Because they are too afraid to be right. It’s that simple.
In my previous post, I showed that everything with “conservatives” boils down to fear. They are more fearful than is good for human beings. And that fearfulness makes them choose unwisely.
It’s like being drunk. When you’re drunk, your perception is warped. Your judgment is impaired. You make bad choices. And people suffer for those choices.
Being overly fearful is very similar. You don’t perceive things as they are but as you fear them to be. You make bad choices, attacking or fleeing from the phantoms of your imaginary fears. And people suffer.
Leonard Pitts wrote a great column recently in which he reminds everyone just how wrong conservatives have always been about almost everything:
They stood athwart the civil rights movement, William F. Buckley once arguing (and later repenting) that white people’s “cultural superiority” entitled them to dominate African Americans.
They opposed women’s rights, Barry Goldwater once saying that he had nothing against a woman running for vice president, “just so she can cook and get home on time.”
Nor are the right’s wrongs limited to matters of human freedom. Every art form that ever dared deviate from status quo — music, film, books, comic books — has had to run a gauntlet of conservative opprobrium. As far back as the 1920s, they were up in arms over a new music called jazz.
Pitts admits that “conservatives” might occasionally have been right about foreign policy or military strategy. But I chalk that up to the fact that even Hitler occasionally couldn’t help saying something true. This is the rule-of-thumb that "even a broken clock reads true twice a day."
But mostly, they are dead wrong. For instance, they have been tragically wrong about the pandemic. It’s quite clear in the CDC data in this article that red-state denizens have been dying from COVID at many times the rate of blue-staters. And this article shows that they were deathly wrong about wearing masks, which really do prevent the spread of the virus.
So it’s no surprise that “conservatives” are doubling down on anti-science prejudice with their “hate the experts” initiatives, or on anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice with their “don’t-say-gay” laws, or on anti-education prejudice with their “critical-race-theory” prohibitions, or anti-women prejudice with their abortion-banning “detect-a-heartbeat” laws.
What about their excessive fear makes them so consistently wrong?
Not only do “conservatives” fear much more than normal people do, but they also fear the wrong things. This makes them scared-squared: they are wrong to be as frightened as they are and they pick the wrong things to be frightened about.
A pandemic is a scary thing. It is something to worry about. Most of the world took serious precautions during the past two years to minimize its spread.
But not “conservatives.” What were they frightened about? Liberals, of course—who put stock in all those science-based governmental authorities trying their damnedest with the available information to prevent spreading virus by enforcing mask mandates, by getting vaccinations out to the populace, by keeping people at home.
Yes, the Libs were the enemy for "conservatives,” not the pandemic. Talk about choosing the wrong target. Now there are almost a million Americans dead from COVID, the majority of them from red states. But that's OK with “conservatives." At least they died without the humiliation of wearing liberal masks or taking microchip-laced vaccines that would infect their minds with liberal propaganda.
Of the great many things that “conservatives” fear, change is at the top of the list. They feel—quite wrongly—that they will be safe if things stay the same.
No feeling could be more mistaken. Life changes much more than it stays the same. By insisting on today's status quo—or what is worse, the status quo of 1957!—“conservatives” virtually guarantee that they will be out of joint with reality. They make all sorts of wrong choices because they don't recognize that the world is no longer what it was when they formed their prejudices. This is frustrating for them.
And rather than learn from their frustrations, “conservatives” are much more likely to make another bad choice. They prefer to lash out at those who work for change. This is worse than counterproductive. It doesn’t get them what they want (the feeling of safety) and it makes enemies of the people who could help them because they are more adept at navigating change (liberals).
Don’t let “conservative” belligerence fool you. They want you to think that they re tough guys because they brandish weapons and go off on foul-mouthed rants against liberals. Don’t fall for it.
The more weapons they carry, the more afraid they are. The more aggressive they act, the more frightened they are.
Think about it. Someone who is unafraid does not need props to signal fearlessness. Being unafraid reveals itself in character and action, just like any internal state. And the internal state of weaponized meatheads is the state of a frightened child.
So this, in a nutshell, is why “conservatives” have always been wrong about everything: They are frightened children making bad choices who mistakenly believe that acting like bullies and thugs will keep them safe.
This is the best explanation of these idiots I've heard. I'm very open-minded, but I find myself really hating these stupid republicans.