The left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.Let's ignore the first part, about what the left "wants," although it's obviously untrue that American liberals want government employment to approach 100% of total employment. Starting with "they believe," I count twenty-two specific allegations of what liberals believe. Let's run down the list and see which are descriptively false, i.e. liberals don't actually believe those things; which of them correctly describe correct beliefs; and which of them are just bizarre in some other way.
Claim #1: Money grows on trees. The belief is correct, as Matt Yglesias describes here: in a modern economy, the central government authorities truly can just create as much money as they want, though that's different from creating as much wealth as they want. If anything the problem is that not enough liberals get this point.
Claim #2: The Earth is flat. Uhhhh, what? This is perhaps a reference to Thomas Friedman's book The World Is Flat, which is about globalization. Otherwise I just don't get what he's talking about. If he means this in a remotely literal sense then it's just plain descriptively false, and obviously so. If he's talking about the use of a certain metaphor to describe trends in international trade, well, it's basically a matter of semantic quibbling, yes? But it's semantic quibbling that takes place, I daresay, mostly among liberals, not between liberals and conservatives.
Claim #3: "Industrial-age, factory-style government" is a cool new thing. Huh? I don't... I don't even know what he means. The only thing to say about this is that it represents confusion on Jindal's part about what he's trying to say.
Claim #4: Debts don't have to be repaid. Yglesias' post referenced for Claim #1 tackled this issue as well. For the federal government, there is never a moment at which the debt "comes due," i.e. when the government needs to pay off all $17 trillion in public debt. When each individual bond comes due, you just issue a new one. The government being immortal, it will never, ever have to pay off the entirety of its debt, and the real issue is keeping debt servicing costs manageable.
Claim #5: People of faith are ignorant and uneducated. I don't know many liberals who believe this to be true as a rule of religious people. It is, however, statistically true that, in this country, mainstream religious affiliation is correlated with lower educational status. Taking data from a Pew Forum table on educational status by religious category, I made a weighted average where "less than high school" is weighted as a 1 and "post-graduate" is weighted as a 5, interpolating in between. Atheists had an average of 3.22; agnostics weighed in at 3.28; Jews in the aggregate came in at 3.69 (and keep in mind, American Judaism is a highly secular phenomenon, and Reform Jewish ranked even higher at 3.85). Protestants and Catholics ranked at 2.67 and 2.66, respectively. Evangelicals ranked at 2.55. Basically, in the statistical aggregate American Christians are less well-educated than American Jews and American non-theists. So arguably this is another one where Jindal is both wrong that this is a common belief, in its stronger form, among liberals, and wrong that it's an incorrect belief, in its weaker form.
Claim #6: Unborn babies don't matter. I wouldn't claim that no liberals don't believe this, as stated. Most of us, however, think that late-term abortions at least are genuinely troubling, with lots of difficult ethical questions involved. What liberals do think is that criminalization of abortion is not an appropriate way to handle those difficult ethical questions. Instead we liberals would like to address these problems by making the issue stop coming up so damned much, by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, through the use of birth control and, yes, perhaps, very-early-term abortion if it can be done before, say, the point at which the fetus becomes sentient. This is a tough one to grade, though, since it's arguably a rhetorical way of describing a genuine liberal belief.
Claim #7: Pornography is fine. Um, what? Mr. Jindal, I'd like you to meet Professor Catharine MacKinnon. She's a liberal feminist. She's written volumes about how evil pornography is, and even has a well-developed theory of why it can be banned without violating the First Amendment. Now, yes, many liberals disagree with her and think that porn is constitutionally protected. But that doesn't mean we're all fine and dandy with porn, and think there are no problems with it, mostly along the lines of exploitation of the mostly-female actors involved. Now sure, unlike Christine O'Donnell liberals don't tend to think that masturbation is evil, and most would probably say that the individual consumer of porn is not committing some great sin, if perhaps they are helping perpetuate a problematic system. So, I'd grade this one Mostly False.
