Today is my annual struggle (since 2009) to try to think of my birthday as something better than “Finding Dad Dead In His Chair Day,” and I must say, Facebook Friends have been especially helpful by sending along happy birthday wishes. Since none of them de-friended me for political differences during and after the campaign, I was intrigued by this essay in the National Review, titled “Ten Reasons Left-Wingers Cut Trump Voters from Their Lives.”
Now as I have made painfully clear, I was no Trump voter, having determined early on that I would sooner undergo a head-transplant from a warthog, even a Bernie-boosting warthog, but I was no Hillary Clinton supporter either, and was especially eager to shoot down particularly stupid memes from OccupyDemocrats, MOVE-ON, and the National Federation of the Brain Debilitated when my friends posted them, which was depressingly often. (Come to think of it, most of those FBFs who are addicted to progressive memes haven’t sent me birthday wishes, the bastards, but then the National Review piece wasn’t called “Ten Reasons Left-Wingers Won’t Say Happy Birthday To Facebook Friends Who Point Out That The Memes They Post Have Been Proven To Cause Retardation In Chimps.
The article is biased, of course: it’s the National Review. Obviously its assertion is over-generalized. But how fair is its general proposition, which is that the 2016 phenomenon of people cutting off friends and family is “one-sided”?
“Why don’t we hear about conservatives shunning friends and relatives who supported Hillary Clinton? After all, almost every conservative considered Clinton to be ethically and morally challenged. And most believed that another four years of left-wing rule would complete what Barack Obama promised he would do in 2008 if he were elected president — fundamentally transform the United States of America. In other words, conservatives were not one whit less fearful of Clinton and the Democrats than Democrats were of Trump and Republicans. Yet virtually no conservatives cut off contact with friends, let alone parents, who supported Clinton.”
For the record, here are author and conservative talk show host Dennis Prager’s the “ten reasons,” without his exposition:
1. Just like our universities shut out conservative ideas and speakers, more and more individuals on the left now shut out conservative friends and relatives as well as conservative ideas.
2. Many, if not most, leftists have been indoctrinated with leftism their entire lives.
3. Most left-wing positions are emotion-based.
4. Since Karl Marx, leftists have loved ideas more than people.
5. People on the right think that most people on the left are wrong; people on the left think that most people on the right are evil.
6. The Left associates human decency not so much with personal integrity as with having correct — i.e. progressive — political positions.
7. Most individuals on the left are irreligious, so the commandment “Honor your father and your mother” means nothing to those who have cut off relations with parents because they voted for Trump.
8. Unlike conservatives, politics gives most leftists’ lives meaning.
9. The Left tends toward the totalitarian. And every totalitarian ideology seeks to weaken the bonds between children and parents.
10. While there are kind and mean individuals on both sides of the political spectrum, as a result of all of the above, there are more mean people on the left than on the right.
Your Happy Birthday Jack Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz is this:
Is the article fair?
Is this a generally accurate description of progressives/liberal/Democrats, or is it just more partyism and demonization of “them”? Which, if any, of the ten reasons are accurate and therefor honest and fair, and which are untrue?
I guess I’ve already signaled that my own experience suggests that it’s not fair, though I don’t know enough Trump voters to say with any basis that they haven’t cut off the liberals in their lives, or that they have. At first glance, I would say that #2 alone is undoubtedly true, and I have been coming to believe that #9, frighteningly, is becoming more and more true.
Your analysis is sought…