News flash: Liberals lack empathy

For conservatives, that is:

Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger.

(Via Ace and Hot Air Headlines.) From this, of course, the liberal writer draws the conclusion that "liberals need to work harder." She doesn't dare do the most obvious thing: QUESTION LIBERALISM.

If she ever did that, she might ask herself why contempt for others is so intrinsic to liberalism. I might suggest she read Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed, which explains that phenomenon in great detail.

The liberal worldview, Sowell explains, is all about moral narcissism. "Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy," as the subtitle says. Even if one grants that liberal goals are noble, liberal policies consistently fail to achieve those goals. Yet liberals defend their policies on the basis of their good intentions. In other words, what counts is not whether policies work, but whether they are well-intended.

Because of this bogus moral posturing inherent in the liberal worldview, the liberal automatically attributes bad faith to opponents of his policies: "I support this policy because I care about poor people. Everyone who cares about the poor is on my side. Therefore, opposition can only come from those who don't care about the poor."

A good example of this is the liberal approach to public education. Over and over, liberals insist that more money is the answer to the problems of public education. Yet it is impossible to demonstrate a causal relationship between school spending and school quality. Public schools in Washington, D.C., are among the worst in America, even though the system is near the top in per-pupil expenditure.

Mere facts, however, don't prevent liberals from attributing bad faith to conservatives who oppose more federal funding for K-12 education. And the feeling of superiority to others is, as Sowell documents, one of the basic incentives of the liberal worldview.