False Narratives About Liberalism

As a separate companion thread to the “what non-liberals dislike about liberals” thread, let’s discuss the many straw-person and false narrative arguments that have been made against US liberalism in recent years.

I think there’s two categories of these: the full-blown bad faith and/or bias/ignorance based hate-on-liberals arguments of Limbaugh et. al.; and also the assumptions and stereotypes that are less overtly BS but much more widespread. An example of the first is saying Liberals hate America and support Al Qaeda and an example of the second is the assumption that Liberals always want to raise taxes.

Please feel free to go wild and vent all your liberal spleen in this thread. Non-liberals, please come equipped with anti-spleen gear.

Limousine Liberals. I’ve never been in a limo, neither have my liberal friends (unless maybe, for their senior proms or weddings, they sprung for renting one). I grow weary of hearing all liberals tarred with such an extravagant, gas-guzzling brush. AM talk radio would have it that we repurpose poor conservative schmoes’ honest hard money into our pockets, which then go to our ostentatious car payments. I suppose the limo manufacturers and dealers are also liberals; the money never trickles back down to the conservative water table.

I suppose one could make the argument about Limousine Liberals: that they are a very small proportion of the larger liberal group. Like Compassionate Conservatives.

I always liked “liberal elites”. Because multi-millionaires and billionaires are just regular folks.

And then Trump called himself and other rich people “super elites” and the MAGA crowd cheered.

Cause aristocracy is good as long as they pander to you.

I remember shortly after the beginning of the Great Recession, arguing with a friend who was a right wing talk-radio listener. I was arguing that Wall Street was a big cause of the financial crisis and his response was (this is a quote) “Wall Street is dominated by liberals.” When you’ve got that big of a reality dysfunction, there’s just not much to be said.

I’m sure on that particular day of the week they believed that Wall Street was dominated by liberals. And likely one week later they believed the exact opposite.

I think I have usually heard that term used in regards to the Hollywood types, and of course Al Gore. And usually in regards to their environmental “leadership”.

Usually. Then they forget all about it when one of them is a conservative or whatever.

“Entertainers are out of touch, irrelevant and stupid, now let’s hear what Gene Simmons has to say about healthcare,” is literally a thing that happened after all.

“If you’re not a liberal when you’re young you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative when you’re older you have no brain.”
Can’t stand that line in all its various formats.

I think one of the biggest false narratives is the idea that climate change is a liberal issue.

‘Keeping the planet habitable for humans’ is an issue that only one slice of the political spectrum ought to care about, apparently.

I think is rooted in the idea that when you are old, you have no interest into making the world a better place, because improving the world has a cost, that you will pay, but you will not get the reward of a better world, because you will be dead by them.
Is a greedy way to look at life.

So, according to you, conservatives are selfish assholes? I’m not judging, but I want to make such that is the case.

By the way, racism is also a liberal issue for some reason.

I don’t go that far this time. But is a irrational behavior? not.

Altruism is an evolutionary imperative. So, scientifically, you would be wrong. :)

Behavior which APPEARS altrusistic is an evolutionary imperative.

Sure, but we are also in born cheater detectors, so the appearance must have some substance. Also, if we were all hardwired to be altruistic for appearances only, we would be much more suspect of it than we are.

A lot of people we’re duped by Trump into believing that he would help them. Obviously we are set up to believe people can be altruistic even after all these years.

I will give another reason why a conservative mindset is rational (but greedy) for old people:

When you are young, you want a society that is based on merit. When you are old, you want a society where experience, and social position, have more weight with merit.

If theres one job, and you want that job, and you are old and experienced, you want that job to be assigned based on experience over other stuff.

But this ignores the one thing all old people love more than anything else in the world.
Grandkids! Nothing is more valuable to old people than grandkids.

It’s in our DNA. Old people with grandkids are usually sad people.

It’s all clearly visible in the documentary, “Up”.

I think part of the difficulty here is the definition of true altrusim.

All of our actions, by definition, are chosen because our cognitive systems have decided that those choices are maximally “good”, where good is defined by a few core evolutionary drives, and then a whole mess of abstraction piled on top through our life experiences.

The result of this is that we may do things which appear, to an outside observer, to be altruistic. We may do things like sacrifice ourselves for others. The reason isn’t that we’re doing something which we thing harms ourselves, but rather that the harm to ourselves, even going to far as death, is less than the harm we perceive as coming from the alternative.

On some level, that is altruism… at least, it’s the only kind of altruism that actually exists. But at the same time, it’s still driven by the same selfish maximization engine in our brain. It’s just that we’ve chosen, as a society, to label some of those drives as not selfish.

This is a human way to operate, and have my sympathy and support. But I would not describe it has rational. The mention of love and “unvaluable” assets could signal that perhaps is not rational.

In the Soylent Green movie, in a scene, wealthy people have their kids playing around the only live tree in the city. So they love their kids. But they still do nothing to save the dying planet, they love themselves more than their kids.

People aren’t rationale. Of course, acting rationale isn’t rationale either, so maybe being irrational is truly the only rationale approach, since rationality takes too long.

My thesis touches upon it, but it’s mostly boring, so I will spare you the details.