Even some liberal-progressives admit that they don’t have a monopoly on clear thinking.
See Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson regarding the liberal fallacy:
Seeing themselves as supremely intelligent and rational, liberals find it inconceivable that other people might not willingly and happily accept their conclusions and their leadership. Therefore, they believe, the world’s problems can be solved simply by reasoned discussions in the halls of the League of Nations or the UN. Resort to military force, by the same token, is irrational and reprehensible, even in response to mortal threats to national interests.
In his 1920 Human Nature in Politics, Graham Wallas, a major theorist in the British socialist party, called this the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that human beings will act in domestic politics and foreign affairs on purely rational motives and only upon logical trains of reasoning.
Excerpt from Answering McCain’s Attacks, a Washington Post column written by editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.
Critics of [Obama’s] performance last week (including some supporters) focused on his “dollar bill” comments—his apparent invocation of race in saying that his opponent would try to scare voters because he, Obama, did not resemble previous presidents whose portraits adorn our currency.
I was more struck by the preamble to that comment: by Obama’s statements that McCain and the Republican Party are so bankrupt in policies that they can win only by spreading fear .
This resonates with an article of faith among many Democratic believers that has been so long and deeply held it is hardly considered noteworthy: that Democratic policies are so obviously superior, and so much more in the interest of a majority of voters, that only some form of chicanery can explain Republican election victories.
In this view of the world, Republican operatives, from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove, are more diabolically clever, and less bound by ethical restraint, than their Democratic counterparts. They manipulate cultural symbols and issues (God, guns and abortion) to deceive people into voting against their economic self-interest. Or they inflate security threats (Iraq, terror) to frighten them into voting against their self-interest. Obama himself a few months ago said that people who vote Republican are “tricked into believing” that Democrats are out of touch.
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