Why are liberals so angry?
Recovering from major surgery I found myself going through various news articles, columns and think pieces on both sides of most contemporary issues. In almost every case, what begins as a discussion or the statement of a thesis dissolves into speculation, rumor mongering and outright disinformation. I'm not exonerating either sides because conservatives have their blowhards as well , including our current president. But what seems to me to be more of an issue is the way anger seems to go from zero to fifty with no moderation in between. Most psychologists would consider this an irrational overreaction to go from complacency to anger and to do so with such zeal. So my question stands, why are liberals so angry?
Liberals, by and large, have put HUMANITY as defined by an overall stereotype on the pedestal in terms of control. There are no accidents anymore-there is always blame to be levied. Events in earlier times that would have been labeled catastrophes, natural disasters or mere accidents are now assessed blame, usually with some I told you so agenda narrative attached. We saw this with Hurricanes Harvey, Sandy where instead of gather together like in prior storms, the narrative flowed fast and furious to seek someone or something to blame. While there were questions about the efficacy of placing supplies in Slidell, which was later hit by the surge, is that something anyone could have predicted? We saw this with the Fukushima disaster, where a natural event caused unpredictable and unprecedented damage. Was this a situation that anyone wanted? Yet the blame was attached.
This attitude has filtered down to individual tragedies and events as well. It used to be that if someone caused many deaths, the person committing the crime was blamed. Now instead there is blame for a law, blame for a politician, blame spread around to everyone except the action person who acted. We see this in education where teachers are now blamed for student failures even if they have pulled all stops to take action and try to help students succeed. We see this in life where parents exonerate their child from all consequences of bad decisions, lawyering up first and asking questions second. This is what happens when we allow Man to believe that all outcomes can be controlled and that it is the job of a benevolent, but oppressive government to pick winners and losers.
Conservatives, by and large, tend to place more emphasis on the concept of chance and free will-assigning blame when someone arbitrarily ignores common sense or prevailing attitudes. This is not always the easy path, because it lacks risk and can prevent innovation. But what conservatism does supply is structure. Children thrive on structure. It allows them to scaffold their own dreams on top of existing knowledge as opposed to simply stating a goal and assuming the world wants it to become fact.
Liberals, on the other hand, tend to try to play god and manufacture positive outcomes. We see this with preferential admission into colleges and hiring. But even more it has seeped down to
where entire educational and social systems are modified to INSURE that groups succeed even to the point of weighting their test scores to give the appearance of success. This is counterintuitive to the entire history of humanity. It was always the successful, strong, innovative or wise who survived to improve the general populations lot in life. Now we are subsidizing mediocrity for the sake of kindness and at the same time perpetuating second class reasoning and absolute lies as the answer to our problems.
You cannot legislate morality. You cannot guarantee outcomes no matter how you try. You can tax it, you can formulate it and you can create paradigms to encourage it, but humanity overall is about the individual and that individual's successes or failures in life. When you prop up those who are not willing to put in the effort, you end up with a demanding, immature workforce which expects to be overly compensated for less work. This opens the doors for those populations who DO want to do the heavy lifting to succeed in disproportionate ways. An example would be the incursion of people from eastern Asia to the US. Their native culture encompasses responsibility to elder, the family and hard work.
The school where I taught was very diverse. We had students from all around the world. In that setting it was apparent that different cultural overlays had more impact on success than imposed programs or action. In many Korean families the entire family is involved in the family's business. Children are expected to excel, even if they came here not knowing English. Compare that to Hispanic students who were born here, who have been in ELL programs since PreK and who still haven't managed to learn English well enough to graduate until they are past the normal age. What does this say about that culture? Of course it comes down to more than race or culture. White kids fail. Girls fail. But overall the demographic group that struggles the most in school are black males. What societal ill promotes this lack of caring about success in academic fields? Could the glorification of sports at every level have something to do with it? Could the number of single parent families have a role?
When you move all of this to the government level, it appears we have two views. There's Mommy Government, which wants to save everyone and keep people happy even if it means taking away the freedom to be a failure if we want. Then you have Daddy Government which is all about rules and limits and requirements. Imagine how agencies, torn like the children of divorce, between these two overriding attitudes will alternately function and fail ultimately creating the kind of public outcry we're seeing in the Senate right now. My Dad used to discuss politics with us at the dinner table. He said "Politics is a pendulum, as surely as it swings one way, it will swing the opposite way just as far." We are seeing that now as the Left has had eight years of unchecked and unreasonable control. And the folks in control don't like the Right pushing back.
