Consider two children, white, boys, growing up in contented middle-class families in the same suburb of Washington, DC, equally bright, popular, successful with girls, and so on. One becomes a growling conservative, the other a chirping liberal. I think of them as woofers and tweeters.) Why the difference in outcome? A likely explanation, or so it seems to me, is that political orientation is innate or, as we would say today, a result of genetic predisposition.
Biological determination of behavioral traits is a matter of common observation. Differences of intelligence in individuals, races and breeds of animal are well known as are degrees of of aggressiveness, sociability, and protectiveness. Why political leaning should not be equally a matter of genetics, making us robots rather than the thinkers we believe ourselves to be, is not clear.
Note that liberal and conservative traits cluster together rather than assorting randomly, suggesting some underlying linkage. For example, we rarely see an ardent capitalist who favors racial integration, or a passionate liberal who will consider the possibility of racial differences in intelligence. There seem to be underlying patterns that determine the aggregate constellation of traits.
Today this luminous and inerrant column will propose the following insight, patent applied for.
At their purest, conservatives are heartless and liberals, goofy.
I hope this will unite Left and Right in a lynch mob thirsting for my blood. Comity at any price, I say. I will leave a false address. Anyway, some observations.
It may not be fair to say that conservatives want to bomb the world into rubble and liberals, to breast feed it. So i won’t say it. But I may think it when no one is looking.
Liberals are more at ease with the new and different, whether racial, ethnic, or linguistic. Conservatives look back nostalgically to a former world of purity and honor, usually one that never existed. They tend to be intensely loyal to their group, racial or cultural, circling the wagons and looking out warily at a world suspected of being hostile. Liberals go dizzily dancing into the future, propelled by heartwarming ideas apparently conceived by a three year old girl with a new doll.
Also reinforcing the biological provenance of political behavior we believe to be the result of reason is that women are less aggressive than men, and that as men age and their androgens drop, they often become less combative. However, though women are less inclined than men to engage in bar fights, they are not without feral tendencies. One is reminded of Menken’s dictum, “A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as they hate each other.”
Women are more nurturing than men, perhaps accounting for an indefinable but noticeable feminine flavor of the Democrats compared to Republicans. Certainly a divide exists between underlying motives of Left and Right, with liberals being nicer people and conservatives, more practical. That is, conservatives are better at doing things that should not be done in the first place, whereas liberals are better at not doing things that should be done.
A conservatives worst nightmare, that wakes him in the early hours with night horrors and the sweating gollywobbles, is the thought of paying for anything for somebody else. This is heartless. By contrast, liberals want to pay for everything for everybody else with money that doesn’t exist. This is goofy.
To see this, note that China finds its brightest young with rigorous testing and then pays for their education on the grounds that it is good for the country. In America, liberals block testing so as to collect morons and conservatives refuse to pay for education as being too expensive. Actually this makes sense since the students have been chosen for being ineducable. This also is good for China.
Liberals think all races and ethnicities should live together in warmth and fuzziness, while conservatives say they would rather have a moist skin disease and anyway it just doesn’t happen.
Liberals want free medical care for everyone. Conservatives object that it would cost too much. This amounts to saying, “Let them die if they can’t pay,” which is heartless but, from the conservative point of view, practical. and anyway they prefer aircraft carriers.
Liberals favor immigrants, saying that these new people just want a better life, all four or so potential billion of them. Conservatives don’t care what kind of life they have, as long as they do it somewhere else.
Conservatives think that medical students should be tested for intelligence. Liberals want to admit retards of color because it makes them feel all inclusive and deserving. They seem unable to understand that a “doctor” who does not know which end of the body the head is attached to will kill people. This is goofy.
Conservatives believe that outcomes stem from deliberate choices. that is, the black crack whore with a 70 IQ and five birth-defective children decided to use crack and to sell sex to pay for it, and so deserves the life she has. The white upper-class woman decided to have a high IQ and to go to Yale and become married before gravid, and so also deserves the life she has. It’s just a question of choices.
Liberals believe that character, and thus behavior, are shaped by environment and thus are not the responsibility of the person exhibiting the behavior. No one is responsible for anything. The only exceptions are whites, who are malign and hate God, or would if he existed. That is, liberals believe that intelligence, which doesn’t exist, is equally distributed across the nonexistent races but that free will is greater among some races, that don’t exist, than others. This is giving me a headache.
