There’s got to be some mistake

**Posted by Phineas

I mean, our far wiser, morally superior liberal brethren can’t be more intolerant of those who disagree than moderates and those evil conservatives, could they?

As Richard Dawson used to say, “survey says!

Study: Liberals More Likely To Block Online Friends Over Political Disagreements

People with liberal views are almost twice as likely as conservatives to unfriend someone on social media over political disagreements, according to a new Pew Research survey.

In every category, people who identified as liberal were more likely to shun their connections over political disagreements. Twenty-eight percent of liberal users have unfriended or blocked someone, while 16 percent of conservatives and 14 percent of moderates admitted to doing the same.

I’m really not surprised, though. As I wrote a friend this morning:

It’s [because of] their outraged self-perception of their own superior virtue: they can’t handle it when it’s pointed out to them that the facts don’t justify their faith in progressivism. Also, because they believe they’re on the side of the angels [i.e., “progress”], anyone who disagrees must be evil, or at least a fool espousing evil.

And not just online. I have a number of liberal friends and acquaintances who are sent (and I only exaggerate a bit) into sputtering paroxysms of indignation at the merest suggestion that, for example, the welfare state has harmed African-Americans more than it helped, that private accounts would be a good reform for Social Security, or that the New Deal was an overall failure. They don’t just disagree and offer counter-arguments (or wave away yours with a simple “nonsense”); they act like you’ve just sprouted horns and a pointed tail.

Not that this doesn’t happen on the Right, to be fair. I’ve several times online run into “True Conservatives” who meet any disagreement with all-caps shouts of “RINO!” and worse. There seems to be a certain subset of people who get their sense of self-worth from their politics and who don’t know how to handle an argument when challenged. Call it a question of maturity.

But, as the Pew study suggests, the intolerance is far more common on the Left than on the Right or in the Center. Along with a lack of maturity in some, I suspect, it has much to do with a problem at the core of the Progressive vision, itself: democracy requires disagreement, but Progressives are ambivalent toward democracy, hence they can’t really respect disagreement.

And so, in the end, their arguments come down to “shut up, he explained.”

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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