Why are Liberals less tolerant than Conservatives?

[Winston]

The media seems to present Liberals as more progressive, open minded, tolerant and caring than Conservatives. And they portray Conservatives as backward, narrow, rigid and old fashioned.

I used to think that too, back in the 1990's during the Clinton Era. But I've come to realize that that may not be true after all and that it's most likely just media brainwashing again and their tendency to portray the opposite of what's true. Consider the following:

- Conservatives that I've known seem more tolerant and down to earth. If I don't agree with them, they will still be my friend. But with liberals, if I don't agree with them, they get angry and uptight and cease our friendship.
- Liberals are behind political correctness, which restricts free speech and often impedes the truth too, so that you can't be too honest around PC people. To me, that's an attempt to take away my freedom and free speech.
- Liberals are behind multi-culturalism, which has proven to be a disaster. Races tend to stick in cliques and there is hostile tension between them, like in LA for example. It's brought down society and made it very segregated. On the other hand, in the 1950's, when America was predominantly all white, the country was the most successful and prosperous and efficient. There was no breakdown of society and culture, or segregation.
- Liberals are also behind feminism, which instills a man-hating attitude in women which makes them very unfeminine and unattractive to men. No normal guy likes masculine women.

Neither extreme on either side is good. And as a Libertarian, I'm not for either Liberals or Conservatives. But that's my take on it.

Winston

[MrPeabody]

Ted Kaczynski has a good description of the psychology of the modern left in his thesis "Industrial Society and It's Future".

"12. (fr) Those who are most sensitive about “politically
incorrectâ€￾ terminology are not the average black ghettodweller,
Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person,
but a minority of activists, many of whom do not
even belong to any “oppressedâ€￾ group but come from
privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its
stronghold among university professors, who have secure
employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority
of whom are heterosexual white males from middle- to
upper-middle-class families."

http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf

[Winston]

That's very true. I read that treatise a long time ago. It was very intellectual and impressive. It's hard to believe that that guy was sending out bombs through the mail. He seemed too smart for that. I wonder if there's any conspiracy behind that. When he got arrested, he looked like he didn't even care.

[MrPeabody]

It's one of the most insightful essays I have read. He was a child prodigy and a mathematical genius. He could have been a math professor at the University of Berkeley which is the most prestigious math department in the world along with Princeton.

His writings have been compiled in the book "Technological Slavery". His thesis is that freedom and technology are not compatible and we need to return to a more simple form of life.

[Jason of Dystopia]

For the life of me, I don't understand why anyone would use the ramblings of a terrorist to explain our political culture. Sorry, this is just beyond the pale to me. (Yeah, we're all freethinking here, but...f**k!)

If you want a good discussion of the Right v. Left dynamic from one of the greatest public intellectuals of our time, and who has written extensively and clearly on the subject for a long time, I suggest you first reference Dr. Thomas Sowell.

http://www.tsowell.com/

Here's just a little of what he has to say, all in one, everyday, humdrum column:

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.

If no one has even one percent of the knowledge currently available, not counting the vast amounts of knowledge yet to be discovered, the imposition from the top of the notions favored by elites convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue is a formula for disaster.

Yet what the political left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others.

They may not impose their presumptions wholesale, like the totalitarians, but retail in innumerable restrictions, ranging from economic and nanny state regulations to "hate speech" laws.

If no one has even one percent of all the knowledge in a society, then it is crucial that the other 99 percent of knowledge — scattered in tiny and individually unimpressive amounts among the population at large — be allowed the freedom to be used in working out mutual accommodations among the people themselves.

These innumerable mutual interactions are what bring the other 99 percent of knowledge into play — and generate new knowledge.

There. He just gave you the strongest case for liberty you ever heard, but will not be taught in the schools. No bombs required.

Read the rest here.

[MrPeabody]

I like reading sources like Kaczynski because he was an independent thinker and wasn't a bureaucrat or a pencil pusher. I really haven't seen anything that profound coming out of an institute. Institutes serve their elite sponsors and the employees automatically adopt the correct mindset so that they can pay their mortgage and raise their children. We have seen the disadvantage of the liberals, but the conservatives tend to be stilted and comformist to a society that doesn't work.

Kaczynski on conservatives:

"50. (fr) The conservatives are fools: They whine about
the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically
support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently
it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid,
drastic changes in the technology and the economy
of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects
of the society as well, and that such rapid changes
inevitably break down traditional values."

[gsjackson]

Sowell's theoretical musings -- and similar hot air from Milton Friedman and the rest of the "free market" theorists -- are ahistorical and completely unhinged from actual politics on the ground in the US. In current-day America they serve only one function -- as cover for the predations of the financial sector and the rest of the corporate oligarchy.

No, I think you're more likely to get something approximating truth from a misfit outsider such as Kascynski than you are from these comfy old house apologists for wealth and power. And I speak as someone who once was the latter, as an employee of the Heritage Foundation and a Republican congressman, and editorial writer for a couple of conservative newspapers.

[Jason of Dystopia]

I know, I know the "false Left/Right paradigm." So, you are convinced of this and cannot imagine anything of value from the incredible amount of material written by both the left and right think tanks.

I read Kaczynski's manifesto in 1993, when you could only get it in libraries because the newspapers wouldn't publish it.