Again, at their purest, conservatives are heartless and liberals, goofy. For example, racial conservatives cannot bring themselves to say that African chattel slavery was wrong, despite its gruesome record, which is heartless. However, it was not irrational. Slavery was a recognized way of making money. By contrast, the liberal drive to eliminate literacy tests for college and elite schools, to favor minorities, is goofy. It makes no sense, and would result in…well, today’s America.
Conservatives tend to regard the homeless as human detritus, suffering the consequences of their own moral failures and fecklessness. They deserve no sympathy and should be subject to unspecified measures to get them out of sight. This is heartless. Liberals want to put the homeless in hotels at public expense or build housing for them, which is kindhearted but tends to produce more homeless. i myself might well become homeless, at least for a really good hotel.
Liberals want to pay blacks reparations for slavery. This, requiring people who didn’t do it to pay people to whom it wasn’t done, is goofy. Conservatives want nothing to do with blacks, at all, ever, and don’t care what happens to them. While perhaps not precisely heartless, it leans that way.
The liberal belief that you can be guilty of things you didn’t do is exquisitely goofy. However it gets confusing. For example, I didn’t kill Abraham Lincoln and am therefore guilty of it, and therefore owe reparations to, well, somebody. Perhaps eight billion other people also didn’t kill him, making this an inverse mass murder of frightening proportions.
Liberals always want to do nice things for blacks without actually coming into contact with them and apparently not noticing that the money is accomplishing nothing. This is goofy but characteristic.
In fairness, it should be noted that liberals and conservatives can work together toward a common goal. For example, in a shared rush to wreck the United States, liberals engage in domestic destruction by lunatic social policy, while conservatives keep the country in disastrous and crippling wars. Similarly,democrats fight to keep the borders open while Republicans work to maximize hostility between races. It is a serviceable modus vivendi. See? There is hope.
Goofiness, sometimes called the “squirrel factor,” appears in a great deal of liberal thinking, if that is quite the word. For example, as mentioned above, conservatives want to find the brightest children with tests and put them into schools at their levels while crushing them with student loans. Liberals literally–I am not being cute–want to ban testing and select students by race to be all heartwarming. This is goofiness at its finest. It also plays to the resentment of underperformers against the more able, who don’t exist. Here again we see the superior niceness of liberals. They don’t want any group to feel left out or unequal. Thus they try to eliminate differences by fiat. It doesn’t work, but what counts is the spirit of the thing.
It invites parody: There are no septuagenarians with thick glasses and lousy jump shots in the NBA. disparate impact. I want reparations. A full–up Corvette, with tangerine metal-flake lacquer, would be acceptable.
On the other hand, the IGMFY philosophy (“I got mine, screw you”) outlook common among conservatives and codified as capitalism, has its own downstream effects. These can involve bloodthirsty mobs, guillotines, burning at the stake, and suchlike. We aren’t quite there. Yet.
There is a bottle of Wild Turkey in the kitchen. I am going to consort with it.
Paraphrase from Dave Barry
The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They’re the kind of people who’d stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn’t bother to stop because they’d want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club
Fred killing it as usual…
“Conservatives look back nostalgically to a former world of purity and honor, usually one that never existed.”
Not true. The period from 1946-1966/67 was the best 20 year period in the best country this world has ever seen in the history of the world. LBJ’s “Great Society” programs destroyed all that, but it took 2-3 years to full take effect.
“Conservatives don’t care what kind of life they [illegal aliens] have, as long as they do it somewhere else.”
Of course, b/c all illegal aliens invade all White, Western civilizations. You ever see a Dane sneak into the Congo or Iran, etc.?
“…at their purest, conservatives are heartless…”
Nah. We love and take care of our own.
Now pour me a shot of Wild Turkey…
Love it!
“The period from 1946-1966/67 was the best 20 year period in the best country this world has ever seen in the history of the world.”
Yes. Riding on the postwar boom. And helped by intelligent presidents. But you ignore the social issues that came out into the open in the 1960s, such as segregation.
Then things went downhill financially.The huge cost of the Vietnam war, and the increasing role of other economies in the world, meant that the USA no longer had a clear lead. Then Ramblin’ Ronnie came along and slowly eviscerated the middle class and whatever you wish to call the social segment below it.
Years ago, the New York Times published a column that wondered why Liberals are so stingy in giving to charities. It raised a storm. Studies do show that conservatives tend to give far more to charities and volunteer far more than Liberals. This seems to contradict the commonly-accepted notion that rightists are heartless and leftists have a proclivity to vote for welfare, but its not a contradiction when you consider that Leftists merely posture this generosity.
A person with Leftist leanings are more attuned to social positioning, than those on the right.
