It’s sometimes interesting to see how one side of the political spectrum views the other. Usually it’s funny, and maddening, and wrong. And usually, it tells you more about the side that is doing the projecting than it does the side they are projecting upon. A piece up on National Review today entitled The Liberal Mind Rejects Sad Facts fits into all of these categories. 

Leftism is often predicated on avoiding pain. That is a major reason why the Left dislikes capitalism and free markets. Free markets create winners and losers, and the Left does not like the fact that some people lose and some win.

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Second, the Left lives by theories and dogmas into which the facts of life must fit. That is why left-wing ideas are usually wishful thinking.

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Here are four descriptive statements rejected by the Left for these two mutually reinforcing reasons.

 1. People are not basically good.

Leftists tend to reject this because a) it is too painful to accept, and b) it undermines the leftist dogma that people do bad because of outside forces — poverty, capitalism, racism, etc.

2. Men and women are inherently different.

Leftists have rejected this idea because some of the differences are too emotionally upsetting to accept. Men are variety-driven by nature? Too upsetting. Women may have less yearning for, and ability in, math and engineering? Only a sexist like former Harvard president Lawrence Summers would say such a thing. Moreover, the belief that men and women are inherently different violates the Left’s foundational principle of equality. Many liberals admit that they reject talk of male-female differences because it can easily lead to gender inequality.

3. Black males disproportionately commit violent crime in America.

Leftist reactions to this truly painful fact are to label one who notes it a racist and to decry American society as racist because there are more black males in prison than in college.

4. The United Nations is a moral wasteland.

Since before the U.N.’s founding in 1945, liberals placed much of their hope for a peaceful world in the United Nations. That the U.N. has turned out to be an abettor more than a preventer of violence is a fact that the Left finds too painful to acknowledge. And it violates the left-wing belief that nationalism is evil and internationalism is the solution.

Is it weird to classify the act of trying to avoid pain as a negative? Or is it weird to say that the thing we have a problem with is people mentioning the fact that there are lots of black men in jail, and not the actual fact that there are lots of black men in jail? Is this entire thing full of weird?

Yes. And that makes it, if hilariously dumb, still pretty interesting.