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October 8, 2022

Over the last several years, my liberal friends have become less and less comfortable with utilizing classical debating styles — you know, where one person proposes a theory, explains it thoroughly with facts and figures and then responds to any questions about the theory in a logical, rational way.  This article develops a theory on why the vast majority of all liberals are currently atrocious debaters. 

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My wife and I have been lucky.  We have developed many close friendships with lots of people over our lives.  Some of these relationships are more recent, but many have lasted 20, 30, or even 40 years.  We have over a dozen friends whom we try to stay in close contact with on a regular basis.  About half of them are liberal; about half of them are conservative.  Virtually no one seems to be dead in the middle anymore.

Recently, a new trend started to become obvious.  For my conservative friends, roughly half of all their friends share conservative values, and half are liberal.  But our liberal friends tend to have just one or two conservative friends, and they are no longer able to discuss political issues with their conservative friends, since the liberals tend to get too emotional when talking politics.

It is my belief that this inability to discuss political issues is because my liberal friends look only at online sites that share their worldview; they watch only TV news that reinforces their worldview; they discuss politics only with people who share their worldview; and they often look at social media that make them think the liberal view on a topic is the only rational one to have.  This isolationism creates an echo chamber, where only one type of ideology is allowed in, and this forces liberals to think of conservatives as caricatures of what conservatives really believe.  (Recently, a new acquaintance, a liberal, asked my wife and me if we think all liberals are socialists.  This was before we even sat down to have our first drink together.  Who does that?)

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This apparent isolationism leads to my theory of what happens in a real debate, where different views are presented.  It is called the Pavlovian Liberal Didactic, or PLD.  Pavlov first noted that his dogs salivated when his lab assistants came in to feed them.  The dogs probably also wagged their tails and shook a bit in anticipation of eating.  This conditioned response led Pavlov to many of his theories, some of which make sense.  (It is difficult to agree with many of his experiments on humans.)

In debates with liberals, PLD can manifest itself in one of four ways.  If a conservative asks a liberal a tough question or makes a comment that is outside a liberal’s worldview, then one of the following three responses occurs (similar to the drooling, tail-wagging, and shaking exhibited by Pavlov’s dogs):

1) The Hide in the Basement Response: This is where the liberal walks away without responding at all.  This happened at a recent family party, where my forty-year-old nephew was complaining about Reagan’s AIDS policies.  I simply asked him to tell me which policies he specifically disliked.  He became agitated and started typing things on his iPhone, clearly trying to find some answer to the question posed.  (One might think he should have performed this simple due diligence before making his comments, but I digress.)  He was visibly shaking, and it got so bad that his mother (in her 70s) had to usher out the door.  In his circles, no one ever questions his logic, since all his friends think exactly like him.

2) The Non-Response Response.  This may take one of three forms:

“I am not going to dignify that question with a response.”

The No Answer, Just Sit There Response.  (A liberal Ph.D. academic was asked, “What is the independent clause in the 2nd Amendment?)  He just sat there, as though he had never taken, or never understood, fifth- or sixth-grade English.