Claim #8: Traditional marriage is discriminatory. Well, yes, it is. It's also not particularly traditional, and replaced older forms of marriage that were more discriminatory. I could write lengthy blog posts about why this is just plain a true belief, and one that liberals are proud to endorse.
Claim #9: 32 oz. sodas are evil. This is oversimplifying. Many liberals like the idea of public health paternalism, i.e. the idea that government regulation preventing people from doing things that are really, really unhealthy but that they might do anyway, as for instance government regulations aimed at exterminating the practice of smoking. The specific Bloomberg regulation prohibiting 16 ounce sodas being sold in New York City is an interesting form of health paternalism, since it doesn't make it impossible to consume that much soda, it just makes you specifically ask for it. I think that, as phrased, this claim is descriptively false: liberals don't think soda is evil, they think it's dangerous and unhealthy, which is true, and that government regulations to help people avoid the temptation can sometimes be effective and desirable.
Claim #10: Red meat should be rationed. Literally zero people believe this. As with the last issue, there are probably many people who believe, correctly, that red meat is unhealthy and individuals ought limit their consumption of it for their own sake, and perhaps that some sort of public policy ought help them do it. Other people, including myself, think that meat actually is evil, in that its production involves committing an atrocity, and that it should be abolished. And yes, both of those are probably more left- than right-wing beliefs, especially ethical vegetarianism. I know plenty of liberals who are big into red meat in the stereotypically conservative way, though, and I don't think there's a single person on the planet with a belief of the specific structure Jindal describes here.
Claim #11: Rich people other than liberals or Hollywood types are evil. First of all, I think it's worth noting that, to a certain extent, it makes sense to think that people who disagree with you about issues of fundamental moral principles have a bit of a moral shortcoming. I think Jindal thinks that way, and yeah, I'll admit that I find someone with Jindal's ethical beliefs somewhat wicked. So it kind of makes sense to think that people of any kind, including rich people, who have deep-seated political disagreements with you are a little bit Bad, if not properly Evil. But beyond that, I think Jindal's sort of misrepresenting the liberal belief that the desire by the rich to reshape federal policy so as to funnel yet more wealth their way is a wicked desire. That doesn't make the people holding that desire evil, it makes them greedy. And yeah, I think very rich people who whine about how over-taxed they are are kind of greedy, and those of them like the Koch Brothers who do large-scale advocacy for causes I think are wicked are kind of wicked. But this is a pretty severe misrepresentation.
Claim #12: The Israelis are unreasonable. Um, isn't this pretty much on their business card? The Israeli government, at least. Of course there are a lot of liberals who are also Israel hawks, and who endorse the idea of unquestioningly going along with anything that the Israeli right says, but yes, there are lots of us who've noticed that the Netanyahu government has been insanely unreasonably in its approach to, in particular, the settlement issue. So this one is sometimes descriptively false and sometimes normatively true.
Claim #13: Trans-fat must be stopped. Seriously? This is controversial? Trans fat is one of the least healthy substances known to man! (Okay, of those that people have been known to consume for sustenance.) I don't get why Jindal thinks this is something he can demagogue about.
Claim #14: Kids trapped in failing schools should be patient. Okay, this is another one that's rhetorical exaggeration of the other side's position in a genuine policy dispute, this one about charter schools. Arguably it's an issue where Jindal's side kind of depends on oversimplifying the reality of the status quo to begin with. Whatever, this one's tough to judge. I'll just add, however, that the whole charter school issue isn't mostly a left/right divide, it's largely an intra-left divide. And even those who are anti-charter schools probably have a lot of ideas about pretty urgently needed educational reforms, though they might not be ones Jindal likes.
Claim #15: Wild weather is new. This is just a goofy misrepresentation of the true liberal claim that weather has been getting and will continue getting more extreme as a direct result of global warming and climate change. It's also, I dunno, it strikes me as extra-special odd coming from a Louisiana politician.
