According to Hillary, with concurrence from Jonathan Chait, half of Trump supporters are “racists, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, islaamophobic, you name it.”
She also said this:
So no one should have any illusions about what’s really goin on here. The names may have changed. Racists now call themselves “racialists.” White supremacists now call themselves “white nationalists.” The paranoid fringe now calls itself “alt-right.” But the hate burns just as bright. – Hillary Clinton
Hillary and Chait are vile bigots of the worst kind; they exhibit pure unadulterated hatred of “others” who are perceived as lesser beings because they are thought to be psychologically unwell, morally reprehensible, and cognitively handicapped.
This is nothing new for the leftist mind. Hillary’s unabashed, even proud, condescending bigotry is merely the latest example of a consistent pattern of thinking on the left that has persisted for almost two hundred and fifty years.
And no, it is not just as bad on the right, not even close:
From the 18th century to today, many leading thinkers on the left have regarded those who disagree with them as being not merely factually wrong but morally repugnant. And again, this pattern is far less often found among those on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum.
The visceral hostility toward Sarah Palin by present day liberals, and the gutter level to which some descend in expressing it, is just one sign of a mindset on the left that goes back more than two centuries.
T.R. Malthus was the target of such hostility in the 18th and early 19th centuries. When replying to his critics, Malthus said, “I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candor.”
But William Godwin’s vision of Malthus was very different. He called Malthus “malignant,” questioned “the humanity of the man,” and said “I profess myself at a loss to conceive of what earth the man was made.”
This asymmetry in responses to people with different opinions has been too persistent, for too many years, to be just a matter of individual personality differences.
Although Charles Murray has been a major critic of the welfare state and of the assumptions behind it, he recalled that before writing his landmark book, “Losing Ground,” he had been “working for years with people who ran social programs at street level, and knew the overwhelming majority of them to be good people trying hard to help.”
Can you think of anyone on the left who has described Charles Murray as “a good person trying hard to help”? He has been repeatedly denounced as virtually the devil incarnate — far more often than anyone has tried seriously to refute his facts.
Such treatment is not reserved solely for Murray. Liberal writer Andrew Hacker spoke more sweepingly when he said, “conservatives don’t really care whether black Americans are happy or unhappy.”
Even in the midst of an election campaign against the British Labour Party, when Winston Churchill said that there would be dire consequences if his opponents won, he said that this was because “they do not see where their theories are leading them.”
But, in an earlier campaign, Churchill’s opponent said that he looked upon Churchill “as such a personal force for evil that I would take up the fight against him with a whole heart.”
Examples of this asymmetry between those on opposite sides of the ideological divide could be multiplied almost without limit. It is not solely a matter of individual personality differences.
The vision of the left is not just a vision of the world. For many, it is also a vision of themselves — a very flattering vision of people trying to save the planet, rescue the exploited, create “social justice” and otherwise be on the side of the angels. This is an exalting vision that few are ready to give up, or to risk on a roll of the dice, which is what submitting it to the test of factual evidence amounts to.
What explains this? How and why is leftist thinking perpetually so small minded and bigoted?
The one-foundation morality of “care” (sic).
Moral foundations are the color receptors of the moral eye. The more of them we employ the more accurately we perceive the social world around us. When half or more of them are for all intents and purposes inaccessible to one’s social vision, as is largely the case for the left, one is left with no alternative but to conclude that people unlike one’s self are sick, deluded, or brainwashed, for seeing moral colors that “everyone knows” just aren’t there. And when one “knows” in this way the “truth” of the moral inferiority of “others” it is only natural for one to feel not only rationally justified but morally obligated to do everything possible to reduce and/or prevent such “deplorables’” from influencing public policy, if not eliminating them from society altogether if at possible.
Even if we stipulate all the of the idiosyncrasies of human social cognition and behavior – e.g., the built-in cognitive biases, the irrational commitments to sacred values, the jettisoning of facts and logic in favor of defense of the tribe – this is not the thinking of a normal, healthy, adjusted, mature, adult brain.
Any and every time it the leftist mentality has had the reins of society in its hands it has created nothing but crimes against humanity on a massive scale. From the French Revolution to the planned societies of the Russian, Chinese, Italian, German, Cuban, North Korean, and Cambodian collectivists, all of which were convinced that the “new man” or the “good society” were merely a matter of implementing the correct social constructs, the final solution has always been squalor and death for millions.
The one-foundation mentality has, does, and will continue to cause more harm to humanity than any other problem it has.
Mann and Ornstein were right that It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, but they pointed the finger of blame in the exact wrong direction.
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