Arrogance, Lies, and Weakness of Intellect

Orson Scott Card, again.

I have been puzzled for some time by the behavior of the Left, not just in this election but in the past decade.

Among issues he has with the Left, we have:

Gore tried every trick to win Florida, including blocking the counting of absentee ballots from military personnel overseas, yet the Left claims the Bush administration tried to suppress votes.

The Left claims the Republicans lie. What they call "lies" would not be called lies if uttered by any non-Republican.

When they trumpet examples of Republican "lies," they usually turn out to be in the following categories: 1. Statements that turn out to be wrong, though they were believed to be right at the time they were spoken. (In the rational world, we call these "mistakes.") 2. Statements that interpret legitimate data in ways that support the Republican view. (In the rational world, we call these "differences of opinion.") 3. Statements that point out obvious contradictions between what the Democratic candidates say and what they have said and done in the past. These are called "negative campaigning" and "mudslinging" and "distortions" and, of course, "lies," but these countercharges are offered instead of coherent explanations. Meanwhile, the Democrats engage in wholesale, flat-out lying, ranging from Kerry's false charges against America's soldiers in Vietnam, his phony claims about Christmas in Cambodia and what it was he threw over the fence when he said they were his medals, to present charges that Bush has blocked stem-cell research and that if Kerry were president, paralytics would rise up and walk.

The Left claims to have a monopoly on intellectuals, but who actually carries out intellectual analyses?

I get letters that are endless variations on the same theme: Mr. Card, I like your books and you seem so wise, but yet you're supporting Bush. Why don't you look at the evidence and realize that Bush is the devil and Kerry will save us from the disaster that Bush is leading us toward? Yet when I choose to answer these letters and ask them to get specific, it becomes obvious that none -- no, not one -- of these people has actually examined the evidence at all. These "intellectuals" show not even the slightest sign of ever having questioned their own opinions. Now, I have to regard this as the minimum standard for being regarded as a genuine intellectual -- that you have questioned your own beliefs and subjected them to rigorous tests of logic and evidence. <snip> I actually find better reasoning about and evidence in support of the Leftist point of view, and more skeptical but serious examination of Rightwing ideas, in magazines like Commentary and The Weekly Standard than I do in Leftist publications like Harper's and The New Yorker. What I find from most self-styled "intellectuals" in American public life is a laziness so profound as to be frightening. These are our opinion leaders and university professors? Have they forgotten that "the never-doubted opinion is not worth speaking"?

And arrogance? The Left believes it's the only faction that deserves to rule.

But I no longer believe it. Because the double standards of the Left today are not prompted by any sense that the lies and misbehavior they are concealing are wrong, but rather by the fact that the exposure of those lies and misbehavior would be politically inconvenient. Indeed, the whole question of right or wrong is irrelevant to the thinking of the Left. They speak the language of morality, declaring Bush to be evil (or variations on that theme), but in fact the Left lives in a moral universe in which there is only one moral virtue, and here it is: It is good and right for power to be in the hands of the Left. All "morality" on the Left and all "reasoning" on the Left flow from this unspoken axiom.

I've noticed that Kerry's criticisms of the Bush administration are vague, at best ("too many notes"). When specifics are mentioned, they are basically the same things the Bush administration has done or is already doing. The only difference is that Kerry will do these things in a "better and smarter" fashion. Why will Kerry's implementation be "better and smarter"? Because he's not a Republican.

The Left is firmly convinced that good is only possible in the world when they are in power; therefore they can do any number of unfair, indecent, or dishonest things in pursuit of that goal.