Today we have Stephen’s Monday post on Wednesday! Thank you Stephen. Happy Hump Day, FRians!
It is very easy to accuse liberal politicians and supporters of hypocrisy because they continually not only change their positions for political expedience but flat out ignore the political expressions they have publicly stated.
They sometimes excuse this as they changed their mind, or they “evolved” on the issue, or their computer was “hacked”, or they simply don’t remember that they ever stated such a thing in the past.
No, I am not addressing when they have inconsistent positions which are intellectually incompatible with other positions, for which inconsistencies they can legitimately be called hypocrites, but only those political positions which have completely reversed.
Most everyone is familiar with the Democrats being the party of slavery during the Civil War, the party of Jim Crow laws, the party which opposed equal rights for blacks for over a hundred years, the party of Dixiecrats who opposed the integration of America tooth and nail, who collectively voted against the “civil rights” laws in Congress.
But because they supported public welfare, magically transformed into the party of equality while labeling their political opposition as racists who would bring back all of the laws and policies of the Democrats if given the chance. Biden tells African-American audience GOP ticket would put them “back in chains”.
With regards to another well known issue of legalizing homosexual marriage, Hillary Clinton conveniently changed her opinion trying to get into the Presidency. President Obama said that he was not a supporter of homosexual marriage, that is until he was.
Prominent Democrats like Tipper Gore lead the charge to put explicit warning labels on music and video games because they would have a deleterious effect upon impressionable children. However, these same leftists had previously pretended to espouse and advocate for freedom of speech and expression.
Of course, the push for censorship of words an thought is being pushed by those leftists all around the world, under the name of “hate speech” openly censoring anything not deemed “politically correct”.
Even police departments in the U.K. are threatening people who say things they deem “offensive”. So much for the left’s free speech movement.
The left protests and demands that any corporation found to be dumping chemicals and poisons in the water, air, sea, or landfills be held strictly liable for any and all damages they have caused. But when it is the EPA which dumps millions of gallons of poison into a river, they are deafeningly silent.
Of special note is the leftist constant harping on the concept of “equality”, whether it be with regard to gender, race, orientation, religion, age, or income. Feminism builds its reputation upon calling for equality of the sexes; “civil rights” organizations make a fortune peddling equality of every race and every ethnicity; homosexual, and now every variant that they can imagine, groups ply power in the name of equality; prayer taken out of school and monuments dictated by Satanists and Islamists because their religions must be equal; AARP advocates for equality of the elderly while Universities and educators seek to profit from empowering the youth; and socialism gathers legions of minions under the banner of equality.
(And yes, they are about as clueless as the little yellow cartoon characters, but not nearly as amusing.)
As a result of all of this “equality” is that a straight, white, heterosexual, Christian, middle aged man is the one group people are encouraged to hate and despise because they have the privilege to be hated, or something like that. Woe to any who hold any one of those characteristics, but the more of those characteristics you hold, the more despised you become.
Equality leads to antipathy of an illusory privilege justifying inequality.
Now, there are plenty of areas where the left has been consistent: opposing gun ownership, progressive taxation, public largesse, and pro-abortion. Further, I’m not getting into those areas such as deficit spending, foreign trade, and executive authority which keeps changing for both parties depending upon who is in power.
One might be inclined to think that all of this continuing reversal of political positions might lead adherents to suffer from some fairly extreme levels of cognitive dissonance, inducing unfathomable stress on the minds of leftists across the nation.
In truth, many former leftists have stated that these contradictions were the very thing which caused them to start to question their beliefs and eventually led to their departure from the leftist groupthink enclaves. However, many more remain in the enclaves and become ever more entrenched and adamant in their adherence to leftism like a masochistic religion.
How ever do they manage to not merely change their political positions, but convince themselves that they never actually changed their positions but this new idea was what they really believed all along and that they were just not previously capable of articulating it properly?
In the modernist philosophy of one George Costanza, of Seinfeld infamy, “It’s not a lie, if you believe it.”
The human mind has an amazing capacity for denial and delusion. In essence, adherents to the anti-society enclaves, dwellers of the urban bubble if you will, are so focused upon their emotional hatred of the “other” that they will accept anything as the truth so long as it alleviates their cognitive dissonance.
It is enough evidence of the truth and divinity of their group’s new political position that the opposing party, their enemies, hold a different position. Theirs is an anti-view of reality, a willful suspension of questioning history.
To put it simply, they just conveniently forget that their leaders once advocated for the very opposite position than they now advocate. “We are wiser now. We have evolved our position on that issue.”
Sometimes there is some fictitious interpretation of an event which they believe magically changed reality with as little or no evidence apart from a vague quote by someone somewhere. “All of the racists left the Democrat party and became Republican because of the Southern Strategy.”
More often they simply deny that their political allies ever held or said things which differ from what they now say that they believe, and because the source of that information is their enemies it can’t be believed even when presented.
People, well some people, have the capacity to not think. People will believe what they want to believe, regardless of the facts. They simply choose to forget facts which contradict what they want to believe, and will call any person presenting such facts a liar and dismiss them entirely. It is simply a willful amnesia of a disconcerting past, a politically inconvenient history.
