Liberals and doubling down

I came up with the idea of starting this thread after reading the news about how a 29-year-old dating couple - white millenials who were most likely liberals (one was a vegan and the other a vegetarian) - died tragic deaths after spending literally more than 1 full year bicycling around the world. A thread was started on this event a few days ago.

Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan were arguably more idealistic and naive than even the more naive liberals that SB board members have met in person. The few liberals I've known offline who truly do believe in/advocate the positions that we conservatives abhor were not as idealistic as they were. Austin and Geoghegan maintained a blog in which they chronicled their experiences in all the countries they visited (and for the most part, they had a lovely time) and in their blog, Austin wrote: "Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own… By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind."

I have yet to meet a liberal who literally thinks evil doesn't exist, as Austin did.

That said, after reading online reactions to their deaths, I thought I would ask: do (or did) the liberals you know or have known in person double down when you offer them fact-based arguments which at the very least strongly challenge their ideas and at the most destroy them?

And if the answer is yes, I then ask why do you think they doubled down?

I'll start.

The liberal that most quickly comes to mind is a former friend. A fairly intelligent man, he went to a prestigious university. He is no stranger to the pains of life; he knows bad things happen. But his positions are decidedly liberal: he opposes firearms ownership, sarcastically told me he doesn't believe government statistics on certain ethnic groups committing disproportionate shares of crime, believes in white/male privilege, applauded the takedown of the Southern Cross from certain public places (and logically, the removal of statues of Confederate figures), and as you can expect, thinks President Donald Trump is an incorrigible racist.

Back in times I'd still talk to him, I once surprised him with a strong argument about how firearms if wielded legally reduce crime and increase safety at home against criminals, and told him that guns in themselves are not evil as law enforcement and lawful civilians have used them (without firing) millions of times to deter crime. To make my point that guns can be used for good, I reminded him - an ardent believer of racism against blacks - that U.S. Army troops wielding rifles ensured blacks could have gone to school back in the 1950s.

He later reacted with visceral anger, listing his moral, philosophical, religious, academic, and activism credentials and told me not to speak to him in that way any longer. It was then that I realized that this otherwise educated individual absolutely despised being challenged and he hated being proven wrong even more. For a man who preached humility, he sure had and still has, to my knowledge, a humongous ego.

There have been others, but in conclusion, I would say that liberals double down because they believe what they believe with a fervor that borders on religious fanaticism. I will also add that to some, their commitment to liberal ideas is literally a religion; they don't worship people like Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders, but it is to them essentially a god and an idol. I also think that there is an element of pride, as in the person I described above, and an element of self-appointed moral superiority; they view conservatives as merciless, cold, and lacking in compassion, and that they could be taught something by people they deem as moral vassals if not moral inferiors is unthinkable to them.

An area where this has been most evident is Trump's performance as president. They believed Trump would lead humanity to chaos, that under his presidency white supremacists would engage in new waves of lynchings, and that all the progressive achievements of the past decades would be undone. Less than 2 years into his presidency, unemployment is very low, black unemployment is the lowest it's ever been and black support for Trump is higher than it ever was, the economy is doing better, and America is nowhere near the doom and oblivion they preached it would head into under Trump. They rationalize that all of these good things are in no way related to Trump.

As you can imagine, for a while now I have given up trying to reason with liberals, because the moment I confront them with facts, their reason disappears and they get hysterical, irrational, and emotional. I strongly believe today that "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is real - and it's scary that people whom I thought were otherwise smart and reasonable could be infected by it. But that's yet another reason I'm glad I voted for Trump - his victory showed me what some people are really like and I'm happy they're no longer in my life.

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Liberals and doubling down