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Those Mean-spirited Liberals

by Christopher Chantrill
June 30, 2008

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EVERY NOW and again our learned scholars in the liberal university come up with a study, financed by taxpayers’ money, that concludes what every liberal already knows. Conservatives are rigid and not very intelligent. In fact, as one study by two Berkeley professors claimed, the the “whiny, insecure kid in nursery school” probably grew up to be a conservative.

Of course two can play at that game, and so conservative Peter Schweizer took a look at the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey and a few other generally available opinion surveys and came to the opposite conclusion in his book Makers and Takers. He found that conservatives are the good guys and liberals are the whiners.

Maybe he got different results because the General Social Survey covers the whole United States while the Berkeley professors only studied a single school in Berkeley, California.

Either way, Schweizer’s findings make sense.

Liberals are more materialistic than conservatives, he finds. Of course they do. Believing in equality, differences in material things are very important to them. Not surprisingly, when they discover material differences in society, liberals are offended. There is a word for this feeling of offence: Envy. And so it is that liberals are more envious than conservatives.

Liberals celebrate anger. No, we are not just talking about Bush Derangement Syndrome. “Since the sixties, modern liberals have embraced anger as a sign of genuine commitment to the cause,” writes Schweizer and their political rage leaks into their personal lives. The General Social Survey shows that liberals are more angry than conservatives and “three times more likely (17 percent to 6 percent) to have actually done something to get back at someone who had hurt or offended them in the past month.”

Liberals are stingy with their money. Again, this is hardly surprising. Liberal political philosophy says: People Have Needs, and the government should provide. Thus liberals, when they actually spend money on anyone other than themselves, give money to the activist organizations that advocate for bigger government. Conservatives, on the other hand, give money to organizations that actually help people. Schweizer shows us that the headline liberals of recent memory—the Clintons, Gores, Kerrys, and Obamas—don’t give much. But headline conservatives like Bush, Cheney, and Limbaugh do give, and give generously.

But then they would. Conservatives believe that people should help people, and governments should stick to the stuff that governments do best, defending society against enemies, foreign and domestic.

Liberals are less honest than conservatives. Peter Schweizer compares liberals and conservatives using the World Values Survey and the National Cultural Values Survey. Liberals admit that they don’t value honesty as much as conservatives. They are more willing to sell “Aunt Betty a car with a bum transmission” than conservatives, and “twice as likely as conservatives to say it is okay to get welfare benefits they were not entitled to.” Schweizer’s poster boy for welfare cheat is billionaire George Soros, who once “tried to get a Jewish charity to give him money while also receiving public assistance.”

Did you know that liberals are not just angrier but whinier than conservatives? Peter Schweizer samples liberal Whine Country using the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, as representative varietals.

But at least liberals are smarter than conservatives. Everyone knows that Calvin Coolidge was “weaned on a pickle,” that Ike fumbled his syntax, that Reagan was an amiable dunce, and that President Bush is too dumb to be president. But navy veteran Sam Sewell found one liberal dumber than President Bush. Browsing presidential candidate John Kerry’s website he happened upon the results of “an IQ-like qualifying test Kerry had taken in 1966.” It showed that Kerry belonged in the 91st percentile on intelligence, a bit lower than President Bush in the 95th percentile.

Conservatives also rank better on political knowledge, according to Schweizer. Here’s the result of a political knowledge test conducted in 2000. A high score is good.

Strong Republican 18.7
Independent-Republican 15.7
Strong Democrat 15.4
Independent-Democrat 14.2
Weak Republican 14.1
Weak Democrat 13.3
Independent 9.5

All this may be true, you will say. But how mean-spirited must Peter Schweizer be to drone on for 200 pages about “why conservatives work harder, feel happier, have closer families, take fewer drugs, give more generously, value honesty more, are less materialistic and envious, whine less... and even hug their children more than liberals?”

Conservatives had better hug their children more. They have more children to to hug than liberals. Forty-one percent more, to be exact.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com.  His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison


Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois


Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State


Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990


Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh


Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy


Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006


China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing


Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit


Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity


Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008


Socialism equals Animism

Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit


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