Shannon Love

Palin Wars Part V: The Leftists Strike Back

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Sometimes the Internet gives you a present.

While writing my previous post on Palin and the Left’s Status-Anxiety, I worried that I wouldn’t make my case sufficiently because I didn’t have room to add in any examples of the kind of leftist comments on Palin I thought supported my hypothesis.

Thankfully, Google’s inbound link service alerted me to a link from a leftwing blog in which virtually every comment provides a very good example of the kind of emotion-driven reasoning that I have written about in the Palin post and elsewhere.

I think there is fodder for several posts in some of the comments, but for now let’s just follow the main theme.

The parent post is hosted at Science Blogs and was written by Ed Brayton who describes himself as

… a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda’s Thumb

He’s apparently some kind of professional atheist and science journalist.

(Let me just say, that I always get a little shiver of fear when I read someone like Brayton. I can’t help thinking, “that could have been me.”

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Palin Dumb? History Says, “Nope!”

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In this previous post, commentator Mauro made this rather typical statement in regard to Palin and Tea Party members.

Those people in the middle states aren’t “educated elites” (and this is by no means a generalization of *all* people in those middle states), and they have resentment toward those who are more qualified to make rational decisions…And this is *bad*, because it turns out that yes, we college-educated guys *are* so smart, and we don’t go burning Korans or blindly invading Middle Eastern countries when we’re angry.

Is Mauro correct? Do the “college educated” (by which he clearly means leftist intellectuals) have a track record of making better decisions than the kind of middle-class people who support Palin and join the Tea Party?

Well, yes and no. It’s pretty safe to say leftists don’t burn Korans. Instead, they burn American flags and drop crucifixes in urine. Plus, its true that they never, ever fight for anyone’s freedom from tyranny, for any reason.

However, leftists do make their own class of colossally bad decision whose consequences dwarf those made by people like Palin and the Tea Party members.

Leftists make irrational decisions that arise from their own intellectual hubris. All leftists (and most intellectuals) vastly overestimate their individual and collective understanding of complex, poorly understood and hard to predict phenomena. In every generation leftists have claimed to precisely and accurately understand something that in hindsight they clearly did not. Likewise, in every generation, there were people much like the modern Tea Party or Palin supporters, i.e., religious, supposedly uneducated, dullard bourgeois who told the leftists they were wrong.

In many major areas, history showed that the supposedly ignorant and unimaginative bourgeois proved correct in the end.

For reasons of brevity lets look at the two biggest leftwing-intellectual idiocies of the last century: Marxism and Freudianism.

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Fisking Mauro, Part 1: Raising Beyond One’s Station

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I am not a big Palin fan. I am an atheist and not a social conservative in any meaningful sense. In my estimation, her chief virtue is that she annoys and enrages all the right people. However, I do recognize that she does honestly represent a wide and vital section of the America polity. I think the left’s inability to see Palin as a legitimate political figure reveals a great deal about their insular mindset and their deep need to see themselves as superior to other people even at the cost of a loss of political power.

In my previous post on Palin hate as leftwing status-anxiety, an anti-Palin comment by a Mauro jumped out at me as a prime example of how leftists think about themselves and the rest of us. I wanted to go through it in detail to try and explain where these cognitive distortions come from.

I’ll break this up into several posts. In this post, I will examine how Mauro’s comment reveals his intrinsically elitist world view:

Mauro starts with:

… I think that the real issue with her is that she’s basically a walking cliché.

and followed it by:

Honestly, I can’t remember any of her positions right now…

His further comments demonstrate that he really doesn’t understand anything what Palin thinks or even what she has stated. If he doesn’t have even basic knowledge of her positions, how can he say Palin is a cliche?

Easy: When applied to person, a cliche is just a euphemism for a stereotype. Stereotypes are at best statistical descriptions of groups of people that exist solely in the minds of the individuals holding the stereotypes. In short, stereotypes are simplified cartoons that don’t reflect the real people that they purport to describe.

Mauro is clearly working from a cartoonish stereotype. He doesn’t know anything about Palin other than she is not one of his imagined leftist elite. So where does he get his stereotype from in the first place?

It’s not her ideas that are problematic, but her middle-America anti-intellectualism and superstition that is a problem,[emph. added]

Here we see Mauro’s highly typical leftist elitism in its purest form. It’s not Palin’s ideas that he sees as dangerous but simply who she is. By superstition he means “religious” and by anti-intellectualism he means, “refuses to acknowledge how brilliant and infallible people like Mauro are.”

Mauro problem with Palin isn’t that she is unusual, Mauro’s problem with Palin is that he believes her to be an ordinary middle-class American who are themselves unfit to influence public policy

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Palin and the Left’s Status-Anxiety

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The left’s obsession with Sarah Palin is one of the most interesting political and social phenomena of our time. The degree and volume of venom directed at her staggers the imagination. It is unprecedented in recent times especially for someone who does not currently hold office.

This comment on a Hit and Run thread, provides a common example:

You jest, but on my drive home last night I listened to a couple of NPR disembodied voices opining as to how Sara Palin was different, even in today’s polarized political environment, because she demonizes the opposition. The irony was particularly palpable because the “round table” discussion about how evil Sara Palin is was the lead-in to an interview with the author of a “behind the scenes” expose book about Sara Palin that promises to expose her as the evil, manipulative monster that she really is and was immediately preceded by a blurb that the creepy reporter who moved in next door to the Palin family to spy on them had moved out.
 
The callers were able to restore some balance, however. The first caller they put on wanted to know why the press hadn’t fully investigated Palin (which the panel agreed was singular to Palin and no other politicians escape such scrutiny). The same caller proceeded to point out that she never believed the story about the birth of Trig, the down’s syndrome baby, and wondered why the media never fully investigated that. When the “balanced” round table gave a perfunctory acceptance of the premise rather than denouncing her “birther” views, I gave up and changed the channel.

Leftists try to rationalize the hatred by claiming that Palin is an extremist, but that is easily disproved by comparing where she stands on various issues versus how many Americans hold the same views. Moreover, if she truly were an extremist, she wouldn’t be a threat because she would have no electoral base.

No, the best explanation for the left’s bizarre Palin obsession is status-anxiety. Status-anxiety occurs when a person believes that their position in a real or imagined social hierarchy is threatened. Leftists react emotionally to Palin because of the threat she poses to their own individual sense of status. All their other arguments are just put forth to rationalize that emotional reaction.

In short, it is not the ideas she puts forth, its that someone like her is significant at all.

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The Media’s Extremist Pixies

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Don Surber [h/t Instapundit] asks if the media should be ignoring the nutjob pastor in Florida who is threatening to burn Korans.

I think they should but not for any reason immediately involved with this threat. I think the media should make a point of ignoring all stunts which are clearly designed solely to attract media attention.

Why shouldn’t the media ignore them? As consumers of media, do any of us personally really care what those nutjobs are doing? Isn’t media coverage the event might get the only reason we might care?

By paying attention to them in the first place, we’ve created an idiotic feedback loop in which we pay attention to events that are only worthy of attention because we pay attention to them in the first place!

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