The Cultural Ignorance of the Left

RealClearPolitics points to a very interesting essay by a South Dakota businessman and lawmaker:

True or false: The average resident of New York City, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles or San Francisco knows more about life in France than they do about life in South Dakota.That question came to mind while listening to some of the establishment Democratic media discuss November's election results.

For just a little while, they noticed the rest of the country. I heard one correspondent joke that maybe they should send some foreign correspondents to the Midwest. Urban, blue state opinion is so uniformly liberal, it was hard for them to believe Bush could win. They didn't personally know many Bush supporters. They're seldom exposed to opposing points of view, and they never have to intellectually defend what they believe.

For them, every election like this is a reminder of how strange we red staters must be.One reason is that, despite the homage the urban liberals pay to the idea of diversity, you have to live in rural, red state America to experience intellectual diversity.

We hear both sides of the story. On abortion, the environment, gay marriage, war, and taxes, we hear the liberal side from the national media, and we hear both sides in the local media and radio. Sure, we hear the liberal side twice, but at least we hear the conservative side once.Another reason liberals never hear the other side is that they're such bullies. Intellectual bullies, that is.

Things like this are hard to quantify, but you can detect it in how liberals argue their political positions. Consider hate crimes laws. They criminalize thought. We can all agree that things like assault, murder, and theft should be illegal, but only an intellectual bully is interested in whether you had the correct thoughts about those you were murdering or assaulting.

Read the whole piece. And if you want an example of the smug, intellectual superiority that simple oozes from the people the author is describing, you couldn't do better than to read the comment section of the previous post (The Invisible News). "Mitzell" has the blue-state mentality down pat and there ain't nuthin' gonna part him from his stereotyped view of anyone who has ideas different from his.