The week after this election, senior editor of Think Progress Ned Resnikoff penned a screed online about his unfortunate experiences with his neighborhood plumber. Here’s the harrowing story, as quoted by roving journalist Michael Tracey:
Certain radical leftists constantly attribute motives to random people without knowing those people. Plumbers do not want to murder you just because they are plumbers; it turns out that many plumbers are even Democrats! People with southern accents are not out to murder Jews en masse. If you feel like you’re living in near-Nazi Germany because a random plumber came to your house at your request to fix your shower and then was – gasp! – polite but had a different accent and different profession than you, then perhaps you’re the political hypochondriac.
Stop hyperventilating and get out a bit more.
But the bubble grows. Because people only associate with people with whom they agree, particularly on the left. Conservatives are confronted with leftist ideas and leftists personally on a regular basis – there’s only one conservative cable news source, Fox News, and only one major conservative national news publication, The Wall Street Journal (and even there, the reportorial side of WSJ leans left). Hollywood, the universities, and even ESPN are dominated by the left. Conservatives can’t escape leftism. Leftists can.
So when their bubble is punctured, they freak out. It’s why leftists are far more likely to “defriend” someone on Facebook for their politics than people on the right.
This sort of paranoia means that it will be difficult to live together. If you can’t hire somebody to do a job because you’re afraid they’re secretly a brownshirt, it’s going to make it tough to share a political system. Perhaps leftists ought to take a step back and recognize that people with whom they disagree – or don’t even know – aren’t the awful villains they picture in their heads.
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