When I was a liberal, this was exactly the way I saw conservatives.

Let's start with Evil.

I would have a knee jerk reaction to any conservative assuming - knowing - they were rich, greedy, uncaring, selfish, and arrogant. Oh, and they liked to go to war just for the hell of it. In a word: Evil. I would not listen to conservatives talk on any issue because of my rock solid belief that they were horrible human beings who cared not a whit for others.

In this way, a feedback loop was created such that when a conservative would speak, I knew they were evil and felt no desire to listen. (Why get aggravated, right?) Or, if for some reason I was compelled to listen for a few minutes, every word that came out of their mouth was tainted with the awful truth that I knew. Yes, they were evil.

Next up: Stupid.

Like my conviction that conservatives were evil, so too was my firm belief that they were also, for the most part, stupid. (If a conservative somehow managed to squeak past my stupid label, it didn't matter because they were at the very least, evil.) There were all sorts of ways stupid played out. For sure, if they were from the south, they were dumb. If they were from the mid-west, well I just knew they couldn't be that bright. I mean, the great plains? How could anyone from there be smart? Any other geographic pockets of conservatives were also stupid because of the obvious fact that they were stupid. (Yeah, I know. Really pathetic.) In my view, only people from major cities could be smart. And then, only the highly educated. The intelligentsia.

As a student, I expected my professors and fellow students to be super liberal. If I got a whiff of anyone who seemed like they may not be towing the party line to the fullest, I was disgusted. I also looked down on those who viewed college as a place to get job training. College was about study. It had nothing to do with anything concrete related to functioning as an independent adult in the real world.

(sigh)

And lastly: Old

Old was often part of a larger category that was about blandness and sameness. Conservatives were old, but also male, and also white. This fueled my feedback loop because all of these things were, well, you guessed it. Evil.

I would scratch my head in wonder about how any black person could be conservative. I thought

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/08/confessions_of_an_ex-liberal.html#ixzz244IBVObn