The new liberal website, The Argument, conducted an interesting poll of Trump 2024 supporters, Harris 2024 supporters, and those who didn't vote.
One question was about free speech on campus.
"For each of the following, do you believe they should be allowed to give a speech at a college campus?"
Nearly 50% of Trump voters would oppose a transgender rights activist speaking on campus. 86% of Harris voters would support it.
Nearly 55% of Harris voters would oppose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving a talk. 63% of Trump voters would support it.
Over 67% of Trump voters would oppose a Palestinian activist who calls for the abolition of Israel. 53% of Harris voters would support it.
Nearly 47% of Harris voters would say no to someone who opposes same-sex marriage.
The divide on these questions is not surprising. But what about the question of cutting off contact with a relative whose political views you disagree with?
“Do you think having opposing political views is ever an acceptable reason to cut off contact with a family member?”
"40% of 2024 Harris voters said yes, compared to just 11% of Trump voters and 18% of respondents who didn’t vote," reports Josh Barro.
Passionate political views do not necessarily translate into punishing loved ones for holding "incorrect" political positions. There must be some other impulse at work that makes liberals more prone to dismissing familial ties than conservatives.
Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data and polls, believes there's such a profound difference between right and left on this issue that liberals are outliers compared to the rest of the nation.
I think liberals have got to understand that we, as a constituency, are very much unlike the rest of America. It’s not just that we’re different from Trump voters — it’s that we’re very different from people who don’t vote as well."
The findings about who was more likely to cut off friends and family over politics really underscored this for me, because Harris voters were the only group that was even close to evenly split on that. That’s not a statement that we’re wrong, but it is a statement that the rest of Americans view and interact with the world very differently than we do.
Barro writes that liberals are "much more fixated than conservatives on politics as a barometer of morality." This may represent a difference between "secular" morality and a morality based on personal religious beliefs. For the left, "morality" is politics. The right's view of morality rests upon a set of values and beliefs that emanate from a sacred text or the teachings of a revered figure. There is a divine intervention in the affairs of human beings that gives us a set of laws to abide by, while the left's humanist approach to morality depends on individual conscience.
I’ve been thinking about that poll question because of the bifurcated response I’ve seen among liberals to Kirk’s killing. Among liberals who “do” politics for a living, I’ve seen near-uniform expressions of horror and revulsion. I have seen a surprising amount of grief. In addition to being a logical human response to the fact that a husband and father of two children was murdered, I think this reflects an understanding that political violence is dangerous for everyone. In some cases, it’s an expression of professional empathy — as Ezra Klein writes, he and Kirk were in some sense in the same business, and that business is now more dangerous than it used to be. And I think it also reflects, at least implicitly, an understanding that responding to a conservative’s murder by fixating on how bad and gross his ideas were would be a political loser, just making liberals seem weird and callous and obsessive and off — especially given the likelihood that the murder was itself committed as an expression of objection to those ideas.
But among liberals who are mostly spectators to politics… hoo boy. They have seemed weird and callous and obsessive and off, unable to stop themselves from responding to Kirk’s very-likely-ideologically-motivated murder by harping on how bad his ideology was.
"When liberals respond to Kirk’s murder with jeers for him (and with outrage over institutional displays of mourning of his death — I have seen a lot of complaints about institutions in blue states that have lowered flags to half mast for his death) they are saying that he and his supporters are undeserving of the usual consideration that we provide to each other in our society," writes Barro.
This nauseating sense of moral superiority drives the right wild and serves to bring out in bas relief the profound objections the right has with the tone and constancy of left-wing critiques of the right.
If someone engages in violence on behalf of a political movement, that’s a demerit to the movement. It doesn’t mean that people have to give up their ideologies, or even that they have to give up speaking passionately on behalf of those ideologies, when political violence comes from one’s own “side.” But it is at least a reason to pause and reflect on how someone might have gotten so stirred up, and to give some space to the other side to grieve. Partisans seem to understand that political violence from their “side” would create a reason for such a pause, which is why they look for fake stories to avoid admitting when it happens.
"What I am seeing from a lot of the liberal rank-and-file is a failure to observe that pause," writes Barro.
As they did with Luigi Mangione, the left has granted Charlie Kirk's killer something of a pass. They can still claim to believe that murder is wrong. But the shooter must be "understood" and his cause "celebrated," because the victim was morally deficient.
I sincerely hope that if a person of the right ever murders a left-wing political personality, conservatives don't play that silly game to justify a murder based on the victim's political views.
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