They want to be socially accepted, so this entails showing others that they are popular and enlightened. They do this by adopting the morality of the herd, no matter how strange it may be. Nietzsche pointed this out long ago. CEOs tend be Leftists and wokesters because they have an intense focus on social climbing.
Leftists might say they favor integration, but they rarely walk their talk. Seattle is perhaps the most left-wing city in the nation, but the ultra-leftist moms and dads that infest this city don’t want to their own children integrated. 1/3 of all children in this ultra-left paradise are enrolled in private school, safe from the lower classes, while their ultra liberal parents preach endlessly about discrimination and racism. That 1/3 figure would be much higher, because the rich and sanctimonious leftist caste that rules the city are the only ones who can afford private school, so overrepresent the 1/3 figure.
‘Years ago, the New York Times published a column that wondered why Liberals are so stingy in giving to charities. It raised a storm. Studies do show that conservatives tend to give far more to charities and volunteer far more than Liberals.’
How was this determined? Do charities routinely ask party affiliation or something, I think not.
I am willing to believe it is true, but want some validation.
The NY Times column was published on Dec 20, 2008, by Nicholas Kristof, titled “Bleeding Heart Tightwads.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html
I used ChatGPT to confirm the data, which it did. Some of the sources, in the column:
Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.
Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.
Maybe a trend because wealth tends to be conservative. If it comes eg. to inheritance conservatives are immediately socialists. Giving people what they never earned (her own brats wich only achievement are that mom let the right one in).
Great post. Thanks. Says pretty much all.
I’d add that people who identify as conservative aren’t good with images, gestures and sounds in time. Whereas people who identify as liberals or, more likely, bohemians tend to view the world in more holistic terms and are able to convey an emotional understanding better.
“Leftists might say they favor integration, but they rarely walk their talk. Seattle is perhaps the most left-wing city in the nation, but the ultra-leftist moms and dads that infest this city don’t want to their own children integrated. 1/3 of all children in this ultra-left paradise are enrolled in private school, safe from the lower classes, while their ultra liberal parents preach endlessly about discrimination and racism. ”
Dear Ruralguy:
The goshdarn problem is that the blacks that leftist and liberals do come in contact with are usually middle class, intelligent, polite, and productive. I live in NYC. You can live in the city all your life without coming into contact with the thug sector. You have to be a police officer, social worker, teacher, or emergency medical personnel in the ghetto to see what Fred Reed is talking about. I suspect the same can be said with Seattle and any other urban metropolis in the US of A. Note that these professionals who administer the ghetto tend to be predominantly black.
The reason is that the cities are very segregated not just by race but also by class and income. You can live in a posh penthouse. One mile would be a crime-ridden slum, but you would never walk there. The subway or bus stops a block away from your abode so you don’t know what is going on in your own backyard.
Since we’re talking about schools… it should be noted that if you are a white or Asian child, you are probably not going to attend a public school in the black ghetto. If you attend a public school, it would probably be predominantly white. If you are bullied in school, you will get it from white delinquents, not black thugs.
I am not saying this to cast the underclass in a sympathetic light. I am putting forth my thoughts as to why the leftist elite can afford to possess such an unhealthy, sentimental, patronizing attitude towards the thug sector.
“political orientation is innate or, as we would say today, a result of genetic predisposition.”
That’s not consistent with old adage, which I think is an accurate observation on the human condition :
“If you are not a socialist when you are young, you don’t have a heart. If you are not a conservative when older, you don’t have a brain”
A lot of truth in this screed, but,,,
a) it does not call out that the conservatives he speaks of are the most extreme element of the species, and
b) the liberals cited are pretty much all of them.
There is a vast middle ground of conservatives who do not fit the mold given.
Nope.
As I speak in London, England, a clever chap with a camera and a clipboard is walking amongst the liberal “Refugees Welcome” demonstraters, asking a most simple question:
“How many migrants can I put under your roof, please?” Simple as it gets. Answer as of now, ZERO. Not one will put money where mouth is. Conclusion: Liberal is indeed a pose. Conservatism? Let me get a camera and a clipboard. I’ll find some way to expose them too.
I also laugh at both sides. I don’t fit on either one because I am strongly pro-choice as well as being pro-private-firearms ownership.
You are correct if you suspect I have a libertarian bent. At the same time, I think most libertarians — both uppercase and lowercase L — need to wake up and smell the f’n coffee by recognizing the threat to liberty from private organization.
Fred,
You say, “patent applied for.” What? Do you think you are a Gibson guitar pickup or something?
😀
Apparently this is falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, it is true, nonetheless
Show me a man of 25 who is not a liberal, and I will show you a man without a heart.
