Can a Sane and Morally Decent Person be a Liberal?

My title is intentionally hyperbolic and provocative, but not without justification given the outrageously vile (e.g., Martin Bashir) and breathtakingly mindless (e.g., Melissa Harris Perry) commentary encountered at liberal media outlets such as MSNBC.  Here is a measured formulation of my question:  To what extent does liberal ideology  militate against sanity and moral decency in those who imbibe it, people who otherwise are basically sane and decent?

A philosophy doctoral student at an Ivy League institution e-mails,

In a recent post, you wrote:

Can one be both a liberal and a decent and sane human being? Or is scumbaggery as it were inscribed into the very marrow of the contemporary liberal?  Or perhaps it is more like this:  once liberalism infects a person's mind, the decency that was there is flushed out.

Actually, I have struggled with relatives of these questions for some time, and honestly don't know what to think. Many of the people I rub shoulders with are liberal to the bone. But I know well enough to say they're genuinely nice people--and smart people (some, for instance, are brilliant philosophers). At the same time, I find most of the liberal claptrap so intellectually inane and morally repugnant that I have a genuinely hard time seeing how anyone--much less these seemingly smart and decent people--can believe it. I don't know how to reconcile the two observations. Surely you know at least one intelligent, morally decent liberal. How do you fit their existence into your ontology? Or do we have an argument from queerness motivating us to become liberal error theorists? Would such a creature--assuming they can exist--present a peer-disagreement scenario, or cause you to lower your credence in your own beliefs?

 

My correspondent poses the puzzle of reconciling

 

1. Some liberals are genuinely nice and highly intelligent people

 

with

 

2. These same liberals subscribe to intellectually inane and morally repugnant beliefs.

 

What makes this aporetic dyad truly puzzling is that the limbs are individually plausible but appear collectively inconsistent. Let's consider an example.

 

I don't know Robert Paul Wolff personally, but I was favorably impressed by a couple of his books and I read his blog, The Philosopher's Stone, despite the fact that he often comes across as a stoned philosopher.  He is no doubt very intelligent, and he seems like a nice guy.  But he says things so preternaturally moronic that I am left scratching my head.  Here is just one of  several examples:

Why Do Conservatives Oppose ObamaCare?

Robert Paul Wolff has an answer for us.  Ready?  The bolding is Wolff's own and is twice-repeated:

Because Obama is Black.

Is Professor Wolff serious? I'm afraid he is.  But given that the man is neither stupid nor the usual sort of left-wing moral scumbag, how could he be serious?  What explains a view so plainly delusional?  How account for an emotion-driven mere dismissal of the conservative position the arguments for which he will not examine? How is it that a professional philosopher, indeed a very good one, can engage in such puerile ad hominem psychologizing?  Wolff himself provides an answer in a later post:

My knowledge of the beliefs and sentiments of those on the right is based entirely on things I have read or have seen on television.  I have never had a conversation with a committed right-wing opponent of the Affordable Care Act, nor have I even, to the best of my knowledge, met one.  You would be quite correct in inferring that I live in a left-wing bubble [called Chapel Hill -- before that, I lived in a left-wing bubble called Amherst, MA, and before that I lived in the right wing bubbles called Morningside Heights, Hyde Park, and Cambridge.]   If this strikes you as disqualifying me from having an opinion, you are free to ignore the rest of this post.

Need I say more?

............

 

This is a perfect illustration of my correspondent's puzzle. In Robert Paul Wolff we have a man who is intelligent and (I will give him the benefit of the doubt) morally decent, but who maintains a thesis that is both delusional and morally repugnant in that it constitutes a slander on conservatives.  What explains this?  Wolff himself provides what may be the best explanation:  he lives in a bubble.  He doesn't know conservative positions, nor interact with conservatives.  But isn't it a moral failure in one who is supposedly a truth-seeker simply to ignore whole swaths of opinion that run counter to one's own?  Is that not a mark of intellectual dishonesty?

 

But the best explanation, in terms of his 'bubbly' isolation, is still not very good.  How could anyone of his maturity and experience with the world of ideas, even one  unfamiliar with conservatism, imagine for even a second that the cheap psychologizing he engages in could be on target?

 

It is Christmas time, and so, to be charitable I won't accuse Wolff of a moral failing; I'll just say that he and so many of his ilk are topically insane:  their leftism has rendered them incapable of rational thought with respect to certain issues, race being a chief one among them.

 

For further discussion of Robert Paul 'Howlin'' Wolff, see below.

 

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Robert Paul Wolff has an answer for us.  Ready?  The bolding is Wolff's own and is twice-repeated:

Because Obama is Black.

Is Professor Wolff serious? I'm afraid he is.  But given that the man is neither stupid nor the usual sort of left-wing moral scumbag, how could he be serious?  What explains a view so plainly delusional?  How account for an emotion-driven mere dismissal of the conservative position the arguments for which he will not examine? How is it that a professional philosopher, indeed a very good one, can engage in such puerile ad hominem psychologizing?  Wolff himself provides an answer in a later post:

My knowledge of the beliefs and sentiments of those on the right is based entirely on things I have read or have seen on television.  I have never had a conversation with a committed right-wing opponent of the Affordable Care Act, nor have I even, to the best of my knowledge, met one.  You would be quite correct in inferring that I live in a left-wing bubble [called Chapel Hill -- before that, I lived in a left-wing bubble called Amherst, MA, and before that I lived in the right wing bubbles called Morningside Heights, Hyde Park, and Cambridge.]   If this strikes you as disqualifying me from having an opinion, you are free to ignore the rest of this post.

Need I say more?