Who are traditional liberals? Traditional liberals are a base of voters and Americans who blindly accept the mainstream media narratives of Trump’s inability to preside over the country, his damaging effect on race relations, his ineptitude in dealing with the coronavirus, and the Republican Party’s indifference to the middle class. The kicker is that these people think Joe Biden has better mental faculties and preparedness to lead a nation. He couldn’t lead the support group in his retirement home.

These people think Trump will lead to the destruction of America, somehow ignoring the fact that Black Lives Matter publicly states they want to dismantle American systems. The media calls Trump a divider, then praises an organization built on sowing division. 

One great frustration concerning traditional liberals is their complete unawareness of the changing world. They think Democrats in the mold of John F. Kennedy are still in office. They believe the lie that it was Democrats who ushered in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s and are therefore the party representing the underserved or little guy. They also must have missed the Reagan comment thirty years ago that he didn’t leave the Democrat party, the party left him. But traditional liberals hang on.

To be clear, what traditional liberals are not are leftists. You know a leftist when you see or hear one. These are the nihilists “protesting” in American streets about alleged systemic inequalities or telling you that, for just having white skin, you are a horrible human being. Leftists are in your face, self-righteous, and always long on insults while being short on rationale.

It is maddening because you all know a traditional liberal. You spend time with them. You call them your friends. They are largely uninformed, the reason behind the epithet “useful idiot.” When presented with reality, they usually move on without considering the facts. They respond, with “Yeah, well” or “I guess” and never think about it again.

These are the people that regurgitate the hyperbole that Florida saw 15,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day, but never have the context that Florida tested more people in one day (42,000) than did New York in a six-week span in March and April, or the fact that of the 15,000 new cases, they might die in proportion to 3/100,000. It could even be less. They don’t know that Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts all have higher death counts than Florida, despite many of them having significantly less people. Like, millions less.

The greatest frustration involving these people is that they live entirely conservative lives. They take care of themselves, they take care of others, and they basically want to be left alone to work and raise a family. They don’t get involved in social causes, unless it’s affiliated with a church, because they are too busy living their generally decent lives.

They go to college, study and work hard, and eventually get a steady income. By and large, they wait to get married and have kids until they can provide for a family. 

When they choose to begin raising a family, they move out of the cities and into the suburbs. Why? They want to get away from crime, they want to flee higher taxes, and they want to find better schools. You know what people mean by a “better” school? A school that is not full of disruptive and dangerous students. As just an objective reality, the demographics of these schools are typically whiter. For all of the traditional liberals that virtue signal how in tune they are with diversity and how much they supposedly embrace diversity, they certainly don’t act like it when it comes time to buying a home and choosing a school district. 

Traditional liberals are the first group to surround themselves by the comfort of whiteness, all while voting for a party that says whites are the devil incarnate. I don’t imagine much thinking is going on, because it doesn’t even make sense. How do they grapple with this?

These people also vote for hardcore leftists who proclaim that the world is ending in a few years unless we take drastic measures like the Green New Deal. It would bankrupt America. Did you know that people have been telling us that we’re doomed for the past sixty years? And every ten years when the bill comes due, they just tell us that in another ten years we should expect some disaster. All the doom and gloom of rising oceans didn’t stop Obama from buying a $15 million beachfront property. Why is it that when a religious nut prophesizes an imminent apocalypse we rightly call him crazy, but when a scientist predicts climate change calamity we just call him a science-based Democrat?

Do they really believe this? Their actions suggest otherwise. Your traditional liberal friends have a two-car family, commute to work from the suburbs, and either blast the air conditioning in the summertime or the heat in the wintertime. You know what runs your car and central air? Fossil fuels. 

Those lawns don’t get green by themselves, either. Did you know that clean water scarcity affects over one billion people on Earth? But by all means, keep watering your yards, and contradictorily voting for a party that would turn off the spigot.

More likely, they do believe in man-made climate change. That’s what CNN tells them. They think conservatives deny science. That’s not true. We see climate change, accept it might be an issue, but also don’t think ruining modern society is the correct course of action. That’s like a doctor amputating your legs after getting the common cold.

It gets really obvious that these people are cluelessly insincere when it comes to taxes. Your traditional liberal friends often complain about taxes, usually in the form of property or payroll tax increases. They are also really good at sheltering their cash income from the IRS. Do you know a waiter or waitress friend, flea-market friend, garage-sale friend, or blood-donor friend that gets straight cash from their job and keeps it all? Of course, you do. The next time your waiter or waitress friend tells you that we need higher taxes, tell them to start at home or close their yap.

Then the cause of the day: Race. None of your traditional liberal friends are outwardly racist. No doubt they harbor certain quiet thoughts about this or that, but who cares? They don’t act on it. These people go about their workday treating everyone equally and kindly. That’s what you do. When determining if they’ll play golf with so-and-so again, or have another dinner with the so-and-so family, they don’t decide down racial lines; they decide if the people they want to associate with share their same values.

Yet here they are, voting for a party that now says acting colorblind or in a non-racist manner is actually racist! They don’t see themselves as racist. They don’t act in a racist manner. But they will vote for a party that says they are.

Traditional liberals will vote for their party because... that’s what good liberals do. They vote for Democrats.

Parker Beauregard is a freelance cultural commentator whose articles appear regularly on various online outlets. He can be followed on Twitter and Parler @LastBestHope76.