Surprisingly, Slate today published a take-down of the left's tendency to pat themselves on the back for "eviscerating" everyone who doesn't agree with them by talking down to them:
All of these rants are overtly didactic; in the political universe they inhabit, liberals are liberals because they are in possession of all the facts, while people who disagree are not. The notion of politics as a sphere of competing interests has vanished. Instead, political differences are arranged by degrees of knowledge and ignorance. You don’t need to actually offer people anything to induce them to vote the right way; they just need information. And those who persist in making the wrong choice can only be stupid...
Their rants are so ineffective because they don’t see any opposing ideologies to combat or even real enemies to fight, only a mass of idiots who need to be hectored out of their idiocy. No wonder nobody’s listening; no wonder the left is doing so badly.
