Don’t call leftists stupid.  It doesn’t help.  You can’t fix stupid.  However, you can fix the real problem.  You can point out the lazy pattern of thought they have habituated.

There are five cognitive skills needed to form coherent opinions, and leftists bother to use only two of them.  The following pattern repeats with each political issue in the news:

1. They emote in accordance with their biases, often cultivated by deceitful leftist influencers using supraliminal messaging.  For example, movies almost always portray villains as white, gay people as heroic or victims of bigotry.

2. If pressed to defend their ideas they ideate by concocting some justification out of bogus facts, counterfeit principles, or talking points they’ve heard other leftists burp up.  If they do it quickly, they often mistake their mental agility for superior intellectual prowess.

Conservatives are far more likely to think past the first two steps and complete these last three:

3. Conservatives exercise fact-finding discipline to make sure that their opinions comport with reality, as described by reliable and truthful sources.  No, CNN doesn’t count.

4. We subject our opinions to intellectual rigor, testing them for adherence to moral and legal standards, and for consistent use of principles from issue to issue and person to person.  For example, the conservative view holds that “my body, my choice” needs to apply to both the mother and the baby, and “no one is above the law” is not an excuse to prosecute Republicans if the same laws are violated without penalty by Democrats.

5. We are far more likely than leftists to listen to the inner voices of conscience or the Holy Spirit, AKA prayer.  By doing so, we gain understanding of our beliefs and behavior as might be seen from the perspective of Perfect Justice in the case of the non-believer, or God’s plan in the case of us believers.  We are thereby more aware of our shortcomings, making their remediation possible.  Better people form better opinions.

Conservatives argue against shortcomings in leftist opinions on a case-by-case basis.  However, when we fail to call attention to the larger defective pattern of thought with which these opinions are formed, each persuadable Democrat remains unaware of the deficiencies in his habits and is committed to repeating them.  He lapses into the first stage, emotion.  There he can slip into a near-effortless defense against the discomfort of confronting his mistakes: condescending sympathy for any perceived victimized group in question, smug self-satisfaction with his virtuous attitude, anger with you, contempt for you, hatred for anyone who dares threaten his righteous self-image, or all the above.

We conservatives are like the manager of a widget factory who tries to recall every defective widget that escapes the factory floor.  He never repairs the defective assembly line machinery that cranked them out in the first place.  The machinery we must fix is the thinking process Americans use to form all their political and religious opinions.

We won’t win the culture war until the machinery that broke the culture works properly.  The only tool we have to repair it is our ability to identify and categorize the omissions leftists display in their cognitive process.  Once they see the pattern, they will find it hard to stop seeing it.

Howard McCrum wrote Reason Right: The Hope for Fixing Leftist Logic (self-published at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, 2021).

Image via PickPik.