The Arrrogance of the Right
I fear my little brother is lost. I don't know what happened to his mind, but sometime in his developmental years all of my father's skewed conservatism siphoned into him and now he is little more than an antagonistic parrot who apparently lives to jab people in the ribs to see if he can get a rise out of them
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In my personal experience, I have seen right-wingers try to force their morals and religion on others; I have seen them honestly believe they are "the only side with sense" and the rest of us are inferior college-brainwashed bumpkins; I have seen them take vocabulary to create demeaning hot-button words that cloud issues to illustrate some overarching theme of outrage or control (the actual meanings are beneath them); I have seen them tell people from other countries that Americans are "the best" when they haven't even left our shores; and I've seen them whine endlessly about the dangers of the leftist media when they patently refuse to even check if their right-wing propaganda is at all based in truth or whether they're just generating outrage to keep the cogs turning. Furthermore, they then have the gall to come up to me -- someone whose job it is to be the media -- and tell me I don't know what I'm talking about because Rush said this one thing. (even though they haven't done any research.) That is arrogance.
For the lefties, I would call them condescending. I've seen plenty of them who write off people who don't hold their beliefs as "stupid hicks." I know many who put themselves on a bit of a pedestal for their "compassionate beliefs" and then look down on others who don't for perfectly logical reasons. I know a bunch who -- for some reason -- seem to think that the masses are too dumb to take care of themselves and need government to do it for them. However, I have not known the left to be nearly as domineering, angry or as loud as the right. On a personal level, they tend to be more willing to see exceptions to the rule, even if they refuse to change their oh-so-brilliant opinion on the matter. It's the softer side of fanaticism, if you will.
Of course, on either side of the spectrum you do have closed-mindedness because no one really enjoys being told they're wrong. Unfortunately, I do think that this is largely a nation of sheep voting down party lines because it's easy and there's community in it. I think that may have started to shift, and I hope people really do start to take an interest in their government and the actual issues at hand... but I'm not holding my breath.
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