Listening to a Liberal: A Window Into Elitism, Control, and Intolerance

A friend I’ve known for 15 years – five in my profession and ten after retiring – spent the morning getting together for breakfast today. What a window into a completely different world!

Over the last few years he’s asked me to help him with a couple of projects at his home. At the time he first asked me – knowing that we are ideologically on opposite sides of the fence from conversations while working together – I stipulated that I would agree to working with him under the condition that we would not bring up any discussion about politics. He agreed that would be a good thing, so we’ve spent lots of times while working on the project to develop a better relationship outside of our views of a political nature.

However, at breakfast today, I told him that, since we weren’t working together having breakfast, and I wanted to understand where he was coming from ideologically, would he share with me how he viewed all of what was going on with impeachment, the president, and Congress’ actions against Trump. He agreed, and we had a civil discussion for almost two hours. I listened, and occasionally attempted to point out a few counter points he brought up.

What I learned from the experience is this. Liberals believe those who aren’t educated beyond high school are unqualified to have an opinion. You know, sort of like those “smelly WallMart shoppers”. Then too, if anyone who does have a college education that disagrees with their view is simply misguided and is believing lies concocted by conservative apparatchiks at the highest levels to deceive the public who agree with them. 

They do not accept facts. They do not tolerate any view which is contrary to theirs. They view Trump as someone who is endangering the country because he’s done things their own past president has done; been a womanizer, or lied about important issues like keeping your doctor or health care plan, for example. However, because Clinton’s, or Obama's were in the past, it has no baring on the point that Trump deserves to be drummed out of office.

They have their agenda and whatever they do is for the “good of the country”, even if it strips rights from those it affects negatively. Liberty, freedom, and rights as they see them are merely what they deem as allowable by their criteria.

So, the bottom line is they know better than anyone how to direct our country. If you have a different view of that, you’re just ignorant, stupid, uninformed like the “unwashed masses” are, and need to be re-educated.

I was finally able to break off the lopsided conversation – he did seventy-five percent of the talking – and we left still friends. If there were any commonalities we had, they were few and far between, but a real learning experience of just how different the liberal’s viewpoint is from a conservatives’.