” mass media censors the truth. Sadly, Trump and his team don’t 24/7 expose the loss leaders, either.
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LDQ: Correct. Liberalism is a symptom of serious emotional or psychological pathology. I have proof. the warden’s sister , husband and three adult children are all liberals and all but one are under psychiatric medicines and therapy. They’re all voting Crooked Hillary.
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Hillary is as pure evil as any evil one on the planet. Only thing holding her back is that she hasn’t run up a huge, personal body count as did Mao and Stalin.
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Anybody that would vote for Crooked Hillary is morally bankrupt and too hyperbolically stupid to understand that her destructive policies are even worse for America than is her corrupt soul. She and her worshipping imbeciles truly are irredeemably despicable. .
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The only “good” liberal I ever knew was dead. Make the World a better place [fill-in-the-blank] a liberal in the face.
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I am of the opinion that you won’t be going to Heaven if you vote for Crooked Hillary.
“Liberalism is a mental disease or defect. These people cannot be reasoned with. There is something fundamentally wrong with their minds.”
Leftism (what most folks call Liberalism, now) is first a spiritual disease. Anyone who agrees with unlimited killing of innocent children in their mothers’ wombs is spiritually dead or diseased.
#12 Her claim that she is a Christian in good standing in the Methodist Church.
Is she listening to the guidance of God when she prays…if she prays?
Is her prayer telling God what she wants to have happen?
Is she listening to the the promptings of the evil spirit?
By their fruits dear people…by their fruits!
Rotten fruits.
T Shaw, I know two liberals, and yeah, they both have mental issues. Both of their careers are in fields that require high levels of organization. One actually is hyper organized. Way OCD, very critical of other people who don’t do things the “right” way (I refers to things that do not matter here). They both seem to have “little person” syndrome–or whatever it is you call it when you feel inadequate as compared to others, and are trying to compensate for that. They both come from very comfortable middle class backgrounds, and majored in English during college. They both have advanced degrees. One is a women, one a man. The man strikes me as being something of a misogynist, while the woman is a feminist, which I think may be a form of misogyny itself. And I am not surprised they are voting for Hillary.
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After some thought, it seems very natural that they should support a “command and control” party like the (near communist) Democrats. I don’t think they can handle the concept of a free market and little regulatory control.
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus wrote, “Liberalism is a mental disease or defect. These people cannot be reasoned with. There is something fundamentally wrong with their minds.”
No, it is simply an example of false consciousness.
Different groups will have different practical aims, some in the preservation of existing social relations, some in their overthrow so as to allow the development of new social relations based upon new forces of production. The result is that different sections of society have different experiences of social reality. Each will tend to develop its own overall view of society, which will be markedly different to that developed by the others.
Such views are not only accounts of what society is like. They also serve to bind people together for the practical task of preserving or transforming society, for each prioritises some sorts of practical social activity to the detriment of others.
A social group identified with the continuation of the old relations of production and the old institutions of the superstructure necessarily only has a partial view (or a series of partial views) of society as a whole. Its practice is concerned with the perpetuation of what already exists, with ‘sanctifying’ the accomplished fact. Anything else can only be conceived as a disruption or destruction of a valuable, harmonious arrangement. Therefore even at times of immense social crisis, its picture of society is one of a natural, eternally recurring harmony somehow under attack from incomprehensible, irrational forces.
On the madness of liberalism. Looks like everyone agrees on this matter, even, MPS who employs the term “false conscientiousness” as an alternate description. Other allusions to this insanity are George Santayana: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” And Albert Einstein: ” Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Liberals either reject the past or misinterpret according to what they would like to see versus what is in reality.
If my observation is representative, people in the word-merchant sector do not socialize much with people who have contrary employments and sensibilities, and tend to define such people as they do know out of the realm of anyone you’d listen to or take seriously. They also tend to value surfaces and credentials more than actual experience or performance. Look at Charles Fried’s assessment of Sarah Palin in 2008 or Scott Sumner’s assessments of Trump this year. The former had to ignore completely the unpreparedness of the Democratic presidential candidate and the latter the actual history of criminal conduct of the Democratic candidate. They do that, because no one they listen to thinks any differently.
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Sumner, unlike other faculty bloggers, actually deigns to reply to people. However, you can tell very readily when he’s addressing someone he thinks is a professional economist and someone who is a member of the general public. His replies to the latter always consist of gamesmanship and nothing else. He never actually converses with them or entertains anything they say. That tells you something about the faculty (and professional people generally, at least in coastal cities).