Sorry, I was not impressed then and found what he said a rehash a certain libertarian/environmental themes that were better said elswhere and well before Ted escaped the Harvard MKULTRA lab and set up shop in Montana. (Szasz, Albee, Lasch, Rothbard)

Oh, and it appears that he has inspired greatness.

Parts of the manifesto written by the suspect in Norway's terrorist attack were taken almost word for word from the writings of "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.

The passages copied by Anders Behring Breivik appear in the first few pages of Kaczynski's manifesto. Breivik changed a Kaczynski screed on leftism and what he considered to be leftists' "feelings of inferiority" -- mainly by substituting the words "multiculturalism" or "cultural Marxism" for "leftism."

In the same article:

Former FBI Agent Terry Turchie, who supervised the federal task force to capture the Unabomber, said Sunday that he saw similarities between the two men.

"They seem to have this anger, the loner aspect, this desire to look back at the way things were and think of themselves as self-reliant," said Turchie, who wrote "Hunting the American Terrorist: The FBI's War on Homegrown Terror" in 2007.

"The real problem is these loners are much more difficult to find and prevent from killing people than other kinds of terrorists," he said.


So, if we are going to scoff at guys like Sowell and embrace the Unabomber, when the inevitable cause of this effect comes to my front door (because I am apparently shill for the predatory class) I hope you don't mind if I ...er...defend myself.

[Think Different]

I recommend you read a book about this, called "Liberal Fascism", by Jonah Goldberg (a conservative).

[gsjackson]

I know, I know the "false Left/Right paradigm." So, you are convinced of this and cannot imagine anything of value from the incredible amount of material written by both the left and right think tanks.

I read Kaczynski's manifesto in 1993, when you could only get it in libraries because the newspapers wouldn't publish it.

Sorry, I was not impressed then and found what he said a rehash a certain libertarian/environmental themes that were better said elswhere and well before Ted escaped the Harvard MKULTRA lab and set up shop in Montana. (Szasz, Albee, Lasch, Rothbard)

Oh, and it appears that he has inspired greatness.

Parts of the manifesto written by the suspect in Norway's terrorist attack were taken almost word for word from the writings of "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.

The passages copied by Anders Behring Breivik appear in the first few pages of Kaczynski's manifesto. Breivik changed a Kaczynski screed on leftism and what he considered to be leftists' "feelings of inferiority" -- mainly by substituting the words "multiculturalism" or "cultural Marxism" for "leftism."

As the only one here to scoff at Sowell, I don't embrace or defend the Unabomber. He's no writer, and I abandoned his manifesto after a couple of paragraphs. As you say, many have made the same points earlier and much better. For anyone who enjoys screeds against technology, I recommend Neil Postman.

My criticism of the passages from Sowell you quoted is that, at best, he is offering mere truisms. To the extent he is engaged with actual on-the-ground debates about policy, he is slaying the dragons of 1948. I think most people concede that Hayek, whom Sowell is drawing on here, was correct in his point that centrally planned economies cannot get enough information to set adequate pricing and availability, and are inferior to market economies in that respect. But "pundits" like Sowell create airy, ahistorical generalizations out of libertarian thought that are pleasing to many ears, and once they've found their readership make a decades-long career out of recycling the pieties, never again to be relevant in real policy discussions (and by that I don't mean the crap that takes place in the mainstream media).

In the same article:

Former FBI Agent Terry Turchie, who supervised the federal task force to capture the Unabomber, said Sunday that he saw similarities between the two men.

"They seem to have this anger, the loner aspect, this desire to look back at the way things were and think of themselves as self-reliant," said Turchie, who wrote "Hunting the American Terrorist: The FBI's War on Homegrown Terror" in 2007.

"The real problem is these loners are much more difficult to find and prevent from killing people than other kinds of terrorists," he said.


So, if we are going to scoff at guys like Sowell and embrace the Unabomber, when the inevitable cause of this effect comes to my front door (because I am apparently shill for the predatory class) I hope you don't mind if I ...er...defend myself.

[gsjackson]

My above post inadvertently found its way to the middle of the quoted text, right above: "In the same article:"

[MrPeabody]

You don't really know the full story. Apparently, Kaczynski went to Montana and bought a cabin in remote country and was hoping to permanently live in peace. He soon found himself being harassed by development interests. He felt that he was defending himself once he realized that there was no corner of the earth where he could escape out-of-control civilization. Even a dog will fight when cornered. In any case, to dismiss his works because he did something naughty is typical conformist thinking. His works should be evaluated for the merit of his arguments. And his arguments are well reasoned and worthy of consideration. The conservative think tanks are devoted to economic growth, profits, and other considerations of their masters. If there is a decision to be made between a small successful community or destroying that community to create progress, the conservatives will justify the destroying of the community and use platitudes to convince themselves that progress is ultimately better for everyone. Sorry, but I am not buying it. They are not real conservatives. I do respect the Amish, Mennonites, and other groups who have chosen the way of peace. They put their community as the premiere value. I think they are real conservatives and have more to offer than the pencil pushers.

[Jason of Dystopia]

[gsjackson]

[onezero4u]

absolutely....
as long as you agree with them!!!! otherwise they are intolerant as conservatives or worse