Many conservatives are absolutely perplexed by the question of what motivates liberals to take the patently wrong political positions they do. It’s difficult to explain it without believing such obviously wrong ideas like “liberals are just stupid”, or “they want to destroy our country”, but sometimes we resort to those explanations out of pure frustration.
But what is the explanation? Why do seemingly good, intelligent people take positions that cause so much harm in the face of all the facts? I’ve finally stumbled upon the answer, and it’s so stunningly simple, yet profound in its implications, that it’s absolutely mind-boggling. Liberalism isn’t a political ideology; it’s a psychology - the psychology of self-satisfaction to be precise.
By Eric Alan Beltt
A liberal (or a leftist; I use the terms interchangeably), is a person who only cares about politics to the extent that doing so makes him or her feel good, or avoid feeling bad, due both to external and internal factors. Their motivations can include things like a desire to feel intelligent, moral, noble, or unique, as well as a desire for peer acceptance or reverence, and aversion to being ostracized, among many other things.
Now, before I go any further, I have to draw a distinction between liberals and the people who agree with them. Liberals, the people I’m referring to throughout, are the activists and ideologues; the people who truly believe in their leftist ideas and who fight for them.
People who simply agree with the real liberals on some given issue on the other hand, are not generally the people I’ll be referring to. This group includes people who vote in their own concrete self-interest (tax the rich and give it to my group for example), as well as people who are simply misinformed about the issues (they might believe conservatives don’t support civil rights for example), and those for whom one or two issues override all else (abortion for example), among other things.
With that said, I’d like to restate the main point. Liberalism isn’t a political ideology. The only common bond that truly holds liberal ideas together is their straight-forward simplicity (pass a law, raise taxes, hand out money, talk it out, etc), which is solely a consequence of the fact that liberals are completely uninterested in real solutions to real problems.
