Political Entomology and Blue-Bellied Liberals

Some political behavior is just so primitive that human psychology falls short of explaining it. Instead, a keen-eyed psychologist has to rely on other sciences, like, oh, I don't know, entomology.

Ever notice how ants, in their busy peregrinations, are constantly rushing up to each other and bumping heads? It turns out that it's not just to exchange pleasantries with one another, but to feed one another. If one ant is well fed and the other one hungry, the former will produce a drop from its mouth that the other one gratefully gobbles down.

Apparently, ants have what is known as a "social stomach" in addition to a personal stomach. Until food passes into the personal stomach and becomes the private property of said ant, any ant can stake a claim to it. They have even done experiments on this, for example, feeding a few ants honey that has been colored with a blue-tinted dye. Soon enough, all of the ants in the community will show a blue tint in their abdomen.

This is pretty much how the left/liberal world works. It is filled with media ants, Hollywood ants, academic ants, singing ants, judicial ants, educational establishment ants, and lastly, political ants who all run around randomly bumping their heads together, so that they're constantly regurgitating little half-digested bits of information and feeding them to one another. Pretty soon, just like the ants, they're all the same color.

Take, for example, the current bogus controversy about President Bush and the "domestic spying." If we could have somehow placed a dye in the New York Times, we would have seen how the meme left their proboscis and was sucked up by the MSM. From there, the MSM fed it to the politicians, and they bumped heads with all the legions of dopey TV lawyers like Jonathan Turley and Jeffrey Toobin, who assured us that what Bush has been doing is illegal. It then trickles further down into the darker precincts of academia, the left-wing blogosphere, and Air America, and pretty soon every liberal's stomach is the same color as the New York Times was last Friday morning.

I thought about this as I was reading Thomas Lifson's typically excellent piece, The Liberal Bubble. He points out how our liberal elites have managed to construct such "a comfortable, supportive, and self esteem-enhancing environment. The most prestigious and widest-reaching media outlets reinforce their views, rock stars and film makers provide lyrics and stories making their points, college professors tell them they are right, and the biggest foundations like Ford fund studies to prove them correct."

If you're an empty-headed liberal, you never have to go far to get yourself a fill-up. Just turn on the TV. Pick up the newspaper. Listen to Bono. Read Time or Newsweek. Go to college. Go to a Christmas party. Liberalism is always in the air, like political muzak. Unlike conservatives, liberals find themselves in a congenial world that constantly mirrors their half-baked philosophy, so that it need never be thought through and actually digested in the personal stomach-mind.

According to Lifson, "American liberals are able to live their lives untroubled by what they regard as serious contrary opinion. The capture of the media, academic, and institutional high ground enables them to dismiss their conservative opponents as ill-informed, crude, bigoted, and evil. The memes are by now familiar. Rush Limbaugh and the other radio talkers 'preach hate.' Evangelicals are 'religious fanatics' comparable to the Islamo-fascists in their desire to impose 'theocracy'.... Jewish conservatives are members of the 'neocon' cult..."

I am sure you have witnessed how free liberals feel to casually utter the most obnoxious, bigoted, and hateful comments about President Bush or about conservatives in general. Members of my own family do so. As Lifson writes, liberalism has been reduced to an "in-group code, perfectly understandable and comforting among the elect, but increasingly disconnected from everyone else, and off-putting to those not included in the ranks of the in-group. Rather than focusing on facts, logic, and persuasion, liberals find it easier to employ labeling ('That’s racist!') and airy dismissal of contrary views to sway their audience, and because their authority figures in the media and academia accept this behavior, they assume it is persuasive to the rest of us."

Within the liberal in-group, such expressions of group norms "earn prestige." Ted Kennedy tells it like it is! Howard Dan speaks truth to power! "But to the rest of society it becomes stranger and stranger, until it becomes repellant," writes Lifson. Liberals "experience their differences with the rest of society as a sign of their advanced intelligence and consciousness. At best, they are perplexed at how long it is taking everyone else to catch-up with their enlightened state of understanding."

Liberals inhabit a world of such constant intellectual mirroring and self-reinforcement, that it is possible for them to live a life relatively free of any "cognitive friction." Or at least it used to be. You can see how irritating it is--traumatic, really--for them to have to actually contend with competing world views, even something as innocuous as Fox Cable (which is clearly more populist than conservative).

Odd that liberals accuse President Bush of living in a bubble, when the typical liberal is so amazingly provincial. I don't think there is anyone living in a more cognitively closed intellectual world than the typical secular New York liberal, where there is no diversity of thought and all the stomachs are blue. I would be bored to death if I had to live in such an intellectually and especially spiritually endeadened environment. What bothers me about the New York Times is not so much the liberal bias, as its parochial and small-minded pseudo-sophistication.

Unlike liberals, conservatives, in order to get through life, must have "dual citizenship." They must learn to negotiate a world dominated by liberals and by liberalism. I would never dream of publicly uttering the kinds of things liberals feel free to say in public (although Petey is a different story--he has a sort of political Tourette's Syndrome). Since conservatives have been outsiders for so long, they not only know how to "pass" in polite society, but they also know how to argue. In fact, most conservatives (including myself) started out liberal, so we know exactly how liberals think. The reverse is almost never true; conservatives don't become liberal unless they have sustained a closed head injury or are unfortunate victims of some other organic process.

On the one hand it would be much easier to live in an intellectually narcissistic world that mirrored my own thoughts. But once that happens, you may realize that they're not even really your thoughts. They're just half-digested blue memes, passed from one mind to another, in a caricature of thought. Another predictable day in the liberal anthill.