On 2012-02-02, at 11:02 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
> I met a number of people with conservative ideas, which I found rather
> objectionable, but many of the people who expressed them were quite
> nice fellows - gregarious, polite, respectful, courteous, even
> helpful. On the other hand, the opposite was true of many lefties I
> met - I liked their ideas, but the people who expressed them were
> rather sanctimonious, arrogant, full of themselves, judgmental,
> vitriolic, and quite intolerant of the views of other people. Not
> that every conservative I met was nice and every leftie was nasty -
> but enough of them fit the mold to make one wonder.
We met a number of polite, respectful, and courteous conservatives, mostly tea party supporters, on our road trip through the US a couple of years ago.
But my wife and I also noted that though they were friendly and helpful to both of us, they were more respectful of me as the male and gave me most of the eye contact. Which got us to wondering how they would have received us if we were non-white and poor and our contact was other than in relaxed vacation settings but in their neighbourhoods and workplaces.
So I'm not as prepared as Woj and others on this thread to attribute all of the positive qualities to conservatives and all of the negative ones to liberals and leftists, which is simply the obverse of the flattering self-portrait political partisans typically paint of themselves as against their opponents. It equally verges on stereotyping, based on our prejudices supplemented by chance and superficial encounters.
I'm typically attracted to people who are warm and reliable and alienated by those who are cold and self-centred, which I suppose is true for most of us, but I can't say I've met more congenial conservatives than Marxists or liberals, not that I've kept count.
That said, it's nevertheless true that how people think and the values they hold are as much a a part of who they are as is their temperament and strength of character, and probably exerts the greater influence on their behaviour. By this standard, the conservatives fare rather badly, as we discovered on our road trip, however gracious their outward demeanour.
The context in which we meet others, and especially how kindred they perceive us to be, still seems to me to be the determining factors governing our relations in a society which is still very much divided along class, gender, racial and religious lines.