Thursday, October 13, 2005

Have Liberals Succumbed to Ideologism?

There is a constant barrage of frothy rhetoric spouted from the leaders on the left opining that conservatives ranks are filled with racists. The term racist stems from the term racialism which Oxford defines as:

Belief in the superiority of a particular race leading to prejudice and antagonism towards people of other races, esp. those in close proximity who may be felt as a threat to one's cultural and racial integrity or economic well-being.

I have never met someone as defined above. The strict interpretation of having a belief in the superiority of a particular race raises the bar for being a racist very high. Yet I know many people who exhibit the rest of the definition. Where I currently live in Hawaii, we have the most diversity of any state in the union. Also, Caucasians are not first or second on the list in terms of population. I would conjecture that this is the most prejudiced state in the nation. My Korean neighbors show clear disdain for the Micronesians. I know Chinese friends who honestly advise their children to avoid the Vietnamese. Even the largest group, Americans of Japanese descent, are prejudiced against each other depending on how many generations back your family emigrated. Do any of these people believe they are a superior race? Not that I have ever noticed.

Do conservatives believe they are a superior race? That is a completely ridiculous statement. And offensive to the large body of conservatives who are not descended from white western Europeans. But lets take the definition from above and substitute a few words:

Belief in the superiority of a particular ideology leading to prejudice and antagonism towards people of other ideologies, esp. those in close proximity who may be felt as a threat to one's cultural and ideological integrity or economic well-being.

I would propose that this could be the definition of the term ideologism (I always wanted to make an ism), and then would use the term immediately to label current liberal socialists as succumbing to ideologism. They may even believe they are a superior mental race. Their constant use of class warfare and racial innuendo falls clearly into the definition. And not only do they believe in the superiority of liberal socialism (bordering on the religious), they personally and globally feel threatened by conservatism. And that leads us back to race. These liberals who have succumbed to ideologism openly antagonize using racial discord. This leads to reverse prejudice where one race is identified and labeled racist when they clearly are not. More antagonism is created, and the resulting fear and separation is self destructive.

Non racial xamples of this behavior are the familiar mantra "Reagan was a simpleton" or "Bush is stupid". Clearly antagonistic statements originating from ideologism. The popular accusation of actively denying black votes, wherever liberals happen to loose and election, stems from ideologism. Most tragic is the accusation of racism against conservatives from the leaders in the urban minority communities. The cultural and economic well being of this population group has been effectively under the control of socialist liberals for forty years, yet the statistics show a staggering picture of waste and ineffectivity. And yet these same leaders constantly accuse conservatives of systematic racist practices. Reality is difficult to distort, but they persist in trying.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your definition is clever and worth adopting. It should obviously be applied to both extreme sides of the political spectrum, both of which suffer from the same thing.

When some conservative folks say that "Obama is a racist", or "Obama is a socialist", when Obama is, from the point of view of any objective observer nothing different from those moderate Republicans of a generation ago (hard to find in the Republican Party of today), and certainly nothing like a racist, they are ideologists on the right. And don't let me even get started about those who use the term "Nazi" or "Hitler" to refer to him.

Michael Moore is an ideologist, and so are Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. In fact, there are way more ideologists on the right than on the left, since the actual left in America is tiny. Of course, if you choose to use the term "left" to denominate someone who, for example, would support a wishy-washy mildly regulatory health care reform without even a public option, then you will believe there are many more leftists in America than there really are. And your definition of left is what pretty much everywhere else in the world is called "center".