Show me a man of 50 who is a liberal, and I will show you a man without a brain
The conservatives with whom I associate do not want war. I suspect Fred is talking about a small number of them. In DC it seems that they all want war but the people out here in the country, many conservative, don’t want war. We seem to have flipped on the war issue. Anti-war used to mean liberal now it seems conservative. In DC I don’t think there is anyone anti-war except maybe Rand Paul.
The conservative / Liberal divide is just squabbling amongst American Whites, who are a disappearing breed. The demographic changes are already baked into the cake. America is or shortly will be a Latin American country. Economic inequality and crime will increase, public life will continue to decline, and the USA will fall into a second rate power status like Britain is today. Whites are too culturally and morally degraded to mount any resistance to this (And half are liberals and welcome it). The correct response is to realize that your ancestors were not “Americans”, they were English or Germans or Dutch. They were sold the lie of American cultural assimilation, and fucked you by abandoning their cultural origins. They cut you off from your true nation for blue jeans and Chevrolets. Avoid the same mistake by not assimilating to this new America. You must shrink the circle of your “in-group” to include only your family, friends, and neighbors. You are not “American”, you are a member of your own little tribe. Avoid taxes, don’t serve in the military, dont give to charities that support your competitors and enemies. You cant stop the coming storm, but you can weather it. Remember you are now a minority, a discrete group in the larger American empire. Look out for your own people when you can. Try to ensure the financial and cultural survival of your children. Thats all that is left for you now. There is no longer any such thing as the “American Nation”. A nation is a group of people bound together by common blood, history, and culture. “America” doesn’t qualify.
I believe that your comment is the most correct of all here–including our host’s screed.
Michael Savage has said for more than a decade that a nation–to BE a nation–must have three characteristics:
Common language
Shared values
Defined borders.
We are 0 for 3. Therefore (and as you noted above) we are NOT a nation any longer.
Especially due to #3, we are a landmass.
Fred is master of the paradox and the heterodox, the eloquent albeit better-educated, more-objective 21st-century embodiment of William Cowper Brann. Adding another Menckenism as fulfilled prophecy apropos to this treatise…. “As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
[…] https://fredoneverything.org/left-and-right-twin-halves-of-the-national-lobotomy/ […]
[…] Guest Post by Fred Reed […]
Amazon, inter alia I assume, is now selling T-shirts online that say on the front side “I may be old but I got to see the USA before it went to shit.” I have my own now, and am waiting for a sufficiently safe time and place to wear it in some public place for a minute or two.
There is nothing “conservative” about the endless wars we stumble into. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. if you review our history prior to WWI, we tended to avoid wars in Europe and Asia and espoused the Monroe Doctrine. Let the fools in Europe and Asia gleefully murder each other and we will stay out of it.
After WWII, we decided that we needed to be world policeman to stop the Communists (Korea then Vietnam), then the Islamists (Iraq, Afghanistan). We have developed this addiction to invading and occupying crappy countries for some reason. We need to mind our own business for a change.
I thought the quote was from a French surgeon informed that his son was a socialist.
Has anyone noticed that when we get a Texan in the White House, we have wars? Johnson and Vietnam, W Bush and Iraq. Coincidence? I think not. Perhaps those 10 gallon hats cook their brains?
As others have said, conservatives are not heartless – they care about those close to them: their families and neighbors.
It’s liberals who pretend to caaaare about everyone, while actually being almost completely selfish and personal status focused.
The conservatives are the honest ones, who say what they really think. The liberals say whatever will give them social status. Pointing out to them that they are talking nonsense doesn’t help, because the more detached from reality their ideas, the more virtuous they consider themselves to be for holding them.
And the neo-cons, who want endless war, are not in any sense real conservatives.
The entire conservative/liberal, left wing/right wing paradigm is a contrived, control cage to bemuse and befuddle the masses as a weapon of mass distraction. It fosters the illusion of choice and options. All major players on both sides answer to the same bosses. It is the great American Slobocracy in motion. It bores me to tears, I am astonished that anyone would take it seriously. Fine piece of writing here, Fred. Don’t bother pouring me a shot of the Turkey, just give me the bottle and I’ll swig it down.
Thank you Hereticdrummer and Bill Fairchild! I am reminded of a T shirt I saw somewhere with an ancient looking native american on the front that said “Remember that the left wing and the right wing both belong to the same bird”
What exactly does ‘right wing’ even mean ?
https://pagosadailypost.com/2023/01/09/a-different-point-of-view-right-wing-defined-or-maybe-not/
A fun read with truth! Fred Reed is a man with a special literary talent who can find humor, wisdom and practicality in most all facets of life including history. Here, he gets away from the serious and goes a bit wacky yet injects a gob or two of truth about Conservatives and Liberals alike. I found several new terms that are interesting.
