Posted on November 13th 1987
Conservatives and Liberals: Stupidity Redefined
By Alex Linder
[ The following is from a forum thread posting. ]
[opinion published in Pomona College's The Student Life, Friday, November 13, 1987]
Conservatives and Liberals: Stupidity Redefined
By Alex Linder
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
Stupidity comes in different forms. While the above statement dose contain an element of truth, it is incomplete; the liberals possess their own pernicious brand of stupidity. But let's start with the conservative side.
It may not be true that all stupid people are conservative, but certainly most are. Stupid conservatives are stupid because they don't know very much. They lack education and they fear the unknown. Stupid people aren't even so much conservative as they are reactionary. They hold on to their old methods of doing things in the face of obviously newer, better methods. An example might be an elderly couple who experienced severe problems during the Great Depression. After narrowly getting by in the thirties, they have pinched pennies without stopping the rest of their lives. Out of fear that another depression will come along, they have made money an end rather than a means.
The problem arising from such conservatism (when transferred from a personal to a national level) is that it leads to chauvinism and nationalism. Such closed-minded reactionaries are unable to see things from any perspective other than their own. They place inordinate faith in their own culture, assuming that no one can be better than they are. This stupidity transcends racial and cultural lines -- consider the Aryan supremacism of the Nazis and the Middle Kingdom beliefs of the Chinese. In America, however, xenophobia is a relatively small threat simply because America is racially and ethnically diverse. Americans are motivated by love of freedom rather than appeals to ethnicity.
Liberal stupidity is much closer to home for us at Pomona. We Pomonans are much better educated than the average man in the street. We know all the facts about dozens of issues even when the issues don't directly concern us. The stupidity of liberals, thus, isn't lack of knowledge, rather it lies in the inability of most liberals to interpret facts correctly.
To a disturbingly large degree, academia (a liberal asylum) is engaged in a perpetual war against common sense; it's a heady celebration of the esoteric at the expense of the obvious. Intellectuals like Dean Warren extol the subversive nature of education. And truly we can say that the thrust of academics is to take what is common and accepted and come up with intricate theories why what seems obvious is wrong. For proof, consider communism and the threat it does or doesn't pose.
To the man in the street, anti-communism is second nature. When he looks at a map and sees how communism has spread outward around the globe under the direction of the Soviet Union, he sees that the communists are very powerful. Now, our man doesn't know much about Marx (bunch of obscure theory about the proletariat), but he knows what life is like under Marxists (no freedom, millions killed, walls around countries) and he doesn't like it. He also knows that the communists want to take over the world. Didn't Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev all say that? Our man simply accepts their words and deeds at face value. Only an intelligent liberal is clever enough to figure out why the men who say they're our enemies really aren't.
A real-life example is instructive. Laughing ironically, a certain unnamed professor points out that when Khrushchev banged his shoe and said "We will bury you" at the U.N. in the early sixties, what he actually said was that the U.S.S.R. would outstrip the U.S. economically and technologically. Typically academic - correct on the details but missing the point. It is immaterial whether or not Khrushchev at that particular time affirmed the Soviet desire to "bury us"; the action and words of the Soviet leadership over the last seventy years have made it abundantly clear that they do so intend.
A final example of liberal stupidity is the current jubilation over glasnost. Liberals wax orgasmic over cosmetic Soviet liberalization. What has Gorbachev actually done? He's released a few political prisoners and allowed the publishing of a few dead authors. Reasonable people maintain skepticism towards everything and particularly Soviets. But Kremlinologists, those responsible for spreading rumors about an opening of Soviet society, are notorious for building castles in the air. After all, with the little they have to work with and their penchant for analyzing "latent content" in Soviet speeches and documents, any opening at all is given a stronger significance than it deserves. That is, the best way to understand the Soviets is to look at what they've done in the past, not to idly speculate about the characteristics of "closet liberalism" that people like Andropov and Gorbachev are supposed to possess, no matter how traditional their words to other Soviets (as opposed to the pacifistic side they often display to the West).
What has our little enquiry taught us about stupidity? Basically, we have to recognize that there is more to stupidity than not knowing the facts. In fact, with special regard to foreign policy, the type of stupidity I've characterized as liberal -- the inability to interpret facts -- poses a far greater danger to our society. The best people to lead our nation are intelligent conservatives; they know the facts as well as the liberal intellectuals and they don't forsake the obvious out of "enlightened" superciliousness. Remember: Any idiot can see that commies are coming. Any intellectual can't.//