Is the left intellectually bankrupt?

The left is liberal and we all know this:

Liberalism = Insanity

That's certainly something leftists claim and some may even convince themselves of it, but it's projection, as many of the left's attacks are. "Fox" and conservative talk radio are generally more civil and have a higher level of discourse than their liberal counterparts, and they were brought into existence by decades of grossly unfair, monolithic media bias, most of which still exists. Just compare and contrast the decorum of a TEA Party rally with a typical left wing protest/riot over the past decade, and examine the trash and property damage left or not left behind by each one.

I'd also say the left, going back to Marx and even the French Revolution, is inherently more predisposed to base emotions like envy and hatred. Leftists view as their "enemies" not just their direct political opponents, but certain groups already just sitting out there, whether it's class-based (e.g. "bourgeoisie", "the 1%"), religion-based (e.g. "the church", Christianity), nation-based (e.g. America, Israel), sex-based (e.g. men, masculinity, "cisnormativity"), or race based (e.g. whites, an alleged "white supremacist" power structure that somehow supposedly persists even when the president and much of the major urban leadership in the country is non-white, and when Asians have higher incomes than whites, something chronically overlooked in leftists' "results prove discrimination" analyses), or a combination of the above. These are enemies to be attacked, mocked, dehumanized, and in some cases ultimately destroyed even if they aren't politically active, simply because they exist.

By contrast US conservatives, with an ideology rooted in the American Revolution rather than the French, view modern liberalism as their enemy, something both sides at least agree exists and is their direct political opponent. They oppose liberalism because they think it subverts and threatens to destroy the principles upon which America was founded.

Conservatives, in line with these principles, envision a society where diverse individuals have liberty and can coexist even while disagreeing with each other on a great many things, the system being constructed by the founding fathers to even take personal self-interest and less than saintly behavior into account. Consequently conservatives don’t hate minorities, women, atheists, or illegal aliens (though they prefer immigration laws be enforced, as much out of fairness to legal immigrants as to native born citizens) or other groups; they don’t even really hate liberals the way liberals often hate conservatives. They aren't committed to fundamentally changing human nature as leftists often are in their Utopian thinking. They despise liberalism…..certain ideas they view as destructive to the system that would allow imperfect people to live together in peace and freedom. They focus on arguing against those ideas. It’s common for conservatives to describe liberals as “misguided” while liberals are far more likely to describe conservatives as evil. I’m personally less inclined to let liberals off the moral hook than most conservatives are.

I agree that conservatives obviously engage in name-calling too. But the difference with conservatives is that they also emphasize substance. The left’s current strategy is based on expanding their echo-chamber to engulf the world. The left, not the American right, uses classic phrases like “by any means necessary” (there’s even an Antifa allied group currently using that name), literally embracing an ends justifies the means attitude where anything goes. Consequently the left is far more prone to lying, to trying to destroy innocent people, and to feeling alright about sidestepping substantive engagement to silence their opponents.

The left created the PC Frankenstein monster that seeks to end political debates by altering the language rather winning them, and by marginalizing their opponents’ views (e.g. “One can get ahead in America if he or she works hard regardless of skin color) as “hate speech” rather than persuading them to change their minds. That’s how leftist academics have created an environment where armies of gullible liberal students are mobilized to protest the mere presence of conservative speakers, mindlessly chanting that a libertarian like Gavin McInnes, who’s married to an American Indian woman and has mixed race kids, is somehow a “white supremacist”, and that a gay British Jew with black boyfriends and fairly moderate conservative positions like Milo is somehow a “Nazi”. It’s why leftists throw pies at speakers like Ann Coulter and David Horowitz who challenge their worldview rather than engaging them in question and answer sessions. There is NO equivalent to this behavior on the American right.

Given leftist domination of the media/entertainment industry and modern university faculties, it’s easy for liberals to go through life in a bubble, being inundated with one sided talking points and not being regularly exposed to unfiltered conservative arguments and facts their liberal mentors have omitted (what Kelly Anne Conway actually meant by “alternative facts”, though I would have gone with “additional facts”). This has led to the atrophying I mentioned in the op. By contrast it’s very difficult for conservatives to go through life in the same bubble, and almost impossible if they go through college.

Conservatives are constantly exposed to leftist talking points and have to think and defend their positions. This has led to them tending to be much better debaters than leftists.

Leftists weren’t always so shallow and vacuous. Marx himself was one of the great philosophical system builders. You used to be able to find intelligent left wingers who would engage in substantive, even honest discussions. But they’ve dwindled to almost nothing, replaced by bottom feeders who merely parrot bullet points they’re spoonfed and can no longer think independently in any meaningful way.

Trump may be crude by Republican standards, but the left brought him on themselves. Liberal tactics and goals put Trump in office. The populist wave that put Trump into power is an early step in conservatives finally having to fight fire with fire, and people of various ideologies working to rise up against the insidious PC establishment. Even Trump is mild and accurate in his statements compared to what routinely passes for discourse on the left. More importantly, his general election victory was necessary to preserve the real America, given what we were facing with the alternative.

I agree that discourse and these other things we’re discussing have gotten worse (to your point) in recent years, perhaps partly due to the left’s hysterical reaction to having its media monopoly ended. But these tactics and this inherent hatred by leftists long predate FNC and conservative talk radio. Leftist behavior is a problem with the left itself and not something that can be fairly blamed on its conservative opponents.

Leftists have increasingly been trying to kill the other side, the American left being an only somewhat paler reflection of the global left that has inflicted such devastation and horror on humanity for the past 100 years.

That's the short answer, krl.



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Everything you said was wrong. The Democrats were the party of slavery and segregation, while
Republicans freed the slaves and passed all the civil rights acts (including 1964's and the one de-racializing adoption in the 1990s championed by the Gingrich GOP). The Confederacy ended in 1865. There was no party switch. Republicans were always more the party of freedom and equality under the law while Democrats (from their founding around Andrew Jackson) were always more the party of machine politics, corruption, demagoguery, and liberalism (once it arose around the turn of the 20th Century). Democrats denounced Republicans as "pro-business" even in the mid 1800s, and Republicans denounced Democrats as "socialist" even in Teddy Roosevelt's era. In the 1920s Calvin Coolidge, a Republican president from New England, extolled the virtues of the free market and limited government in the same speeches where he crusaded against lynching blacks. He would have fit in at a modern TEA Party rally. Southern Democrat segregationists were mostly liberals. They were economic populists who supported FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, and who agreed with northern Democrats on taxes and welfare spending. Most of them remained Democrats their entire lives (e.g. former KKK member and eventual Democrat Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd).

Conservative Republicans always opposed racial discrimination, just as today. They gradually became more popular in the south as race become less of an issue there. Today the American south is the least bigoted region of the country, as evidenced by almost all the race riots the past half century occurring in the northeast or on the west coast. Meanwhile New England, which had gotten rich by embracing libertarian/conservative policies for centuries, shifted to the left from around 1970 on.