"Left and Right:
Twin Halves of the National Lobotomy"
by Fred Reed
"Consider two children, white, boys, growing up in contented middle-class families in the same suburb of Washington, DC, equally bright, popular, successful with girls, and so on. One becomes a growling conservative, the other a chirping liberal. (I think of them as woofers and tweeters.) Why the difference in outcome? A likely explanation, or so it seems to me, is that political orientation is innate or, as we would say today, a result of genetic predisposition.
Biological determination of behavioral traits is a matter of common observation. Differences of intelligence in individuals, races and breeds of animal are well known as are degrees of of aggressiveness, sociability, and protectiveness. Why political leaning should not be equally a matter of genetics, making us robots rather than the thinkers we believe ourselves to be, is not clear.
Note that liberal and conservative traits cluster together rather than assorting randomly, suggesting some underlying linkage. For example, we rarely see an ardent capitalist who favors racial integration, or a passionate liberal who will consider the possibility of racial differences in intelligence. There seem to be underlying patterns that determine the aggregate constellation of traits.
Today this luminous and inerrant column will propose the following insight, patent applied for. At their purest, conservatives are heartless and liberals, goofy. I hope this will unite Left and Right in a lynch mob thirsting for my blood. Comity at any price, I say. I will leave a false address. Anyway, some observations. It may not be fair to say that conservatives want to bomb the world into rubble and liberals, to breast feed it. So i won’t say it. But I may think it when no one is looking.
Liberals are more at ease with the new and different, whether racial, ethnic, or linguistic. Conservatives look back nostalgically to a former world of purity and honor, usually one that never existed. They tend to be intensely loyal to their group, racial or cultural, circling the wagons and looking out warily at a world suspected of being hostile. Liberals go dizzily dancing into the future, propelled by heartwarming ideas apparently conceived by a three year old girl with a new doll.
Also reinforcing the biological provenance of political behavior we believe to be the result of reason is that women are less aggressive than men, and that as men age and their androgens drop, they often become less combative. However, though women are less inclined than men to engage in bar fights, they are not without feral tendencies. One is reminded of Menken’s dictum, “A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as they hate each other.”
Women are more nurturing than men, perhaps accounting for an indefinable but noticeable feminine flavor of the Democrats compared to Republicans. Certainly a divide exists between underlying motives of Left and Right, with liberals being nicer people and conservatives, more practical. That is, conservatives are better at doing things that should not be done in the first place, whereas liberals are better at not doing things that should be done.
A conservatives worst nightmare, that wakes him in the early hours with night horrors and the sweating gollywobbles, is the thought of paying for anything for somebody else. This is heartless. By contrast, liberals want to pay for everything for everybody else with money that doesn’t exist. This is goofy.
To see this, note that China finds its brightest young with rigorous testing and then pays for their education on the grounds that it is good for the country. In America, liberals block testing so as to collect morons and conservatives refuse to pay for education as being too expensive. Actually this makes sense since the students have been chosen for being ineducable. This also is good for China.
Liberals think all races and ethnicities should live together in warmth and fuzziness, while conservatives say they would rather have a moist skin disease and anyway it just doesn’t happen.
Liberals want free medical care for everyone. Conservatives object that it would cost too much. This amounts to saying, “Let them die if they can’t pay,” which is heartless but, from the conservative point of view, practical. and anyway they prefer aircraft carriers.
Liberals favor immigrants, saying that these new people just want a better life, all four or so potential billion of them. Conservatives don’t care what kind of life they have, as long as they do it somewhere else.
Conservatives think that medical students should be tested for intelligence. Liberals want to admit retards of color because it makes them feel all inclusive and deserving. They seem unable to understand that a “doctor” who does not know which end of the body the head is attached to will kill people. This is goofy.
Conservatives believe that outcomes stem from deliberate choices. that is, the black crack whore with a 70 IQ and five birth-defective children decided to use crack and to sell sex to pay for it, and so deserves the life she has. The white upper-class woman decided to have a high IQ and to go to Yale and become married before gravid, and so also deserves the life she has. It’s just a question of choices.
Liberals believe that character, and thus behavior, are shaped by environment and thus are not the responsibility of the person exhibiting the behavior. No one is responsible for anything. The only exceptions are whites, who are malign and hate God, or would if he existed. That is, liberals believe that intelligence, which doesn’t exist, is equally distributed across the nonexistent races but that free will is greater among some races, that don’t exist, than others. This is giving me a headache.
Again, at their purest, conservatives are heartless and liberals, goofy. For example, racial conservatives cannot bring themselves to say that African chattel slavery was wrong, despite its gruesome record, which is heartless. However, it was not irrational. Slavery was a recognized way of making money. By contrast, the liberal drive to eliminate literacy tests for college and elite schools, to favor minorities, is goofy. It makes no sense, and would result in…well, today’s America.
Conservatives tend to regard the homeless as human detritus, suffering the consequences of their own moral failures and fecklessness. They deserve no sympathy and should be subject to unspecified measures to get them out of sight. This is heartless. Liberals want to put the homeless in hotels at public expense or build housing for them, which is kindhearted but tends to produce more homeless. i myself might well become homeless, at least for a really good hotel.
Liberals want to pay blacks reparations for slavery. This, requiring people who didn’t do it to pay people to whom it wasn’t done, is goofy. Conservatives want nothing to do with blacks, at all, ever, and don’t care what happens to them. While perhaps not precisely heartless, it leans that way.
The liberal belief that you can be guilty of things you didn’t do is exquisitely goofy. However it gets confusing. For example, I didn’t kill Abraham Lincoln and am therefore guilty of it, and therefore owe reparations to, well, somebody. Perhaps eight billion other people also didn’t kill him, making this an inverse mass murder of frightening proportions.
Liberals always want to do nice things for blacks without actually coming into contact with them and apparently not noticing that the money is accomplishing nothing. This is goofy but characteristic.
In fairness, it should be noted that liberals and conservatives can work together toward a common goal. For example, in a shared rush to wreck the United States, liberals engage in domestic destruction by lunatic social policy, while conservatives keep the country in disastrous and crippling wars. Similarly,democrats fight to keep the borders open while Republicans work to maximize hostility between races. It is a serviceable modus vivendi. See? There is hope.
Goofiness, sometimes called the “squirrel factor,” appears in a great deal of liberal thinking, if that is quite the word. For example, as mentioned above, conservatives want to find the brightest children with tests and put them into schools at their levels while crushing them with student loans. Liberals literally - I am not being cute - want to ban testing and select students by race to be all heartwarming. This is goofiness at its finest. It also plays to the resentment of underperformers against the more able, who don’t exist. Here again we see the superior niceness of liberals. They don’t want any group to feel left out or unequal. Thus they try to eliminate differences by fiat. It doesn’t work, but what counts is the spirit of the thing.
It invites parody: There are no septuagenarians with thick glasses and lousy jump shots in the NBA. disparate impact. I want reparations. A full–up Corvette, with tangerine metal-flake lacquer, would be acceptable. On the other hand, the IGMFY philosophy (“I got mine, screw you”) outlook common among conservatives and codified as capitalism, has its own downstream effects. These can involve bloodthirsty mobs, guillotines, burning at the stake, and suchlike. We aren’t quite there. Yet. There is a bottle of Wild Turkey in the kitchen. I am going to consort with it."
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