Disappointing Liberals

So I had one of my posts make the front page of Reddit on Friday. I ended up taking around 30,000 hits to the site and the ensuing conversation has been both maddening and enlightening.

The post was on the topic of education, and the basic premise was that the problem with American kids doing poorly in school isn’t so much American schools themselves as much as American parents’ attitudes toward education.

This produced an openly hostile response from a significant portion of liberals, as can be seen from the image below:

I received many responses that outright accused me of being a conservative, and when I responded that I was a liberal myself, living in San Francisco, this was unable to be consumed as truth.

Real liberals evidently don’t (and evidently aren’t allowed to) identify actual causes of problems unless they cleanly fit in the pre-defined liberal-world-view containers–none of which are labeled “cultures that fail might be doing something wrong”. They only have boxes called, “if the culture is “non-white”, all sources of failure are external.

That’s the biggest box. Actually, all the other boxes fit inside that one.

This attitude makes me furious for a number of reasons:

1. Failing to identify real causes means the problem will continue

2. Anecdotally, when my teacher friends and associates speak out on this issue it’s always in full agreement of the argument I put forth. But liberals won’t listen to the teachers if the answer they give doesn’t fit their world view.

Anyway, arguing with all these people about this has pushed me in the direction of re-thinking my political self-identification. None of my views changed yesterday (other than how I view many liberals), but I wonder if I should be even identifying as liberal anymore.

I refuse to associate myself with any group of people that habitually ignores or denies truth if that truth results in an uncomfortable feeling. It sickens me that the moral indignation itself is actually causing more suffering in the world, and they are oblivious to this. ::