Claim #16: Moral standards are passe. Well, if you add one word at the beginning this could be true; many liberals (particularly of the overly-educated type, heh) think that deontological moral standards are passe. But I don't think very many liberals are advocates of amorality. Again there's a debate, largely within that set of overly-educated lefties, between cultural relativists and more absolutist consequentialists, but I think the relativists have been losing over the last couple of decades and reducing in prominence. And it's funny that he says this after having alleged that liberals think X, Y, and Z are all "evil." How does "evil" fit into a worldview without moral standards, Bobby?
Claim #17: Government-run health care is high quality. First of all, even the most radical of health-care-reform positions advocated by liberals is for government-run health care coverage, not government operation of health care facilities themselves a la the U.K. NHS. But second of all, well, British health care is much higher quality in the aggregate than American health care, particularly given that everyone has access to it, and if you're looking for a closer-to-home example, well, ask the V.A. I rate this one Normatively True.
Claim #18: The IRS should violate our constitutional rights. Okay, two things. First of all, while some liberals did argue that what the IRS did wasn't actually that bad, that always took the form of arguing that they hadn't actually been particularly targeting or singling out conservative groups as opposed to just political groups. No one, no one ever said that partisan targeting was acceptable. Second of all, I don't really think this was an issue of constitutional rights, was it? Okay, maybe you could make it an Equal Protection thing, but I don't think the right wing in this country is a fan of expanding the scope of the Equal Protection Clause. This one is simply descriptively false.
Claim #19: Reporters should be spied on. Uhhhh, what? No, this is a Republican thing. At least, most of the people saying recently that reporters who've been involved in the Edward Snowden thing are "traitors" have either been Republicans or particularly security state-friendly Democrats, i.e. Democrats but not, on these issues, liberals. And liberals have been, if anything, more upset about the whole AP spying thing from a few weeks back (remember that?), and the idea that reporters were being targeted was always the most troubling part of that whole fracas.
Claim #20: Benghazi was handled well. I don't know of very many people who think this is true. That it is not true is obvious because of how much of a political problem it became. (Again, remember that?) But there's a lot of daylight between "was handled well" and "is a major scandal," or even "is a major scandal worthy of impeachment." Liberals are in that daylight. It was handled poorly, but without serious malfeasance or wrongdoing.
Claim #21: The Second Amendment is outdated. Well, yes. The political theory part of the Second Amendment, that individual citizens should be armed so that, if necessary, they could overthrow a tyrannical federal government, is outdated; the government is much too well-armed for this to be possible even if it were desirable. More to the point, among the relatively small portion of liberals who actually would like to get rid of all the guns, is that the Second Amendment is just really harmful, and acts as a shield for an awful lot of damage and destruction. Technically that makes it outdated if and only if it was appropriate in the past, which for myself at least I'm not willing to concede, but whatever. Let's call this one Normatively True, although that's controversial and not all liberals would agree with me (which would make it descriptively false, and not help Jindal out much).
Claim #22: "and the First one has some problems too." What's he on about here? I suppose he's talking about the Free Exercise Clause, and accusing liberals of trying to violate religious freedom. Of course he'll be hard-pressed to come up with a single example of a favored liberal policy that actually would be a restriction of the free exercise of religion, as opposed to just making religious people get over the fact that they have to live in the same material world as the rest of us. But in general the First Amendment is the left-wing Amendment; conservatives tend to be the ones who dislike the whole freedom-of-speech and freedom-of-the-press parts of it. Remember earlier when Jindal was talking about how evil porn is? Good times. Does he remember that, though? Because I'm pretty sure that, if anything, it's the First Amendment preventing him from going after the pornographers. So... maybe he's the one who thinks the First Amendment has some problems? Just sayin'.
So, out of twenty-two claims, I count two that can be described as rhetorical, over-the-top descriptions of genuine political positions with which one could, in good faith, disagree, namely the abortion and charter school issues. The other twenty are all either factually/normatively true beliefs, and typically rather demonstrably so, or inaccurate descriptions of the typical liberal mindset, often in entertainingly obvious ways, or some wacky combination of the two. Basically, Jindal has no effing clue what liberals think, or is at least playing the part of one who has no such idea. But I suppose that's not surprising.
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