I am a strong life long Conservative and produced two children who are Liberal; however, I still have hopes for them to come to their senses. Age does that sometimes. Perhaps their living in San Francisco in their younger years had the adverse effect. Still I would like to believe that political disposition is basically a result of genetic predisposition. I have tried to understand the Liberal mind set for years but have given up. That is the closest I have comet to an understanding.
Another interesting term that Fred mentions is “moist skin disease”. Never diagnosed but long suspected of my former wife.
Thanks as always Fred!
–JB
The last two wars started under Dem watch. Trump was quite obviously trying to end them.
When I hear “conservative” the first thing I want to know is what you are trying to conserve. Most of the mess we have to day needs to be abolished, not conserved.
By the same token when I hear “liberal” I want to know what you plan to be liberal with. Violence? Lawfare? Warfare? Repression? Control? Other peoples money?
I find all of this repugnant and worthy of Elon Musks pithy comment for both sides.
“Go f*ck yourself.
I believe Robert A. Heinlein got it right, and count me as one of the surly curmudgeons.
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
[…] https://fredoneverything.org/left-and-right-twin-halves-of-the-national-lobotomy/ […]
As Shakespeare wrote, “A plague o’ both your houses..” ~Mercutio (Romeo and Juliet Act III.1)
I can’t help but think that this conservative/liberal divide (we occupy a spectrum while a minority occupies the extremes) for the majority is a device to keep the masses preoccupied to notice the divide et imperia. So, the question should be: who benefits from these and are they the ultimate puppet-masters?
People affiliate with groups and then conform their thinking (so to speak), ignoring inconvenient facts. Patterns of beliefs and behaviors don’t need to be genetically based. But male vs female differences may be largely based on genetic tendencies, at least for starters. Man kills mammoth, woman cares for babies. Etc. But affiliation happens there too, as in #IBelieveHer for example.
[…] Left and Right: Twin Halves of the National Lobotomy […]
Fred:
> Liberals always want to do nice things for blacks without actually coming
> into contact with them …
This reminded me of a line I’ve always remembered from a book I read back in the ’60s: Dick Gregory’s quasi-autobiographical _From the Back of the Bus_. Regarding white people — not necessarily liberals or conservatives, but white people in general — he wrote
“In the South they don’t care how close you get as long as you don’t get too big. In the North they don’t care how big you get as long as you don’t get too close.”
I think that remains pretty much true even to this day.
I am a yellow dog democrat. Yesterday while standing in a cafeteria line, I got into a discussion with a Trump supporter. I just wanted to be polite with a stranger. I quickly realized that the behavior and events concerning Trump that were crucial to me were trivial and unimportant to them. I changed the topic to issues of very local politics, where we supported similar causes. In the midst of all this the lightbulb went off in my mind: The difference between modern Republicans and modern Democrats: Democrats are tax and spend. Republicans are Don’t tax, but spend anyway.
The premise of your thesis renders itself moot. How can we mock or even criticize The Messiah Trump for being a compulsive liar if he was simply born that way? ’S just Trump being Trump.
The same with the derelict inhabitants of a sidewalk tent city. No amount of charity will help them, if they are born to make poor decisions.
It is thus pointless to even discuss social situations, if the citizenry are all subject to a genetic predestination. It be like complaining about the weather. It is what it is.
But for Fred on Everything to be worth anything and for any sort of social program to work, all of us must pretend that humans actually *are* malleable. We must make believe that pre-school and the Boy Scouts and solitary confinement are all beneficial in some way, just as we must pretend that society would improve if Fred’s advice were heeded.
In a 1933 letter to an Oklahoma youth, H. L. Mencken wrote, “The Free Will controversy is endless and maddening. . . . There is not the slightest evidence that man has any actual free will, but his illusion that he has is so powerful that he simply couldn’t live without it.”
Read Dr. Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Vision”. He has been thinking on this topic for years and has come up with the best explanation i have ever come across.
Fred sucks!
I know this to be true because I saw it written on a garbage truck in downtown San Antonio many years ago, and I have yet to see a rebuttal on a garbage truck anywhere.
Trump: Fred sucks and we should build a wall around him and make Mexico pay for it.
Biden: Fred does something with a garbage truck. Maybe he sucks it. Where’s my shoe?
Hi Fred! Greetings from Taipei, Taiwan