Conservatives often get called out for their smugness, their seemingly holier than thou stances. They constantly ignore the feelings of others to give you facts often disguised by opinion. They call the mainstream media drive-bys, Rush calls liberals “low information voters”, and Ben Shapiro, well, just look at that guy; he was born staring down the doctor through his eyebrows.
The unfortunate appearance of smugness takes away from the reality of what conservatives believe. To be conservative is to be humble. By this I mean the acknowledgement that you nor anyone else has all the answers, and a group of people who have many of the answers still can’t create a system where all things are equal. This is why conservatives are for small government: they believe you are capable of managing your life and wish to let you do it.
Contrast this with leftists. Leftists believe that the federal government is the means to create equality of outcome, their utopian end goal. Leftists must have all the answers else they could not justify consolidating powers to a centralized government run by them. And make no mistake, leftist ideology demands you give up your freedoms. If you were free to choose, you may make a decision which leaves you better off than someone else which is antithetical to equality of outcome. To give up your freedom you must assume who you’re giving it to knows better than you. If a leftist is wrong, the entire ideology falls apart because who would give up their freedoms to someone who knows less than them? Therefore, they cannot allow for discourse with opposing opinions lest a fallacy emerge.
We see this on campuses where appearances by conservative speakers serve to provoke riots by students. Conservative speakers have been banned from speaking at private universities due to security concerns or forced to pay security fees on public universities. The next step is moving them off campus altogether. Leftist groups like Antifa emerged because anyone who disagreed with them must be a fascist and therefore could and must be kept from speaking. Leftists know they have all the answers and they want you to believe it too.
Their ideology does not allow for compromise between left and right because you cannot speak to someone who thinks differently from you because to think differently means to think wrongly. Even if discourse began, it would bear no fruit because a leftist could never admit to being wrong lest their ideology crumble. Meanwhile, a conservative would contend they are very likely wrong, much like everyone is likely wrong, so it is best to err on the side of freedom.
Keep this in mind when talking or listening to a conservative. They have come to the table acknowledging they do not have all the answers and only wish to afford you the opportunity to make and learn from your own mistakes rather than being forced to live by someone else’s.
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