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It's only baffling if you assume that the people in government are smart. Somewhat less glibly, it's compartmentalization, basically. Take an ordinary, not-es

It's only baffling if you assume that the people in government are smart. Somewhat less glibly, it's compartmentalization, basically. Take an ordinary, not-especially-intelligent person who has basically authoritarian intuitions, teach them liberal principles, and you'll get a person who espouses the liberal way only in the particular examples you taught them. (Or in other examples that someone else explicitly connects to those principles.) Most people are just really terrible at applying things they notionally believe outside the specific contexts they associate them with.

wallace_f 8y ago
Yea.. Even one of my friends with an Ivy degree read and espoused the views of a popular conservative pundit for years, even lauding them as as basically a religious liberal. People throughout history are the same as they are today. Subservient to authority, self-serving, lazy thinkers, and barely even able to think for themselves in the first place.
- jquery 8y ago
  >Even one of my friends with an Ivy degree read and espoused the views of a popular conservative pundit for years, even lauding them as as basically a religious liberal. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, are you saying that no well-educated person would have any conservative viewpoints? That seems patently nonsense.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    No, I was agreeing with the parent comment and offered an example. Within this context, I'm not trying to make any left vs right, or vice versa, political arguments. This person self-identified as liberal. However, they only recognized liberal views within the contexts they had been pre-familiarized with. In fact, this person read, regurgitated, and lauded conservative views for years while beleiving them to be liberal views. This is a particularly hyper-educated person (though in a non-technical field completely removed from economics, politics).
    - jquery 8y ago
      Thanks, that makes sense, and I totally agree. You can see this in (American) society with the politics of race, free speech, and many other domains.

wallace_f 8y ago

Yea.. Even one of my friends with an Ivy degree read and espoused the views of a popular conservative pundit for years, even lauding them as as basically a religious liberal. People throughout history are the same as they are today. Subservient to authority, self-serving, lazy thinkers, and barely even able to think for themselves in the first place.

jquery 8y ago
>Even one of my friends with an Ivy degree read and espoused the views of a popular conservative pundit for years, even lauding them as as basically a religious liberal. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, are you saying that no well-educated person would have any conservative viewpoints? That seems patently nonsense.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  No, I was agreeing with the parent comment and offered an example. Within this context, I'm not trying to make any left vs right, or vice versa, political arguments. This person self-identified as liberal. However, they only recognized liberal views within the contexts they had been pre-familiarized with. In fact, this person read, regurgitated, and lauded conservative views for years while beleiving them to be liberal views. This is a particularly hyper-educated person (though in a non-technical field completely removed from economics, politics).
  - jquery 8y ago
    Thanks, that makes sense, and I totally agree. You can see this in (American) society with the politics of race, free speech, and many other domains.