But, the gullibility of many on the right seems to have deeper roots even than this. That may be because at the most basic level, conservatives and liberals seem to hold different beliefs about what constitutes “truth.” Finding facts and pursuing evidence and trusting science is part of liberal ideology itself. For many conservatives, faith and intuition and trust in revealed truth appear as equally valid sources of truth.
Oh come on! The left walks around thinking Israel is an apartheid genocidal state, that if a man puts on a dress and says he's a woman then he's a woman, that Trump is an anti-Semite and that you can give people free money and still expect them to be productive. But Conservatives believe lies? Seriously?
ReplyDeleteMaskim
ReplyDeleteThe Left, left to its own devices, spins a utopia out of the air, whereas the Right crusades against enemies that aren't there. Both fall prey to mirages -- with fantasies lying to the right of the First Liberal, fears to the left of the First Conservative, and of course neither fears nor fantasies are factual. So this dichotomy makes for an easy critical picture of either to depict of the other.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is also why the Left rarely produces a top analyst; fantasy precludes clear thinking. And is why the Right has never produced a star investigative reporter; paranoia insulates, whereas Woodward-Bernstein style investigation requires hitting the beat and mixing it up with off-beat folks in off-beaten places. So the lions' share of top, truly insightful political analysis that one will read (e.g., Krauthammer, Wieseltier, Brooks, etc.) will come from stalwart right-of-center temperaments, and by contrast a similarly overwhelming share of deep probe reporting (e.g., the relatively recent Spotlight story of the Boston Globe on the Catholic Church, the NYT's late '90s reporting on the global white slave trade, SJ Mercury News '00s unravelling of CIA's abetting narcoterrorism) will come from dedicatedly left-of-center folk.