The Unparody-able Liberal

An interesting question came up this weekend that deserves a full post. The point was made that only a liberal can ultimately do a parody of the left. I disagree. Parody requires an eye for the absurd and a talent for pointing out the absurdity in a way that cannot be denied. There is no ideological requirement. But that’s not what I want to discuss. I want to talk about why liberals will never accept a parody of liberalism, no matter who does it.

Liberals have no sense of humor about their beliefs. There are several reasons for this, but I think the primary reason is how they see their beliefs. Modern liberals don’t really have a fixed set of views. Indeed, for them, situational ethics are the order of the day, where right and wrong are assessed independently in each situation they encounter. And the principle that they think guides them is: “I believe in helping people.”

But of course, this is a sanitized view of what they actually believe. For example, while liberals like to believe that “they” want to help people, they don’t actually want to do it with their own time or money, they want the government to take your time and money to do it. They talk about freedoms, like freedoms of speech, but they only apply those to certain people and actively advocate the government stopping speech with which they disagree. They claim to oppose discrimination, but they advocate reverse discrimination to achieve that. And so on and so on.

But liberals refuse to see this. Instead, they believe that in each instance, they are simply helping people. And since “I want to help people” really can’t be parodied, it is not possible to the liberal mind to parody liberalism.

Moreover, liberals have three defense mechanisms that prevent anyone from parodying their views.

1. “That’s different.”

What conservative hasn’t heard the phrase “that’s different” come from liberals? “That’s different” is a catch all mechanism that lets liberals gloss over the problems with their beliefs. It allows them to reconcile their self-professed views with their contradictory actions without ever admitting that they are acting hypocritically or that they apply their grandiose principles selectively. Thus, they can tell racist jokes without considering themselves racists -- something they do not accept from conservatives -- because “that’s different.” And when a liberal politician breaks a promise, it’s never as serious as when a conservative does, even if the promise and circumstances are identical because “that’s different.” Basically, this mechanism allows them to sustain their views in light of such hypocrisies, e.g. they can both say “I believe in free speech” while simultaneously calling for the banning of speech they don’t like because “that’s different,” and they can simultaneously say that we need to end discrimination, while they impose discrimination on others because “that’s different.”

This mechanism also lets them sidestep logic. Liberalism withers when confronted with logic. But if you ever confront a liberal with logic, and you point out that something they say is not true or cannot logically lead to the result they want, they don’t try to reason it out. . . they just say, “that’s different” and move on without ever admitting that they are wrong.

Not coincidentally, this same mechanism allows them to dismiss any parody of their views because they will simply see whatever scenario the parody is being based on as “different” from what they really believe.

Thus, when Robocop II parodied their views when the executive board put all kinds of liberal garbage into his programming, which resulted in Robocop becoming laughably ineffective, liberals didn’t see that as a criticism of liberalism. To them, this wasn't an attack on their beliefs because what was happening on screen was different than the liberalism in their heads. If anything, they focused on the “say no to drugs” comment and assumed this was a criticism of Nancy Reagan and how "the right wants to turn everyone into robots."

For another example, liberals never seem to get that the guy in every science fiction/war/action film who says “if we tell them we don’t want to hurt them, they’ll leave us alone” is a parody of liberalism. This is a view liberals have espoused in every context you can image -- from appeasing dictators, to unilateral nuclear disarmament, to appeasing terrorists, to dealing with criminals -- and yet, somehow, once this view is being parodied on film, liberals suddenly become incapable of recognizing this as something they routinely advocate. That’s called a defense mechanism, which is a form of delusion.

2. “I’m not being political.”

Related to the first point is something you see all the time with liberals: they don’t think that their views are political, they think they’re facts. I see this all the time with liberal sports writers, who will criticize conservatives to no end for “injecting politics into sports” if they so much as appear at a Republican rally. But these same liberal sports writers think nothing of raving about a Michael Moore film, praising some Democrat they like, talking about how it’s “obvious” that guns should be banned, or advocating any number of liberal causes right in the middle of a sports column.

One sports writer (gossip monger Mike Florio) said, “No matter what your politics are, you have to respect Robert Byrd and admit that he’s done great things for this country.” Another, (Peter King of S.I.) said, “Leaving politics aside, everyone should see An Inconvenient Truth because it’s so important that we do something to stop global warming.” And when he was called on this, King said: “I don’t know why everyone got so upset and why so many people tried to bring politics into this.” And that’s a fairly common response when these guys get called on their politicking.

These guys, like other liberals, simply don’t see their views as political. They see them as widely accepted facts that everyone believes, and they assume that anyone who would disagree with those “facts” is simply being political. To them, saying liberal things is nothing more than expressing that the Earth is round. Thus, if you parodied those views, it wouldn’t strike them as a parody of liberalism or their beliefs, it would strike them as a politicized attack on truth.

3. Disavowal.

Finally, liberals are extremely good at disavowing their failures. Liberal ideas fail because they conflict with human nature. But liberals don’t accept this because this would mean their entire worldview is wrong. Thus, whenever liberalism fails, they look to blame someone or something or they disavow that it was liberalism in the first place.

Indeed, if you listen to liberals, socialism has never failed because “it’s never really been tried.” Stalin apparently wasn’t a communist because he didn’t really put communism into place. Ditto East Germany, Cuba, China and so on. Hitler, who imposed all of the hallmarks of 1930s socialism on Germany (including eugenics, which was very popular with Western leftists at the time), found himself turned into a right-winger. Liberalism didn’t fail in places like England in the 1970s, it was betrayed by a bad economy, just like Obama’s policies aren’t failing now, they’re being betrayed by a bad economy. And his spending isn’t failing either, it’s being betrayed by huge deficits. And so on.

Basically, whenever liberalism fails, it's not liberalism, it's something else. This twisting of logic makes it impossible to parody liberalism because liberals simply will not accept any parody of their views that highlights the bad because they automatically disavow that the bad can be the result of liberalism. It's the perfect cocoon: “My beliefs can only lead to good things and if they lead to bad things, then it wasn’t my beliefs that were implemented.”

These are the reasons liberals will never accept a parody of liberalism, no matter who makes it. They don’t see their views as capable of being parodied, they can't recognize their views when they see them put in a negative light, they can't distinguish between their politicized views and established facts, and they will disavow any parody that suggests their views can be anything other than pure and saintly.