It’s been my theory for a long time that liberals in Minnesota are incapable of carrying on an informed civil debate because in places like the Twin Cities – and in some careers, all of Minnesota – liberals can, or at least could until recently, go an entire lifetime without encountering a conservative thought.
From the left-safe, feminized public school system, through the eliminationist “progressive” ghetto of the university system, a young person can spend the first 20-odd years of their life without ever encountering a conservative opinion on a level deeper than a progressive’s cliche. If they go into a career dominated by the left – teaching, academia, journalism, civil service work – and/or live in a place dominated by the left, like New York, Minneapolis or Madison, they can carry that ignorance well into middle age.
David French at The Corner has a similar, complementary observation; his thesis, that liberals in major liberal centers are much more prone to speaking and acting out of incivility and hatred, comes from the lack of diversity in these liberal centers:
The heartland of American leftism is less intellectually diverse than any large conservative community in the United States. The entire cities of New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. are less politically diverse than your average Evangelical megachurch.
Don’t believe me? In 2008, McCain/Palin won 73 percent of the Evangelical/born-again vote. By contrast, San Francisco gave Obama/Biden 84 percent of its votes. All the boroughs of New York City (except Staten Island) went for Obama by wider margins than 73 percent, with Manhattan giving Obama 85 percent of its votes. There were similar numbers for Philadelphia and Washington D.C. In other words, these major American cultural centers are less diverse than churches entirely filled with self-selecting populations of Bible-believing Christians. Leftists have greater group solidarity than Christians.
French quotes that noted liberal tool Cass Sunstein, in a Harvard Law Review article called “The Law of Group Polarization”:
In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon — group polarization – has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, “radicalization,” cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism.
Which explains everything from Pauline Kael to Mike Malloy.
This next graf deserves to be a quote of the day somewhere:
It is a truism of American life that unless a conservative turns off all technology, grabs a gun and a dog, and heads for the hills, he will be exposed to an avalanche of liberal thought and ideas — in education, television, movies, and the Internet. Liberals, by contrast, can and often do live lives isolated from conservative thought, and their ignorance of our ideas is starting to show.
I was very left-of-center when I was a kid; chalk it up to my family. But it was in a place where, once I got out of the house, conservatism was everywhere. I never had the luxury of thinking that my point of view was the only point of view – indeed, I converted to conservatism in college, largely due to the efforts of an English professor, of all things.
I was apparently lucky:
I was first exposed to liberal ignorance of conservatism way back in 1991. I was a new law student and had just walked out of a class with my ears still ringing from the boos, hisses, and jeers at my conservative arguments. A classmate came up to me and said, “I wish they’d let you speak. I’d never heard anything like what you were saying and wanted to hear more.”
I was shocked. I was merely making a standard conservative argument — breaking no new ideological ground. “You’ve never heard an argument like that? Where did you go to college?”
“Princeton.”
Some liberal once told me: “Ignorance breeds hate.” I couldn’t agree more.
And if you’re a conservative in a place like, well, Wisconsin, you don’t need this explained.
