Insularity Breeds Contempt

And contempt isn’t good for any of us

by Patrick J. Shanahan
12/01/04

The remarkable sour grapes being exhibited by liberals after the decisive Bush victory has taken everyone by surprise. As a dyed-in-the-wool, frothing at the mouth Clinton Hater I understand the impulse. To believe that the American people were foolish enough to elect a person that you know is a meathead and a scoundrel is almost more than any dedicated political animal can bear.

But today’s liberal outrage is different. When Clinton was reelected, those of us on the other side more or less just said to the American people, “You poor fools. Don’t you understand what kind of man this is? How could you have been so hoodwinked?” What we didn’t understand is that they knew exactly what kind of a man Clinton was, and voted for him anyway. C’est la vie. We got over it. What those on the left are today saying to their fellow citizens is, “You ignorant, uneducated, bible-thumping buffoons. How dare you vote for this simpleton. How dare you ignore your betters. How dare you impose you homophobic, racist, fascist morality on this country!”

This is not shock, it is not sorrow, it is not just disbelief, nor is it just anger. It is utter and complete contempt for those who differ from their political viewpoint. I think this is completely new is nature. And I think it has to do with insularity.

It is said that familiarity breeds contempt. This is true in that familiarity with a person or type of people allows us to see all of the warts and flaws that are inherent in all humans. It is hard to hold a person in overly high esteem once you have become intimately familiar with them. But I have always thought contempt to be a little too severe a description for this.

True contempt requires insularity. It requires that we not be able to see the humanity in our fellow citizens. It requires that we not be familiar with them, with what they are like, with the reasons for their views. To anyone halfway familiar with life in the “red states,” it is clear that many of the commentators and pundits who are lashing out have absolutely no familiarity whatsoever with evangelical Christians, military families, or conservative suburbanites. They don’t know any. And yet their paranoid politics demand an explanation. They are so bound by a fundamental lack of imagination that they cannot conceive of any reason why people would vote the way they did, unless it were out of the very worst motives. So they make up those motives. They call their countrymen jihadists, and dunces, and racists, and homophobes.

Want to know the difference between the Upper East Side of Manhattan and, say, Abilene, Kansas? Abilene has blacks, and Hispanics, and gays, and feminists, and communists. But the Upper East Side has no evangelical Christians or suburbanites. Folks in “Jesusland” have far more daily exposure to the core elements of liberalism than folks in Manhattan do to the core elements of conservatism. The folks in Abilene jostle each other every day in schools and stores and churches and parks. It is a rare person anywhere who does not have at least one gay acquaintance or coworker. But it is the rarest of Gays in Manhattan who has a fundamentalist Christian acquaintance or coworker.

Things are out of balance. And it is getting worse. Liberal elitists have always had National Public Radio and PBS as their in-house news services. But even as talk radio, the web and cable television have made it possible for conservatives to gain a current affairs presence, they have made it easier for everyone to isolate themselves. Go to some of the more frothing left wing web sites - say MoveOn.org or democraticunderground.com - and you will see what happens when liberals talk too much to themselves. One can take any far-fetched notion - that Michael Moore in the reincarnation of Ingmar Bergman, for example - and if it is echoed loudly enough by enough people it begins to sound like reality. It also begins to take on a misplaced sense of importance. If a thing matters greatly to everyone who visits a website, then the illusion is created that it must matter that way to everyone, period.

There is an old argument that conservatives by nature had more well-prepared and thought through arguments to support their positions. They had to, because they faced a daily barrage of hostile argument on the newspapers and TV. By having to swim upstream against an overwhelmingly liberal culture they had to constantly exercise their ideological muscles. Liberals by contrast could float placidly on the ideological current, never having to work hard to support their positions, lulled by the knowledge that “everybody who is anybody” believes the things they believe.

Well, conservatives no longer need to swim so hard. We now have our own ideological tidal pools here and there where we can go tubing. And we run some risk of ideological atrophy as a result. Those same changes have made it possible for liberals to completely shut themselves off from distasteful realities. A committed urban liberal can spend every minute of every day with like-minded folk, in a way that - believe it or not - no small-town or suburban conservative can. The danger of this is they begin to believe that since all the reasonable people they know agree with them on the issues, that anyone who disagrees must be unreasonable. Or obtuse. When they lose an election to these “other” people a sense of injustice overwhelms them. How could there be so many unreasonable people out there?

In thinking through what to do about this situation, I cannot help but think of the rash of “reality” shows that seem similar to this. There is one called “Trading Spouses”, for instance, in which a new York Jewish wife might be sent to Cajun country to live with a gumbo and alligator eatin’ family. Or like “The Simple Life” in which annoying socialites are sent to shovel slop with Okie rednecks. Maybe we could - strictly as a public service mind you - start a new show in which angry leftists are sent to live cheek-by-jowl with committed pro-life evangelicals in Norman, Oklahoma. We could call it "Left Behind." Or maybe not. They’re stressed enough already.