Why Liberals Lose

“If liberals are so fucking smart why do they lose so goddamn always?!?”

This quote from Aaron Sorkin’s most famous opening scenes has always struck me. The whole speech is amazing, but this quote stands out. As comedian Stephen Crowder points out, this is the only negative thing said about liberals in Will McAvoy’s progressive speech. So this question is asked by a liberal to liberals.

Liberals will give a plethora of reasons for why they lose: gerrymandering, Fox News propaganda, not being progressive enough, not being centrist enough, etc.

There may be some truth in these explanations, but I believe the question answers itself. If liberals are so smart. This assumes that liberals are so much smarter than others, that they are autmogically correct about everything. This is the attitude that I often see liberals assume and I have often fallen into myself.

This is why Liberals lose. Their arrogance creates their downfall. This is seen often liberal’s inability to convince their conservative friends and family and their dismissal of this failure by claiming Conservatives to be stupid or brainwashed. Progressives will often say, “facts have a liberal bias” but are so foolish as to think that facts alone will convince anyone and so arrogant to think that every fact must lead to a progressive policy.

First, humans are not purely rational creatures. We make our decisions based on what we feel, how we were raised, and who we surround ourselves with. Our beliefs are less about objective facts, but about a story or set of stories we tell ourselves about how the world works. It is narrative, not fact, that governs our thinking. And it doesn’t matter that Democrats deem it propaganda, what Fox News cultivates for it’s viewership is a narrative that helps them make sense of this world. It’s also worth noting that Liberals do not come about their political ideology for purely factual reasons, but for the same reasons that anyone does, the reasons I listed above.

It is arrogance to think that a compelling story that might have truth to it can be thwarted with cold facts handed down dismissively from liberals who think they are smarter than the person they are speaking with and haven’t bothered to fully investigate why their interlocutor believes as they do.

So if liberals want to stop losing, they need humility and narrative. They need to stop calling conservatives mouth-breathers and treating them like sheeple instead of people. They may be at complete odds with that worldview, but the men and women who hold that worldview have active mental lives and a host of reasons for believing as they do. Even if some people in the GOP and Alt-Right are simpletons, what use is it to treat them as such?

Liberals also need to work at building a narrative that interacts with and challenges conservative worldviews. It is not enough to craft a story that is factually correct but has nothing in common with what conservatives believe. They must tell stories that conservatives can jive with and possible even accept, but that also challenge their thinking. These stories must be told with compassion and a desire to come together around a shared story about how the world works. Furthemore, liberals must be open to changing aspects of their beliefs in the process of dialogue. Not all facts have a liberal bias, after all. Not all facts will have a bias towards any one ideology because the world is a frightfully messy place.

If liberals cannot do this going forward, America will remain divided and liberals will continue to lose.

P.S., I suspect that you could replace Liberalism with Conservatism, intellectual superiority with moral superiority, and you would arrive at a similar prescription for Republicans and American Conservatives.)

P.P.S., I recommend watching the Newsroom if you haven’t already; Same goes for the West Wing and anything else that genius has had a hand in creating.

P.P.P.S. This blog has been edited in light of some points made by NotSure. Their comments might, consequently, make less sense now and this should be kept in mind. We actually talked privately and she recommended the following article that I believe is very salutary for liberals to read, not for the purpose of necessarily abandoning their ideology, but refining it and bettering it.

~Charles P.