Red meat post of the day: Emotional liberals versus logical conservatives

I wonder how much hate email John Hawkins will receive after writing this piece:

It takes a lot more integrity, character, and courage to be a conservative than it does to be a liberal. That’s because at its most basic level, liberalism is nothing more than childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues.

Going to war is mean, so we shouldn’t do it. That person is poor and it would be nice to give him money, so the government should do it. Somebody wants to have an abortion, have a gay marriage, or wants to come into the U.S. illegally and it would be mean to say, “no,” so we should let them. I am nice because I care about global warming! Those people want to kill us? But, don’t they know we’re nice? If they did, they would like us! Bill has more toys, money than Harry, so take half of Bill’s money and give it to Harry.

The only exception to this rule is for people who aren’t liberals. They’re racists, bigots, homophobes, Nazis, fascists, etc., etc., etc. They might as well just say that conservatives have “cooties” for disagreeing with them, because there really isn’t any more thought or reasoning that goes into it than that.

Now, that’s not to say that conservatives never make emotion based arguments or that emotion based arguments are always wrong. But, when you try to deal with complex, real world issues, using little more than simplistic emotionalism that’s primarily designed to make the people advocating it feel good rather than to deal with problems, it can, and often has had disastrous consequences. Liberals never seem to learn from this.

Why don’t they learn anything from failed liberal policies? Because there is nothing underpinning them other than feelings and so even when they don’t work, their good intentions are treated, by other liberals at least, as more important than the results of their actions.

Heh. Make sure to read it all.

I’m always amazed at how the left loves to take credit for ‘how great America is.’ You argue with one about how bad liberal ideas are for this country, and they’ll turn right back around and tell you how it was supposedly ‘liberal ideas’ that made this country so great.

Strangely, though, when you play along with their game, and in turn note that some of those same policies – like the “Great Society” programs of the 60s that were supposed to help the poor, decrease illegitimacy rates and disease when in actuality they increased poverty and illegitimacy rates (John noted the stats in his article), and had a disastrous impact on the family – and then ask them to acknowledge that some of their policies have been failures, they won’t accept responsibility for the part they played in it and try to blame conservatives.

Simple translation: all the good things in this country that happened were the result of liberal policies ‘for the people.’ Anything bad that happens is the result of ‘conservative interference.’ Liberals would rather ‘feel good’ about what they do and drone on and on about how they did it out of the goodness of their hearts rather than acknowledge that their ideas were wrong. That’s not a great recipe for learning from your mistakes, but then again, when you can’t acknowledge you’ve made a mistake, it’s not hard to understand why you wouldn’t ‘learn’ from it.