The late Charles Krauthammer famously observed: "To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." That liberals are stupid seems self-evident, but Krauthammer put it down to liberals believing, deep down, that everyone is a nice person; and if they aren't nice, it is because they were deprived. "If only we could get social conditions right — eliminate poverty, teach anger management, restore the ozone, arrest John Ashcroft — everyone would be holding hands smiley-faced, rocking back and forth to 'We Shall Overcome.'" Thus, they are incapable of understanding the world as it is. As Krauthammer points out: "Who else but that oracle of American liberalism, The New York Times, could run the puzzled headline: 'Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling.'" But since liberals are so stupid, "the conservative attitude toward liberals is one of compassionate condescension."
On the other hand:
Liberals are not quite as reciprocally charitable. It is natural. They think conservatives are mean. How can conservatives believe in the things they do — self-reliance, self-discipline, competition, military power — without being soulless? How to understand the conservative desire to actually abolish welfare, if it is not to punish the poor? The argument that it would increase self-reliance and thus ultimately reduce poverty is dismissed as meanness rationalized.
And, therefore, to explain why conservatives would oppose the, to-them, self-evident good that comes from progressive policies, liberals engage in demonizing conservatives. After all, under the religion of the left, the only reason that the left cannot create their utopia is because they are being stymied by earthly demons and traitors: i.e., conservatives and moderates.
Krauthammer uses, as an example, how at the time he first published his article, liberals liked to blame election losses on "angry white males."
The “angry white male” was thus a legend, but a necessary one. It was unimaginable that conservatives could be given power by any sentiment less base than anger, the selfish fury of the former top dog — the white male — forced to accommodate the aspirations of women, minorities and sundry upstarts.
But while unaddressed by Krauthammer, the "angry white men" motif did not appear out of nowhere. As we now understand, it was the root and essence of the neo-Marxist critical thinking school which has given us critical race theory, critical gender theory, DEI, and many other gifts. But it wasn't all that original because it was just a gussied up version of the standard socialist/Marxist strategy of demonizing one group to bring the rest under their control.
For Stalin, the hated group to be rounded up and slaughtered were the Kulaks. Although Mao Zedong pretty much killed and starved everyone by the end of his evil life, the initial focus of the public hate under his rule were the intellectuals. Hitler focused public hate on the Jews. Pol Pot, of Cambodia, was more broad, with public hate extending to intellectuals, foreign nationals, Cambodian Christians, and Buddhist monks.
For the modern left in the United States, the group to be hated are white, straight, males (aka, the "angry white males"). I can only assume that the reason that "angry white males" and their allies have not been rounded up and shipped to concentration camps is that the left still doesn't exert the control over government as it needs. Nothing that another decade or two of immigration won't correct.
But it is due to the liberals' overwhelming need to demonize conservatives that we see Democrats blaming Republicans for the attempted assassinations of Trump. "If it wasn't for the Republicans being so evil," the liberals explain, "we wouldn't have to suggest violence; so it is really the Republicans' fault."
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Nicely written.
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