Conservatives take the positions they do because they believe they’re best for society. Liberals take the positions they do because they make them feel and look compassionate or superior to hold those positions.
This is complete nonsense. Liberals believe that their positions are the best for society just as fervently as conservatives do.
Once you get the mentalities, you can predict where each side will come down on issues.
No you can't, at least not always. Take abortion as an example. If liberals were the touchy-feely-emotion-y party and conservatives were the strictly logical party, then both positions on abortion would be flipped, because conservatives claim to care about the life of the child while liberals claim to care about the freedom of the mother to do what she wishes with her body.
An extremely expensive program designed to help disadvantaged minority children read better that has been proven not to work? Liberals will support it and conservatives will oppose.
In most instances, it's tough to prove that a program does not work, because very few things absolutely do not work under any circumstance. Liberals can make an incredibly valid argument that "though this doesn't work as well as I'd like, it does still work to an extent, so I feel that it is worth the cost."
A program that cuts the deficit by cutting people off the welfare and disability rolls who don’t belong there in the first place? Conservatives will support it and liberals will oppose.
This is because liberals tend to think that most people on welfare have legitimate reasons for needing it. It stands to reason that when your baseline assumption is that those on welfare don't belong there, that you would support removing them from it, but many liberals disagree with such a posit.
A program called “Puppies for Orphans” that hands out “therapy dogs” to poor children at $100,000 per year in cost? Liberals will support it and conservatives will oppose.
This is probably not an actual program.
If Gates gives away so much money that Microsoft goes out of business
Bill Gates' money is not Microsoft. No matter how much of his own money he gives away, Microsoft will not go out of business, because the two aren't related in that way.
Many people talk about compassion, but only a few are going to go work overseas like Mother Teresa, consistently give 10% of their income to charity, or adopt orphaned boys.
This sentence is intelligible and was clearly not proofread. Is the author saying that many people that talk about compassion give 10% of their income and adopt orphans? Is he saying that many people talk about compassion, but most don't do anything about it? Is he saying that Mother Teresa giving her life up for her cause is legitimate compassion but that liberals are all talk?
On the other hand, 99 times out of 100, liberals’ “compassion” is nothing more than “virtue signaling.” They’re offering to take your money and give it to someone else. They’re offering to take rights away from other people that they don’t care about.
It's absurd to think that liberals are evil thieves trying to steal your money and give it to random people on the street that they don't care about. If liberals are trying to steal our money, then sure. Maybe that's believable. But they'd be doing it to pocket for themselves and make themselves richer. What he's effectively saying here is that there are people out there who are so greedy that they want to take everything you own, but that instead of keeping it for their own benefit, they give it to strangers who seem to need it more than they do, yet they don't care about those strangers at all. That doesn't make any sense. Also, his "99 time out of 100" claim was pulled entirely out of his ass with no citation.
It’s cost-free for someone to talk about how much he hates racism because racism is almost universally despised in America. There is no price to be paid for attacking a zoo that made the difficult decision to shoot a gorilla because a boy had fallen into his pen. If you’re not a Christian and have no moral qualms about gay marriage, it’s easy to call for the law to crack down on bakers or wedding photographers who refuse to participate because they find it morally repulsive.
This whole paragraph probably has a legitimate argument, but it doesn't flow at all. He needs to proofread writings that he's going to publish.
The problem with all this pointless virtue signaling is that because there is no real cost to it, there are no limits to it. As long as liberals lose nothing by advocating a position, but get credit for being compassionate for taking it, why not go for it?
This creates a situation where people have to keep on upping the ante to stand out. If racism is almost universally despised, how do you get credit for being more sensitive about race than other people? You find new things to call racist. Eventually, when liberals moved beyond parody when it came to race issues, they showed they were compassionate by obsessing over the 3% of the American population that’s gay. Then from there, they became maniacally focused on the .3% of the population (if that) that claims to be transgender.
Sure, this is a very valid argument and I'm glad to see it made. This is the stance that he should have taken for his whole piece. There's a strong argument to be made that liberals are just pandering to minorities in an effort to appear more caring.
If every single thing on the liberal wish list for minorities, gays and transgenders were to happen tomorrow, a new list of demands or some new series of pet groups that need to be protected would spring up almost instantaneously. That’s because it’s not about the specifics; it’s about an arms race between liberals trying to signal their virtue by being willing to go further than other people in being conspicuously compassionate while getting in some cheap shots on their political opponents at the same time.
Maybe this is true, but most on the left would say that the reason that such a "new list of demands" would pop up would be because our society doesn't do enough to protect minorities in the first place, and that constant diligence is the only way to progress as a society. I think even most conservatives would agree that there are problems that exist that the political parties are not actively pursuing the resolution of today, and that they would like to see those issues addressed as well.
The problem with this is that compassion, real or fake, has little to do with what makes a society successful.
Why bother specifying "real or fake" when you've spent the last tweleve paragraphs claiming that it's fake? This seems disingenuous. Stand by your convictions if you really hold them and call it "fake compassion" if that's what you feel that it is. By questioning everything you're written previously, you're implying that you know that most of what you've written is overly exaggerated and non-reflective of what liberals actually believe.
Contrary to what some people seem to believe, diversity and sensitivity to women’s issues are not what makes a military successful.
These are two distinct issues, and many people (conservatives and liberals alike) would probably argue that a "successful military" is not necessarily reflective of a good society anyway.
A paint job isn’t irrelevant, but it’s also not going to win the race for you.
He's dithering over whether he believes that "liberals’ 'compassion' is nothing more than 'virtue signaling.'" as he said before or whether it "isn't irrelevant.
Ultimately, his point seems to be that conservatives base their argument in logic, while liberals base their argument in emotion. To a minor extent, perhaps this is true, but handwaving away liberals as just being emotional fools is itself illogical. More over, to try to claim logical superiority over your opponent requires much more thought put into your arguments than the author has showcased here.